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?"
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