Reads almost to the end of March

Wooo boy, a lot of reading this week! Let's start off with three pairs of loosely linked articles:

Two Atlantic pieces, one on the Crisis Pregnancy Center free speech case in front of the Supreme Court, and on the #MeToo movement's ramification in the Maryland legislature:
Emma Green, The Atlantic, Should Pro-Life Clinics Have to Post Information About Abortion?
Michelle Cottle, The Atlantic, 'I've Personally Sacrificed My Entire Career for This'

Two on racism – the burden of explaining its reality, and the burden of acknowledging our complicity:
Jemar Tisby, The Atlantic, The Heavy Burden of Teaching My Son About American Racism
Andrew Peterson, The Rabbit Room, Waking Up to "Is He Worthy?": An Apology

Two on justice – a conservative take on community conceptions of justice, and a left-leaning take on the history of American incarceration and how it might be reformed:
Charles Fain Lehman, The University Bookman, What Punishment? Whose Community?
Roger Lancaster, Jacobin, How to End Mass Incarceration

What does the religious life look like going into the 21st century? These first two pieces examine how monks and nuns are looking to recruit new members; following from the second, the next two look at the history of black women in the Catholic Church:
Stephen Hiltner, NYT, The World Is Changing. This Trappist Abbey Isn’t. Can It Last?
Julie Zauzmer, WaPo, Urging middle schoolers to consider the convent: ‘Do I want to marry Joe Blow? Or do I want to marry Jesus Christ?’
Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, Global Sisters Report, Black spiritual traditions have long history in Catholic Church
Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, Global Sisters Report, First black sisters pioneered black spirituality in Catholic Church

Speaking of black women in the church, Ekemini Uwan wrote a great piece on her site (Sistamatic Theology) on the difficulty of overcoming cultural bias in our minds and our churches: Decolonized Discipleship

Several pieces on women's stories – the way we dismiss female-made or female-focused art; Wendell Berry's wife; professional food critic gets mansplained; elderly Japanese women seeking shelter from loneliness in jail; Leslie Jamison is awesome:
Lili Loofbourow, VQR Online, The Male Glance
Robert Jensen, ABC Religion & Ethics, The Woman Beside Wendell: At Home with Tanya Berry
Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, Yes, I Use a Hair Dryer to Make Roast Chicken – Here's the Recipe

Shiho Fukada, Pulitzer Center, For Many of Japan's Elderly Women, Prison Is a Haven

Chris Kraus & Leslie Jamison, The Paris Review, Big-Tent Recovery: An Interview with Leslie Jamison

Heck of a week for tech writing, as the world discovered Facebook is actually kind of bad. Highlights: Paul Ford suggests a digital EPA, Tamsin Shaw shows Silicon Valley's shady military-informational complex connections (and how they lead to publicly subsidized profits), Ifeoma Ajunwa and Ethan Zuckerman both show the bigger scale than the current crisis, Jeffrey Bilbro applies virtue ethics and localism to our tech problems, and Ross Douthat reminds us that amidst all the Facebook hubbub, cable TV is the real evil:

Paul Ford, Bloomberg Businessweek, Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here's How to Fix It.
Christine Emba, WaPo, Twitter Is Sick. The Prognosis Is Grim.
Laura Sydell, NPR, Is It Even Possible to Protect Your Privacy on Facebook?
Ifeoma Ajunwa, WaPo, Facebook users aren't the reason Facebook is in trouble now
Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic, This Is So Much Bigger Than Facebook
Tamsin Shaw, New York Review of Books, Beware the Big Five
John Biggs, TechCrunch, #deletefacebook
Abby Ohlheiser, WaPo, You want to quit Facebook, but will you really click the button? These folks tried.

Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Technology and the Virtues: Scale Matters

Ross Douthat, NYT, Trump Hacked the Media Right Before Our Eyes

Segueing into the non-digital world, Facebook is building a town, and this is probably bad too. Speaking of tech and our cities, Uber killed a person; we should probably build our cities for people before we bring cars to life:
David Streitfeld, NYT, Welcome to Zucktown. Where Everything Is Just Zucky.
Christina Bonnington, Slate, Are Our Roads Ready for Self-driving Cars?
Lewis McCrary, The American Conservative, Drivers Declare War on Walkers

Two pieces on knowledge: the first makes an interesting (but too short) point that we no longer evaluate information itself, but the reputation of our sources; the second is about the uncertainty of faith in a way that is pretty frustrating but very in line with the Charles Taylor "secular-3" thesis:

Gloria Origgi, Aeon, Say goodbye to the information age: it's all about reputation now
Lucy Bryan, The Other Journal, The Weight and Wonder of Everything We Do Not Know

Marriage and relationships: Marriage today seems to symbolize the achievement of two lives rather than inaugurating a new shared life (Cherlin); this individualization should be corrected by a community that supports and holds accountable (Olmstead). Of course, Facebook will not help with this (Sexton). For those not yet in marriageable relationships, hopefully the techno-commodification of online dating doesn't turn you off from human relationships (Alvarez), but be wary of your own desires, too; they are shaped by a fallen culture and assuming they must be indulged can have terrible consequences (Srinivasan). Modern childrearing is also shaped by a fallen culture, which places pressures upon parents that may not be as healthy as the "best practices" they to which they aspire (Huska): 
Andrew Cherlin, The Atlantic, Marriage Has Become a Trophy
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, Marriage Takes a Village
James Sexton, TIME, Divorce Lawyer: Facebook Is a Cheating Machine
Ana Cecilia Alvarez, The New Inquiry, Matchmaking

Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books, Does anyone have the right to sex?
Liuan Huska, CT, Has Attachment Theory Made Us Anxious Parents?

Christian stuff: Rachael Denhollander is more theologically sound and persevering in faith than the majority of white American evangelical leaders (Morehead) – except Russell Moore; that guy's cool (Hemingway). Serious Catholics are just as politically homeless as the remaining faithful Protestants (Dolan). Christians are pretty falsely nostalgic and culture-war-y in their responses to ethically fraught current events (Scheiss); this is probably why the March For Life has more of a preaching-to-the-choir, positive-thinking vibe than the working-for-real-solutions March For Our Lives (Unger). Christianity does offer the tools to transcend Americanized individualism without slipping into anonymous collectivism (Ballor). The Church needs to reconsider structures of accountability and willingly accept limits and vulnerability if it wants to stop having to be disappointed when the frauds and hucksters it's put in power fall (Crouch):

Jason Morehead, Christ & Pop Culture, America’s Evangelical Leaders Could Learn a Lot From Rachael Denhollander

Mark Hemingway, The Weekly Standard, Like Sheep Among Wolves
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Wall Street Journal, The Democrats Abandon Catholics

Kaitlyn Scheiss, Christ & Pop Culture, Why Do Christians Respond so Poorly to Tragedies Like the Parkland School Shooting?

Andrew Unger, CT, Two Marches for Lives
Jordan J Ballor, The Public Discourse, Madeline L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Christianity: Moving Beyond Collectivism and Individualism
Andy Crouch, TGC, It's Time to Reckon with Celebrity Power

Reviews: As Frank Sobotka said in The Wire, "We used to build shit here [in Baltimore]" – one of the things we built was a massive sewer system, despite misinformed NIMBYism; hopefully, we can overcome it again (Puglionesi). Speaking of The Wire, how do you share art when said art takes dozens and dozens of hours to consume, and is probably dated pretty specifically (Bunch)? I couldn't watch The Simpsons growing up; I'd never have time to watch it all now, and I might not get a lot of the timely references anymore, but David Foster Wallace would argue I'm better off without that injection of bitter irony anyway (Reinke). It would be a better use of my time reading some poetry in nature (Olmstead) or seeing how beautiful paintings can find glory in everyday life (Benfy):

Alicia Puglionesi, Atlas Obscura, The Manmade Marvel of the Baltimore Sewers
Sonny Bunch, The Weekly Standard, Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?
Tony Reinke, Desiring God, Did the Simpsons Ruin a Generation?
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, A Life of the Land, Cut Short
Christopher Benfy, New York Review of Books, Renoir's Onions

Miscellaneous stuff!

Ana Stankovic, Los Angeles Review of Books, I Am Not a Marxist
Charlie Clark, Mere Orthodoxy, Let Us Now Praise Fractious Men: The Hillbilly as Economic Dissident
Elizabeth Weil, NYT Magazine, Alone At Sea: Why He Kayaked Across the Atlantic at 70 (For the Third Time)
Simona Foltyn, Columbia Journalism Review, After US journalist killed in South Sudan, a quest for answers