Shared Links, June-July 2015

One of most fascinating things about exploring and consolidating the links I've shared over the years has been seeing little hidden connections and narratives implied throughout. Obviously the biggest one is my conversion to Christianity, and I can see various influences tugging my towards God all throughout 2014. The connection I see in June of 2015 is between the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, which drove me away from posting for quite a while, and the shootings of 9 congregants in Charleston, SC, which it appears brought me back from several months of near silence. Conor Friedersdorf reminds us in The Atlantic that Thugs and Terrorists Have Attacked Black Churches for Generations. If American Christians are concerned about surviving under persecutions, our co-religionists of color would be a good place to look for guidance. "Black churches suffered at the hands of thugs and terrorists throughout the Civil Rights era, as they had for a century before, but such attacks aren’t a matter of remote history.... One wonders how many black congregants are remembering bygone fires today."

And like that, I must have felt suddenly free to share whatever I wanted, because next was a piece from First Things from Ralph C Wood on Flanery O'Connor, which, it turns out, reflects a lot of the interests I've maintained to this day: Stamped but not Cancelled
"O’Connor’s kinfolk sometimes urged her to write about 'wholesome' people. She replied that her outrageous characters are indeed 'whole' because their peculiarity points, even if negatively, to the full, angular, thorny humanity that we are in danger of losing in our time. She likened the true grotesques of our age to chickens who have been genetically engineered so as to make them wingless, the better to produce an abundance of tender white meat. The denizens of our secular sovereignty are not so much a brood of vipers, she said, but 'a generation of wingless chickens.' This, she surmised, 'is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.'
When God dies, as O’Connor learned from Nietzsche, 'the last man' arrives. “‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” They blink because they no longer question or probe, because they refuse to take courageous risks or venture untrodden paths. The last men are shrunken creatures who make everything small, who live longest because they hop like fleas from one warm host to another, who no longer shoot the arrow of their longing beyond man, who want the same things as everyone else because everyone is the same. Unable even to despise themselves, they blink because they are satisfied with happiness as small-minded as themselves."

More on Charleston, from Suzy Khimm in New Republic: Clementa Pinckney's Political Ministry: "Righteous Indignation in the Face of Injustices"
"In the final weeks of his life, Pinckney focused on passing a bill requiring all South Carolina police officers to wear body cameras after Walter Scott’s death. And he rallied his colleagues to act by invoking a passage from the Bible. It was the day before Easter when Scott, an unarmed African-American man, was fatally shot in the back by a police officer in Charleston. On the Senate floor, Pinckney recalled the passage that described how Jesus had appeared before his disciples, but Thomas, who wasn’t there, refused to believe that he had been resurrected on Easter.
“He said, ‘I won’t believe until I see the nails. I won’t believe until I can put my hand in your side.’ And it was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe—my Lord and my God,’” Pinckney said in his resonant basso profundo. He compared Thomas’s story to those who refused to believe what had happened to Scott until they saw the video. “What if Mr. Santiago was not there to record? I’m sure that many of us would still say, like Thomas, ‘We don’t believe,’” he concluded."

And Ross Douthat on Persecution and the Black Church (NYT): "African-American Christianity hasn’t been persecuted in the United States in the way that, say, minority religions are currently being persecuted by the Islamic State; the martyrdom of black Christians hasn’t taken the form of being explicitly asked to abjure Jesus Christ or die. But because the religion of the slaves and their descendants has been crucial to black Americans’ resistance, their long campaign for equality before the law, it has also been a place where the weight of oppression has been particularly heavily applied. Not only during the civil rights era’s church burning and bombings but long before, the quest to subjugate black people has logically required targeting their churches, their religious institutions, their ability to freely practice Christian faith. The faith of black people is not the thing that white supremacists hate most about them, but it is a thing that white supremacists consistently tried to break and weaken, gentle and diminish, in order that white supremacy might be sustained. [...]
America already has been the site of a sustained exercise in persecution, albeit a persecution of a very distinctive and peculiar kind, and nothing that potentially threatens conservative Christians in our arguably-secularizing, arguably de-Christianizing America (marginalization, loss of influence, even fines and discrimination over certain issues) is likely to impose the kind of burdens on believers that the black church, for centuries, had to bear."

Joe Kickasola in Curator Magazine on Tom Waits: The Scar in the Sound "The Hebrew word for spirit, Ruach, is also the word for breath. If the spirit is breath, Waits is, very often, the death rattle, the last gasp as the body begins to collapse in on the breath. And yet–by sheer will–Waits forces it out, defiantly. In this way, he is like a warrior for messy, authentic life; for real, bodily experience in the world, amid many forces that would package and commodify it, simulate and sell it online.
He also functions in the prophetic mode, like Ezekiel wasting away on his side in the middle of square, hollering, out of his enormous discomfort, how everyone ought to turn around before it’s too late. Waits gives us the whole body, and the fragility of Being, by accentuating and foregrounding the grain of the sound, and it is by sound that he asserts material Being in an age tempted to skip the body altogether."

Mark Edmundson at The Hedgehog Review explores what seems to be the flip-side of what Charles Taylor describes as the Lockean "punctual self" – when we eliminate the soul, we are left with "the Body Omnipotent": Body and Soul
"Does the body still exist if we do not have souls? It may sound like a flippant question—or at least a sophistic one. I intend it as neither: Does the body still exist if we do not have souls?
What happens, in other words, if the dialectic that has existed for believers and for idealists alike suddenly collapses? If there are no souls, are there still bodies in the conventional sense—the sense that puts the body in tension with the soul? [...]
I do not think it is wrong to say that what we are left with, when our bodies become ourselves, is the quest for pleasure. If the body is the only existence (and therefore not quite the body as we knew it before), then we need to gear ourselves to living as enjoyably as possible. The objective of life becomes the avoidance of pain and the stringing together of as many moments of gratification as possible. What else could it be?"

In a year of separation, this Art House America post from Alissa Wilkinson seared me deeply: "Pain" Lessons "In any case, don’t cut a baguette. Approach it stealthily, then rip it apart.
Tiny baguette crumbs will spray everywhere, into your hair, your sweater, your cup of tea. They will sneak between the pages of your books and fall into the cracks next to your laptop keys.
This act of ripping seems muscular and violent. To soften it, think of it as that long-ago relationship with the man whom you liked a great deal, but who was all wrong for whatever reason. Hold the baguette gently so as not to flatten it on either end, yours or his. Tear softly, letting the pieces come apart naturally where the cracks had already formed. After you rip, little bits of one end or the other will stick to the torn baguette.
You can never fit something like that back together. No split is perfect, but bread tastes better torn messily, and anyhow, that’s never the end of the story. Better things are always on their way."

Also from Alissa, at Books & Culture (RIP), she writes about David Foster Wallace. I shared this in response to a post on the DFW semi-biopic The End of the Tour I was tagged in by a friend; it's great: Everybody Worships

Shared Links, Jan-May 2015

So 2015 came, and I was reading The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis for the very first time; I often think that if I'd been made to read it as a teenager, my spiritual path would have been quite a bit different: "And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

This Medium piece by Hans de Zwart is chilling: Ai Weiwei is Living in Our Future Living under permanent surveillance and what that means for our freedom

Pico Iyer in the New York Times: Healthy Body, Unhealthy Mind "We run and run in search of contentment, Pascal wrote in his 'Pensées,' and so ensure we’ll never be settled or content. We mindlessly race away from the one place where happiness is to be found."

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead wasn't around when I should've first been reading Lewis, but I'm sure glad it was here in 2015 when I needed to see a modern writer glorifying God's good and mysterious Creation: “That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is very easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."

" 'For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?' In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

Scrolling through this digital Memory Lane is interesting because of the surprises. I shared virtually nothing in February or March, which is when I was going through my divorce, and when I was finally starting to tell others I was a Christian. I don't remember consciously stopping sharing things, and I can't say for sure what caused it: whether there was a connection between having more in-person conversations and spending time with friends and a decreased use of social media, or merely a very different mental state from the major life changes I was going through, or perhaps a challenge in finding things to share that were Christian (probably a decent amount of what I was reading at the time, although I can't be sure) without revealing my newfound spiritual allegiances too publicly. Perhaps the number of major changes just made everything else I could've shared seem insignificant, particularly to share with people I didn't know as well, compared with what I hadn't told anyone but those closest to me. 

One thing I did share: Leonard Nimoy passed in February, and while I was never the biggest Star Trek fan, this is a great quote: "There is a moment when we are all touched by the humanity in these creatures that are supposedly inhuman, when the character Spock, the Frankenstein monster, or Quasimodo, says, 'I, too, need love.' Millions respond and love pours out because we all need it and we all understand. When one is touched, by a flower or a drink of water, then we are all touched and we can cry for him and ourselves. Tears of connection. And now I realize that all of this was preparation for the role of Spock. Crying for Quasimodo’s heart inside that awful body. Loving the monster who spared the child. Joining with humanity to share understanding and compassion.
These very simple and obviously human experiences were the best preparation an actor could have to play the supposedly ahuman Spock. Spock was not my first experience playing alienated characters."

In April, likewise, I shared nothing, until the riots happened. My friend Kate was at Mondawmin when everything started, and she wrote at her blog what she saw: Cops in Riot Gear at Mondawmin Mall at Liberty Heights and Reisterstown Road

Matthew Loftus had a pretty quick turnaround after the riots, writing for The American Conservative on The Policing Baltimore Needs: "From Jim Crow to the War on Drugs, police have been incentivized to deny justice in support of an unattainable goal—but with an honest assessment of failures and a serious commitment to agreed-upon objectives, Sandtown can be a safer place. The community here will not give up fighting for our streets no matter what happens over the next few days. When the cameras leave and the fires stop burning, we’ll still be doing our best to work with the police and contribute to their efforts to make our community safer together."

For Baltimore City Paper (RIP), Rapper Kane Mayfield on Freddie Gray and the reality of police brutality. "The death of Freddie Gray didn’t even shock me. It’s not good, but it doesn’t shock me. I’m not shockable. I’m desensitized. I’ve been desensitized by the slow and deliberate destruction of people who look like me for longer than I can remember."

Matthew Loftus at The American Conservative again, asking the armchair pundits of the Internet as well as in-person protestors to Let Sandtown Speak For Itself: "With the nation’s eyes on Baltimore (and Baltimore’s eyes on Sandtown), what has struck me, as someone who has lived here for five years, is the speed with which people from the outside are willing to impose their own preconceived notions on my neighbors and our neighborhood. [...]
I have lost track of the number of sermons and conversations I’ve heard in which challenges to systemic injustice guided by wise policy changes, and personal responsibility shepherded by spiritual and cultural renewal, are combined into a comprehensive solution, not seen as being at odds in a culture-war skirmish. If you can’t comprehend that the two might work together, consider listening to the people here working for both."

Stop Making Sense.

Shared Links, Nov-Dec 2014

Some things I shared in 2014 are really surprising in retrospect. This Guernica excerpt of Studs Terkel's oral history of death (shared along with a bit of Philip Larkin's The Old Fools) was intended to pay tribute to my neopagan friends and family on Samhain. I knew at the time how much the piece moved me; now I know why. With current events in their state of perpetual turmoil, it's easy to look for political or philosophical arguments for Christianity, but ultimately, we must remember to deal with our mortality. "It’s one thing to write to someone and say you forgive them—it’s another to physically touch them and say you forgive them. It would help me in my healing and him in his, I knew. I felt compelled to do it....

On the way back home, I was thinking about it, and then I talked to Arlene and Father Oldershaw. I said, 'I’ve got it! I know what was happening. I was getting a taste in my body of how much God loves us. He loves us so much that He wants to leap over the table, grab hold of us, and just rock us because we’re his children.' That love, that forgiveness—I got a taste of what it must have been like for Jesus when he was here and walked the Earth among people that he loved so desperately, so wonderfully. I got a taste of it!" You Got Into My Heart Violently, But You’re There

Of course, that's not to say that politics aren't important, even in their most banal, marginally effective forms, as Tim Wise argues here: Your Bumper Sticker is Not a Philosophy: Reflections on Voting and the Limits of Radical Purity "There’s something cathartic (in a juvenile, angst-driven, anarchy-tatted kinda way) about preening as a moral superior because you didn't give in to the two-party 'duopoly,' or whatever the hell Ralph Nader calls it. Maintaining one’s ascetic sense of unsullied ideological purity feels good. So does heroin, of course, but I’m not sure the indulgence of either is one’s best bet for safety in the long run. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that voting is the key to real political change; it self-evidently is not. But to think that it means nothing, or so little as to not recommend the activity is to engage in a dangerous moral conceit...
What it comes down to is this: Voting is harm reduction; just like giving clean needles to addicts. Voting doesn't solve our problems, just like clean needles won’t solve the problems posed by intravenous drug use. But harm reduction matters."

I love this piece on London's taxi driver test so much. It's kind of a humanity vs. technology tale, raising some great questions on what technology is for and how we define "progress." Jody Rosen for T - The New York Times Style Magazine: The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS "Given the pace of technological refinement, how long will it be before the development of a Sat-Nav algorithm that works better than the most ingenious cabby, before a voice-activated GPS, or a driverless car, can zip a passenger from Piccadilly to Putney more efficiently than any Knowledge graduate? Ultimately, the case to make for the Knowledge may not be practical-economic (the Knowledge works better than Sat-Nav), or moral-political (the little man must be protected against rapacious global capitalism), but philosophical, spiritual, sentimental: The Knowledge should be maintained because it is good for London’s soul, and for the souls of Londoners. The Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself. To support the Knowledge is to make the unfashionable argument that expertise cannot be reduced to data, that there’s something dystopian, or at least depressing, about the outsourcing of humanity’s hard-won erudition to gizmos, even to portable handheld gizmos that themselves are miracles of human imagination and ingenuity. London’s taxi driver test enshrines knowledge as — to use the au courant term — an artisanal commodity, a thing that’s local and homespun, thriving ideally in the individual hippocampus, not the digital hivemind."

In response to a comment on that post, I shared this thought and a quote from Wendell Berry's Feminism, the Body, and the Machine: I disagree that this article is merely Golden Age-ing an “antiquated system.” Perhaps it’s a result of stuff that’s been on my mind anyway, but I think this article is asking some deeper questions regarding the limits of efficiency, how we define progress, and in a deeper sense, even our notions of freedom. Is it better to outsource our knowledge of the places we live – not to mention, established parts of a culture – to profiteering technology firms if it is more financially efficient? Put another way, are there costs to these actions that we aren’t considering? To what extent are we willing to increase our dependence on technology for things people could do?
These are complicated questions, and not new ones. I was re-reading a Wendell Berry essay this morning that has some relevance here (sorry for the long quote):
“What is the purpose of this technological progress? What higher aim do we think it is serving? Surely the aim cannot be the integrity or happiness of our families, which we have made subordinate to the education system, the television industry, and the consumer economy. Surely it cannot be the integrity or health of our communities, which we esteem even less than we esteem our families. Surely it cannot be love of our country, for we are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. Surely it cannot be the love of God, which counts for at least as little in the daily order of business as the love of family, community, and country.
The higher aims of ‘technological progress’ are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in ‘the future.’ We do as we do, we say, ‘for the sake of the future’ or ‘to make a better future for our children.’ How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a ‘world of the future’; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid ‘futurology’ available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at ‘the future of the human race’; we have the same pressing need that we have always had—to love, care for, and teach our children.
And so the question of the desirability of adopting any technological innovation is a question with two possible answers—not one, as has been commonly assumed. If one’s motives are money, ease, and haste to arrive in a technologically determined future, then the answer is foregone, and there is, in fact, no question, and no thought. If one’s motive is the love of family, community, country, and God, then one will have to think, and one may have to decide that the proposed innovation is undesirable.
The question of how to end or reduce dependence on some of the technological innovations already adopted is a baffling one. At least, it baffles me. I have not been able to see, for example, how people living in the country, where there is no public transportation, can give up their automobiles without becoming less useful to each other. And this is because, owing largely to the influence of the automobile, we live too far from each other, and from the things we need, to be able to get about by any other means. Of course, you could do without an automobile, but to do so you would have to disconnect yourself from many obligations. Nothing I have so far been able to think about this problem has satisfied me.
But if we have paid attention to the influence of the automobile on country communities, we know that the desirability of technological innovation is an issue that requires thinking about, and we should have acquired some ability to think about it. Thus if I am partly a writer, and I am offered an expensive machine to help me write, I ought to ask whether or not such a machine is desirable.”

In the same thread, I shared this Longreads post, excerpted from Nick Carr's The Glass Cage:
“Look closely at Google Maps. When you’re traveling through a city and you consult the app, it gives you more than navigational tips; it gives you a way to think about cities. Embedded in the software is a philosophy of place, which reflects, among other things, Google’s commercial interests, the backgrounds and biases of its programmers, and the strengths and limitations of software in representing space. In 2013, the company rolled out a new version of Maps. Instead of providing you with the same representation of a city that everyone else sees, it generates a map that’s tailored to what Google perceives as your needs and desires, based on information the company has collected about you. The app will highlight nearby restaurants and other points of interest that friends in your social network have recommended. It will give you directions that reflect your past navigational choices. The views you see, the company says, are ‘unique to you, always adapting to the task you want to perform right this minute.’
That sounds appealing, but it’s limiting. Google filters out serendipity in favor of insularity. It douses the infectious messiness of a city with an algorithmic antiseptic. What is arguably the most important way of looking at a city, as a public space shared not just with your pals but with an enormously varied group of strangers, gets lost. ‘Google’s urbanism,’ the technology critic Evgeny Morozov has written, ‘is that of someone who is trying to get to a shopping mall in their self-driving car. It’s profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character, with little to no concern for how public space is experienced. In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.’ Expedience trumps all.” Your Inner Drone: The Politics of the Automated Future

Alan Jacobs again, with a wide-ranging Medium post on lots of things: The Devil's Bargain. I shared this with a quote from Ursula K LeGuin's National Book Awards speech: "Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art...
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings."

Abraham Lincoln's 1842 speech on persuasion and empathy to the Springfield, IL temperance society, printed in Lapham's Quarterly: Better than a Gallon of Gall

America, in so many ways, needs to repent corporately of its many sins; sadly, it's too easy to valorize and justify our actions, claiming they don't truly represent us. Peter Beinart argues in The Atlantic that Torture Is Who We Are: "America has tortured throughout its history. And every time it has, some Americans have justified the brutality as necessary to protect the country from a savage enemy. Others have called it counterproductive and immoral. At different moments, the balance of power between these two groups shifts. But neither side in these debates speaks for the 'real America.' The real America includes them both. Morally, we contain multitudes."

I've shared Ken Kalfus's The Folly of Mars in n+1 twice, and I doubt it will be the last time; people F*cking Love Science, or something, but it's really just Bread, Circuses, and Rockets: "It’s not the planet Earth that’s fragile—it’s the human organism that’s extraordinarily delicate and needy, unable to survive beyond very narrow physical limits, the conditions for which exist naturally nowhere else in our solar system. To keep even a few people alive in space or on another planet requires from those left behind the expenditure of enormous resources. It’s not necessarily backwards-thinking, or anti-technology, or anti-exploration, to wonder if those resources could be better employed. The fantasy of a future new life for the species allows us to shrug off climate change and other global challenges with the thought that if we fail to make this planet livable for the billions of people who inhabit it, another is promised for us somewhere else."

It's a little funny looking back, but I was a little nervous to share something from Christianity Today, not knowing how it would be perceived. But Alissa Wilkinson is SO GOOD. Can Our Art Deal With Our World? "Today, our consumption habits are shaped by our own curation... Most people who read the Internet are seeing things posted by their Facebook friends—and frankly, few of us have Internet friends who don't think like us. A Pew Research study published on October 21 points out that liberals and conservatives inhabit different corners of the Internet. Liberals are more likely to defriend someone because of their conservative politics; conservatives are more likely to not be friends with liberals at all.
This also shapes how we engage with media. We click through, read, and watch things our friends watch. What we see is shaped by what we already like. In other words, our Internet lives function as echo chambers for what we already believe."

Edward Mendelson on The Secret Auden for the New York Review of Books: "By refusing to claim moral or personal authority, Auden placed himself firmly on one side of an argument that pervades the modern intellectual climate but is seldom explicitly stated, an argument about the nature of evil and those who commit it.
On one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, “I am a good person,” who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive."

From Neil Gaiman's great novel American Gods: "'No man,' proclaimed Donne, 'is an Island,' and he was wrong. If we are not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others' tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever really looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people -- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us that a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain on our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."

Some tragic local news closed out the year: Cyclist Killed in Roland Park; How Can We Make Baltimore Safer for Bikes? (Baltimore Fishbowl - Rachel Monroe) "People who ride bicycles already take protective steps. It is up to people driving cars to recognize that a person on a bicycle has a full right to be in the road, and to drive carefully and safely at all times, not just when around people on bicycles....
We don’t call crashes like this 'accidents.' Distracted driving is not an accident. Leaving the scene of a crash is not an accident. This was a completely avoidable crash."

Shared Links, Sept-Oct 2014

After Ferguson, I was depressed, about the world, about my inability to fix it, about the seemingly pointlessness of social media, and about the loneliness I felt in my social life and my crumbling marriage. As a result, I didn't share very much in September; a few months later, I might have identified this by saying, "All is vanity!" Clive James's new poem "Japanese Maple", published in The New Yorker, was the only thing that made the cut.

This Corman McCarthy quote is good. “The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.”

John Swansburg in Slate: The Self-Made Man: The story of America’s most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth. 

George Monbiot in The Guardian: The Age of Loneliness is Killing Us "When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war 'of every man against every man', he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others....The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage."

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, found through Leslie Jamison's great Harper's essay on Morgellon's disease, The Devil's Bait, collected in The Empathy Exams (which hit me quite hard w/r/t empathizing with people's challenges I didn't understand; it seemed to me before reading it I had to at least assent to the validity of the struggle in order to empathize, which she explores in depth): The Itch

My friend Evan introduced me to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin through a history of ideas class he had put together; his Message to the 21st Century (published in the New York Review of Books) is still very relevant: "If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.
The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.
This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false."

A city planner friend I'm no longer in touch with wrote this on piece on AirBnB for Thought Catalog; masquerading as a list-y comedic piece, it's got this thoughtful passage within: "Airbnb has been branding our neighborhoods for its booking services, offering images, taglines, and ‘community’ feedback on what people have to say about a place. In many cases, either the erasure of culture and history, or the dilution of it as a selling point are big themes for the way neighborhoods are being presented to would-be visitors. It is a rather cotton-candy presentation in that tourist-brochure kind of way, with a thin veneer of seeming a bit more ‘authentic’ by virtue of lacking any major logos from big hotel chains. Other neighborhoods are being branded as ‘gritty’ or on some ‘edge’ or ‘fringe’ as if they represent some unknown outskirts of our city where ~*nobody has been before*~. Sure, tourists want to have an adventure and a new experience, but who gets to decide what is authentic, what is the ‘real’ Bushwick or Hell’s Kitchen, or DUMBO? Who are the people coming up with these concepts? What is the impact of a branded place on our city?" Would that we thought about more decisions affecting our cities this deeply. An Abbreviated Guide To Airbnb’s New York City Listings

Rebecca Solnit for Orion/Longreads: The Art of Arrival "You travel to get away from something, and though people caution that you can’t run away, you can, and sometimes you should. After all, this is a country full of people who were running away—my father’s parents from the pogroms and massacres, my mother’s grandparents from the famines and anti-Catholic laws, rural kids from the brutalities of agriculture and the limits of small towns, city kids from the slums or the harshness, suburban refugees like me escaping anomie and homogeneity....
But there are many kinds of travel, many reasons to move. Sometimes you travel so that the process of becoming that is your inner life has an external correlative in your movement across space. You may not know how to save your soul, but you know how to put one foot in front of another. You may not know the way to stop being so furious you can hardly sleep, but you can buy a road map of the American West. And then you can put the need on like a knapsack and wear it along your journey, wear it out, shed it, find that it belongs to someone you no longer are. This is pilgrimage, which is not as pretty as it sounds. It’s not running away, though: it’s running toward."

Shared Links, August 2014

I shared the Playboy Interview of George Carlin when he passed: “It’s the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy. No time for reflection. No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up. No time to fuck up. No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical.” 

Brand Suburb from Rational Urbanism: "Convincing people to rethink auto-centeredness is akin to doing the same with patriotism or religion. The concepts are nearly identical in that the place where you are raised is so key to your mindset... If one has grown up in post war America, raising a family in a detached single family home in a community divided by the norms of Euclidean zoning practices is what one does if one is able to do so.
The difference between this 'American Way of Life' and other traditional ways of life is that the former is untried and untested over the long term. It has thrived for a brief period, propelled by an increase in the extraction of fossilized energy at a pace which will be impossible to maintain. As absolutely true and undeniable as the previous sentence is, for most American adults it is all they have ever known, and for many it is all that they have ever seen."

Better Angels: On Rilke in Translation by Drew Calvert for The American Reader. Rereading this now, it seems it was another nudge Church-ward; I believe it was around August that my mind starting whirling around itself, considering existence, running into a lot of the problems Rilke sees. Looking at it from my current interests, it reminds me of Charles Taylor, except it's someone writing from within the disenchanted world, longing for any sort of escape from the immanent frame but finding himself unable to accept the idea of transcendence: "Rilke has made you, however briefly, proud to be a human being, filled with sadness and wonder at the paradox we share: we want to live in a perfect world but don’t want to leave the one we’re in, despite its imperfections. . . If Rilke’s poetry has any relevance to twenty-first century Americans, it’s because we worry, now more than ever, that we are losing unmediated experience. We’re busy, we’re sleepless, we’re medicated, and we’re marooned in the everyday."

I am a cat guy. So is Tim Kreider, apparently: A Man and His Cat (NYT)

I didn't know at the time that Lev Grossman had written what amounts to atheist Narnia fan fiction, but I appreciated his probing thoughts on Lewis and fantasy in The Atlantic: Confronting Reality by Reading Fantasy

"I bristle whenever fantasy is characterized as escapism. It’s not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you re-encounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world. Edmund doesn't solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they're exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.
The whole modernist-realist tradition is about the self observing the world around you—sensing how other it is, how alien it is, how different it is to what’s going on inside you. In fantasy, that gets turned inside out. The landscape you inhabit is a mirror of what’s inside you. The stuff inside can get out, and walk around, and take the form of places and people and things and magic. And once it’s outside, then you can get at it. You can wrestle it, make friends with it, kill it, seduce it. Fantasy takes all those things from deep inside and puts them where you can see them, and then deal with them."

It was still surprising even at this point to find that I could learn something from evangelical Christians. In this NYT piece, Kristin Dombek seems surprised as well: Swimming Against the Rising Tide: Secular Climate-Change Activists Can Learn From Evangelical Christians "It is hard to understand that the ways of the universe are not human ways. But it is hard, too, to face this ocean, so changed by us, without hiding in either fear or denial. To stay awake, active, useful, is a matter of feeling as much as knowing. You have to trust that your individual life is linked to something bigger: that you belong, body and soul, to a larger story for which you are responsible. In this, those of us who believe the science might take a lesson from the faithful. And the rhetoric that would pit faith against reason ignores the millions — all of us, perhaps — who live on both."

Robin Williams, another painful death and Playboy interview: "What do you do? Oh, God, the great abyss. Do you fall back on something old? Or do you die the death of deaths and try to go on? Can you find the courage to push yourself beyond the cliché and go to the next step? If you take the chance, sometimes you'll find something so magnificent that it was worth dying for, and sometimes you'll find nothing and have a horrible night. To go deeper with it, that's the most interesting challenge."

This meditation on fame and depression from Stephen Fry pairs well with the above: Only The Lonely "Some people, as some people always will, cannot understand that depression (or in my case cyclothymia, a form of bipolar disorder) is an illness and they are themselves perhaps the sufferers of a malady that one might call either an obsession with money, or a woeful lack of imagination.
'How can someone so well-off, well-known and successful have depression?' they ask. Alastair Campbell in a marvelous article, suggested changing the word 'depression' to 'cancer' or 'diabetes' in order to reveal how, in its own way, sick a question, it is. Ill-natured, ill-informed, ill-willed or just plain ill, it’s hard to say."

I read Annie Dillard's Holy The Firm around this time, assigned for a summer class on Environmental Literature, and was struck by the meditation on death and mystery, observed with detail in a short time and in a specific place. "It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools - that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. The joke part is that we forget it. Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it's Pythagoras. We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh."

When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, I struggled to find the "perfect" article about it to post and I remember feeling such despair that nothing I could think to share could ever be adequate to the urgency of the situation and its aftermath. I eventually posted James Baldwin's 1966 essay A Report from Occupied Territory from The Nation, but I was never settled; I think I had briefly seen the inadequacy of social media, and more importantly, of merely knowing the "right" things without action. With so much of our lives lived online now, this is still a difficult thing to acknowledge and remember. "These things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day. If we ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our doom."

Shared Links, July 2014

I'm still working on digesting this essay in The New Atlantis by Alan Jacobs: Fantasy and the Buffered Self

If more sports writing were like this, I'd probably be as obsessed as the rest of America. David Foster Wallace's 2006 longform NYT profile of Roger Federer as Religious Experience: "There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies ('I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!' etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important — they make up for a lot."

Lawrence Lanahan profiled the Loftus family and New Song Community Church for Al-Jazeera America: Downwardly Mobile for Jesus

Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams hit me hard in the summer/fall of 2014, and her piece on confessional writing in The Guardian says a bit about why: "When I read each of these deeply personal books, I didn't feel as if it was the product of a self that didn't know anything beyond itself – I felt as if it was the product of a self that somehow, miraculously, knew me as well, or at least knew about things that included me." Confessional Writing is Not Self-Indulgent

Proverbs 26:18-19 warns against harmful speech under the guise of "only joking." Lindy West's targets in her Complete Guide to Hipster Racism for Jezebel are a perfect example of this principle.

Carrying Jada, by Stacia Brown in Gawker, is heartbreaking: "We think it is rape culture or gun violence that will define us as a fallen civilization. But it's the indifference that will do us in. It's our fierce commitment to independence — emotional, cultural, financial, spiritual — as our most prized and noble value that dooms us.

We are nothing without each other."

Rebecca Traister, in New Republic, writes on how women's worth is still dependent on their valuation by men. Perhaps a bit overcorrecting from the problem, but this is spot-on:"[In] this country, every barometer by which female worth is measured—from the superficial to the life-altering, the appreciative to the punitive—has long been calibrated to 'dude,' whether or not those measurements are actually being taken by dudes. Men still run, or at bare minimum have shaped and codified the attitudes of, the churches, the courts, the universities, the police departments, the corporations that so freely determine women’s worth." I Don't Care If You Like It

Laura Flander, Yes Magazine: Breaking the Grip of the Fossil Fuel Economy: If It Can Happen in Appalachia, It Can Happen Anywhere. "Coal production is gradually leaving Appalachia—having already extracted much of the region's natural wealth. Local people are figuring out how to build a new economy based on shared vision and community knowledge. If transition can happen here, it can change the debate everywhere."

Leigh Gallagher profiles Charles Marohn of Strong Towns for Time: The Suburbs Will Die

"'When people say we're living beyond our means, they're usually talking about a forty-inch TV instead of a twenty-inch TV. . . This is like pennies compared to the dollars we've spent on the way we've arranged ourselves across the landscape.'

The 'suburban experiment,' as he calls it, has been a fiscal failure. On top of the issues of low-density tax collection, sprawling development is more expensive to build. Roads are wider and require more paving. Water and sewage service costs are higher. It costs more to maintain emergency services since more fire stations and police stations are needed per capita to keep response times down. Children need to be bused farther distances to school. One study by the Denver Regional Council of Governments found that conventional suburban development would cost local governments $4.3 billion more in infrastructure costs than compact, “smart” growth through 2020, only counting capital construction costs for sewer, water, and road infrastructure. A 2008 report by the University of Utah’s Arthur C. Nelson estimated that municipal service costs in low-density, sprawling locations can be as much as 2.5 times those in compact, higher-density locations.

Marohn thinks this is all just too gluttonous. 'The fact that I can drive to work on paved roads where I can drive fifty-five miles an hour the minute I leave my driveway despite the fact that I won’t see another car for five miles,' he says, 'is living beyond our means on a grand, grand scale.'"

Wendell Berry's The Body and The Earth excerpted at Present Truth Magazine: "It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil. Intellectually, we know that these patterns of interdependence exist; we understand them better now perhaps than we ever have before; yet modern social and cultural patterns contradict them and make it difficult or impossible to honor them in practice." 

I did not go into this article on Cards Against Humanity expecting to agree with it as much as I did. Arthur Chu's take for The Daily Beast is similar to that of folks like Leah Libresco Sargent who I'd find myself agreeing with not too much later: The Case Against Cards Against Humanity: Is Max Temkin a Horrible Person?

"You see, the tagline on Cards Against Humanity’s box is a lie. The game isn’t for horrible people. It’s designed to reassure you that you aren’t a horrible person. That’s the whole point.

When I play a card combo like 'What will always get you laid? Date rape,' I’m asking the women at the table to trust that I’m a good, decent guy who doesn’t actually commit date rape or find date rape funny. I’m asking them to get the joke, which is that obviously we all think rape is horrible and therefore me being flip about it is shockingly hilarious.

We spend the evening exchanging these tacit assurances. It functions as an icebreaker the same way trust-fall exercises do. Put us in a situation where we have no choice, and peer pressure means we generally will cave in and trust relative strangers with our physical safety. Cards Against Humanity is the social version of this, getting us to trust that the other players at the table are decent people who share our values.

But what if they're not?" 

Shared Links, Jan-June 2014

2014 was the year I was gradually drawn back to the Church, and a lot of that transformation – from the initial light-bulb moment to numerous slight nudges in the right direction – occurred on Facebook. There were way too many nudges of that sort for me to share or even remember them all (and as I had no idea at the time what was happening, it's mostly in retrospect that I can identify the significance of the things I remember, and would not have even thought to share most of the things I read that nudged me Christward).

Very early in 2014, I shared this long essay from Film Crit Hulk on victim-blaming in sexual assault cases. It's pretty wide-ranging and hard to summarize (not to mention being written in the all-caps vocal style of the eponymous Hulk), but is a good collection of thoughts on how poorly we treat victims of sexual abuse, and how we can do better. WE NEED TO CHANGE HOW WE TALK ABOUT RAPE

I shared this CityLab piece on “the ruralization of urban areas” and this Guardian piece on the West Virginia water crisis together for a reason: be thankful for your water.

Then in February, Baltimore broke everyone's heart. Tracy Halvorsen's original Medium post drew impassioned responses from Tim Barnett on loving the city, Hasdai Westbrook on embracing the lessons of The Wire over continued white-L development (not actually written in response to the initial post, but still very relevant), Lawrence Lanahan on inequality, Steve Gondol (of LiveBaltimore) on not threatening or encouraging people to leave if you actually care about the city's future, and Mark Brown at the Baltimore Brew (again not written as a response) on transit and urbanism. Baltimoreans love talking about Baltimore. 

At the time, I figured this post from Matthew Loftus on his (now defunct and private) blog was just another response, albeit a moving one. Reading it was actually the light-bulb moment in seeing Christianity as something I would have to reconsider more seriously after having rejected it (occasionally emphatically, occasionally apathetically) as a teenager. (I'll save the full conversion story for another post.)

Ralph Nader (of all people) in the American Conservative on Who Owns America? "Although the decentralists were dismissed by their critics as being impractical, as fighting against the inevitable wave of ever-larger industrial and financial companies empowered by modern technology, their views have a remarkable contemporary resonance given today’s globalized gigantism, absentee control, and intricate corporate statism, which are undermining both economies and workers. . . .
The decentralists had a concrete awareness of the ways and means of corporate power that was way ahead of many of today’s conservative thinkers, who believe that the marketplace will suffice to check this ever-boiling force of business power. Many contemporary conservatives exhibit such a focus on government and keeping it at arm’s length that they have neglected to rigorously propose an alternative locus of power, one that would take up many functions of government and restrict what they call 'crony capitalism.'
Part of the reason for this contrast between thinkers of the Depression years and the ones we have now is that the earlier conservative writers were close to the dirt-level poverty, land dispossession, foreclosures, and overturning by Big Business of a historic way of rural life which empirically grounded their diagnoses and reforms. There were no screens to look at daily in their abstract workplaces and households to distract them from grim reality."

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic – The Case for Reparations: "To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the 'achievement gap' will do nothing to close the 'injury gap,' in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records. . . 
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate. . . we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world. . .
I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders."

Shared Links, 2012-2013

This is the first of several posts consolidating articles I've posted on Facebook as a kind of jump-start for this blog/commonplace book. I wanted to get things I've shared all in one place to aid in searching through them, to remember them should I fully jump ship from the USS Zuckerberg, and to see how my interests and sharing habits have changed over time.

In 2012-13, I shared far fewer articles than in years since. The majority of things I shared were more current events-related (government shutdown, gay marriage, etc.), and my political views have evolved quite a bit since then. As such, I only found a few articles I wanted to hang onto from these years.

The first and oldest is from NPR, contrasting artistic and scientific ways of thinking about what Richard Wilbur called "that most rare conception, nothing." Robert Krulwich writes: "We are surrounded by Nothing. Everywhere we go, we have no idea what we're not seeing. We don't know what gravitational fields look like, what dark matter looks like, what quantum foam looks like, what de Kooning's drawing looked like, but what the scientists and the artists are telling us, in their very different ways, is that if we lean in, and pay very close attention, sometimes what looks like Nothing is the best place to find the most interesting...somethings." It sounds like he agrees with Wilbur: "What is it, after all, but something missed?"
Two Ways to Think About Nothing

Next is a comic by Kostas Kiriakis, on how much more interesting questions are than answers. It does come off a little relativistic to my current sensibilities, but I still stand by the superiority of a probing curiosity to a stagnant certainty: A Day at the Park

This Baltimore Sun op-ed by Chris Merriam and Robbyn Lewis is specific to the particulars of Baltimore's transit policies in mid-2013, but the principles are pretty indicative of where my mind was headed w/r/t transportation and urban organization at the time, and it seems I've only grown strong in my belief that cities should put people ahead of cars.

I shared this 2010 Esquire profile of Roger Ebert when he passed in 2013. It's lovely, and I gained so much respect for him by reading it. It's also a good a piece as any to point to my growing love for the stories told by longform journalism. The Essential Man

After moving to Baltimore in 2012 and exploring the city by bike, I started to become aware of how deeply racial injustice has shaped our city, our country, and our individual views. As I got know more people in the city through biking around, I was exposed to more and more writing on race that challenged me deeply. Jen Graves in The Stranger wrote this great article that hit me at exactly the right time, when I needed to know that other white people also saw the historic and continued injustices in our world and were working in various ways to eradicate them in our culture and in themselves. Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Race

A favorite analogy of limited government advocates is that the federal budget is analogous to a household one. Brad Plumer, tongue firmly in cheek, argues in the Washington Post that if a typical family spent like the federal government, it’d be a very weird family. "The U.S. federal government really does resemble your typical money-printing family that owns lots of tanks, operates a giant insurance conglomerate, can borrow money at extremely low rates, and is assumed to be immortal."

The legacy of Pope Francis's impact on the Roman Catholic Church is yet to be determined, but it seems that I was struck by his approach even before I knew I was being drawn back into the body of Christ. Although my theology has changed my position on many of these issues, I wonder if his tempered (overcorrected?) rhetoric may have a warming effect on the perception of the Church among young people. Particularly in the face of American evangelicalism in 2017, having a major face and voice reminding the world that the Church is not merely a front for bigotry and pharasaism seems worthwhile at the least. Pope Says Church Is ‘Obsessed’ With Gays, Abortion and Birth Control (New York Times)

Another longform profile, this one from Pitchfork on the late Elliott Smith, 10 years after his death: "Ever since he died, 10 years ago today, people have been clamoring to tell Elliott Smith's story for him: writers, poets, fellow musicians, his religiously devoted fans—anyone who felt the subliminal undertow of his songs. The urge is understandable. Smith’s music, with its forensic attention to mood, dredges some of our murkiest emotions to the surface and coaxes unnameable sensations into focus. When an artist has this gift, they stir powerful needs... What follows is not an oral history of his life, but of his music; specifically, his solo career. The lines between life and music are tangled, of course, in ways that aren’t neatly prizable, and darker stories eventually creep into the frame at the edges. But the arc traced here begins with the emergence of That Voice: the flowering of his talent, the development of the intimate, inscrutable folk-pop he would mine for the rest of his career." Keep the Things You Forgot: An Elliott Smith Oral History

My first introduction to the great Wendell Berry happened in 2013 through his interview with Bill Moyers: 
Moyers: "What are the precious things that you think are endangered now?"

Berry: "It’s mighty hard right now to think of anything that’s precious that isn’t endangered. But maybe that’s an advantage. The poet William Butler Yeats said somewhere, 'things reveal themselves passing away.' And it may be that the danger that we’ve now inflicted upon every precious thing reveals the preciousness of it and shows us our duty."

Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity

The last thing I shared in 2013 was a Gawker piece on America's amnesiac relationship with its own racial history: "In America we like to pretend that our statues and federal holidays are proof that we are humbled by and respectful to our shared national history. But how respectful are we, and to whom are we showing respect, when a monument to a 'great' American fails to mention that that man once fought tirelessly to subjugate an entire group of other Americans? How respectful are we when we publish in our newspapers headlines calling black women liars for proffering the ridiculous opinion that the racism they've known since childhood is a real thing? Whose history is being respected when a white American says she pines for the days when entire restaurant waitstaffs were composed of old black men? Why does it feel like some histories are more valued than others in America, where often the response to minorities who mention their difficult pasts is, 'Get over it'? ...The specters of the past are all around us in America. Some of us just refuse to look at them."  The Year in Racial Amnesia