More March Reads

I've been making it a point to seek out more female writers after seeing the disparities between male and female authors in what I read the first several weeks of this year. This week, it really paid off, because there were so many great things to read by women. Here are a few pieces on subjects that could have been written about by men, but would likely have been approached differently:
Leslie Jamison, NYT Magazine, Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?
Abby Perry, Fathom: The Steep, Words shape us
Kaitlyn Scheiss, Christ & Pop Culture, Subtweeting Our Righteousness before Men

Two related pieces on parenting and childcare:
Tara Ann Thieke, The Kitchen Table, Invisible Caregivers, Invisible Children
Katelyn Beatty, CT, Babies Need Their Moms. But Moms Need Paid Leave.

Liz is a socialist and a woman, so it's no surprise that she had to write a response to everyone who mansplained her after the first piece here:
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, It's time to give socialism a try
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Let's have a good faith argument about socialism

These two pieces aren't related other than being long, well-written explorations of complex and esoteric issues. The first looks at Christianity and Vodou in Haiti, and examines the Venn diagrams of Vodou and Pentecostalism, mega- and local churches, NGOs and Christian aid groups, and so much more; it's fantastic. The latter is about naturalistic philosophy and psychology, and looks at the history of a bizarre but widespread trend of materialist thinkers diving so far down the rabbit-hole of their arguments that they end up convinced that there can be no such thing as consciousness:
Susana Ferreira, The Believer, For G-d So Loved Haiti
Galen Strawson, New York Review of Books, The Consciousness Deniers

Food, memory, community, capitalism, food, marketing, nostalgia, food, stories, food:
Tara Isabella Burton, 1843 Magazine, What 24 hours in a diner taught me about New York
Alicia Puglionesi, Baltimore Pizza Club, While the pile of crust goes skyward
Taffy Broadesser-Akner, Saveur, Let's Go to Jerusalem for Soup Again

The connecting link between these pieces is their connection to reads from previous weeks, from porn and the #MeToo movement, to Steven Pinker's new book, to people of color leaving white-encultured churches, to the state of evangelicalism after Trump, to Kate Bowler's new book.

Meagan Tyler, ABC Religion & Ethics, Leaving Blokesworld: Why You Can't Have Your Porn and #MeToo – Cosign.

Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic, When Truth and Reason Are No Longer Enough – this is a particularly interesting take on Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, arguing that "rational progress" has been uniquely detrimental to localism and community, making it harder for people to embrace embodied pluralism, and therefore has led to the resentments at the root of our politics nowadays.
Frances Crusoe, Fathom Mag, Multicultural but Still Homogenous – A frustrating personal narrative to go with the recent NYT "quiet exodus" piece. I found myself kind of arguing with the author, even though I would generally think of myself as sympathetic to black people leaving evangelical churches. This reveals to me how crucial it is to really listen to these stories, because even if I wouldn't want to go to an impersonal megachurch or have a pastoral style that constantly comments on current events, if people are being driven away from a church or the Church, it's time to evaluate where our priorities lie.
David French, National Review, The True Sin of American Evangelicals in the Age of Trump – Also frustrating, a response to Michael Gerson's Atlantic piece that is too concerned with hedging about the legitimacy of evangelical fears. I share a lot of these concerns too, but come on – Gerson has an established career and record as an evangelical conservative; he didn't really need to spend his piece relitigating Roe v. Wade or Obergefell. His down-playing of white Christian's racial fears and hatreds would be a much more appropriate angle for criticism, but it's not here. 
Marcia Bosscher, The Well, The Middle Is Not the End: An Interview with Kate Bowler

Also related to a previous piece was Vann R Newkirk III's brutal Atlantic satire of Farhad Manjoo's NYT piece on print vs. social media news: Unplugging From the Internet Nearly Destroyed Me. This was also a good reminder that some of our most breathless, hysterical takes often hyperventilate too much for their own good. Case in point was the worst thing I read this week, Stephen B Tippins Jr's Anti-Social Network in The American Conservative. While I did get a little more charitable towards this piece once I realized it was from back in 2011, it's still so bad, and shows how a lot of fears about the crisis of the moment have a lot more to do with us and our cultural biases than the reality of the situation, which might not be nearly as dystopian as it seems.

But then a story like this breaks:
Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison, The Guardian, Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Alexis C Madrigal, The Atlantic, What Took Facebook So Long?

And I am reminded why I click on everything like this that I see:

Karol Markowicz, NY Post, Maybe it's time for everyone to give up on social media

And why I remain pretty critical of technology all the same:
L M Sacasas, The Frailest Thing, Why We Can't Have Humane Technology

This is the confessional portion of this week's roundup, in which I admit that I read not one, but two articles about the President and his alleged affair with a porn star. I also read some other bad news about him, and generally regret it about as much as I usually do. Mea Culpa.
Lili Loofbourow, The Week, Stormy Daniels is crushing President Trump at his own game
Matthew Walther, The Week, Stormy Daniels bringing down Trump would be the poetic justice America needs
Ruth Marcus, WaPo, Trump had senior staff sign nondisclosure agreements. They’re supposed to last beyond his presidency.

Quinta Jurecic & Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic, Is America on the Verge of a Constitutional Crisis?

It's pieces like the above that make me long for a more robust and theologically rich politics, like these pieces describe:

Rachel Anderson, Public Justice Review, Citizenship as Craft

Bradford Littlejohn, The Davenant Trust, Protestantism After Liberalism? An Untapped Resource for Christian Political Thought

Two churchy pieces (a review of Alan Jacob's book on the BCP that was actually too dense for me, and an article on inner city churches that reminds us we have to be a body that is true to the parts that it has):
Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, Comment, Living Words for a Living Faith
Tyler St Clair, TGC, Why We Restarted Our Church

Lastly, UMBC's president gets a free ad printed on a major magazine's website because the boys from his school through a ball through a hoop more times than boys from a different school (but it is a good read):
Freeman Hrabowski, The Atlantic, The Secret Behind the Greatest Upset in College Basketball History