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
No comments:
Post a Comment