affairs
Sunday, October 27, 2024 →
From “Our Strange New Way of Witnessing Natural Disasters,” by Brooke Jarvis in the NYT:
Suddenly, some experience that previously seemed distant or impossible becomes something we’ve watched happen — not with distance or solemnity on the evening news, but mixed into the jumble of images of everyday life that scroll across our feeds. The details move rapidly from the inconceivable to the familiar, from things we would never expect to things we can easily picture, things we almost feel that we’ve experienced ourselves. Yes, this is what it looks like when you film through a car window while everything around you burns. This is what it looks like when the ocean crashes through the window of your living room. This is what it looks like when a riverbed tries to carry nearly two dozen times more water than it usually holds, or when houses bob downstream like rubber duckies. To quote a viral tweet about a previous calamity: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones, with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
Wednesday, October 2, 2024 →
Excellent recent interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jon Stewart and Terry Gross. Have ordered “The Message” and can’t wait to start reading.
Sunday, September 15, 2024 →
Toni Morrison, in a 1975 lecture, quoted by Ketanji Brown Jackson in her new memoir, “Lovely One”, which I’m reading now:
The function, the very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped property so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Tuesday, May 10, 2022 →
“Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” — Jonathan Haidt’s bleak, incisive essay in The Atlantic about social media and society. (Interestingly, the print piece I read in my issue this evening has the less clickbaity headline “After Babel.” Was that replaced because it would have performed less well on social?)
Monday, May 13, 2019
Packer’s recent cover story for The Atlantic — “Elegy for the American Century” — is an exceptional piece of longform reporting and vivid narration. Excerpted from his new book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Sunday, September 2, 2018
Nathanial Rich’s whole-issue article in the NYT Magazine. I read it in one punch-in-the-gut gulp on a car trip unusually free of kids and other responsibilities. Can’t recommend it more highly.
Sunday, May 20, 2018
I don't think I've ever been more moved by an audio story than I was listening to this two-part podcast episode called "The Choice":
In April of 1992, Nada Rothbart was living happily in Sarajevo, Bosnia, with her husband and two young sons–till the night the Bosnian Civil War broke out on the …
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
What a time for this deeply affecting Mohsin Hamid novel to appear. Here’s Jia Tolentino on The New Yorker’s website:
The novel feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing questions. Whom are we prepared to leave behind in …
Monday, September 5, 2016 →
“Fractured Lands”: An extraordinary, deeply affecting single-article issue of The New York Times Magazine. Unforgettable.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Two of my favorites.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Not content with being The New Yorker’s EIC, David Remnick remains — even in “a few thoughts” blog post sent from a returning train — one of its sharpest writers.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
The Frank Lloyd Wright house in Ebsworth Park, which we visited in February
This post is part of my “Annual Favorites” list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus.
Favorite Books (Goodreads profile)
The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages)
Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count …
Sunday, October 21, 2012
An exceptional piece of reporting in The New Yorker.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Interesting historical perspective from Chrystia Freeland, writing in the Times:
The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that …
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Remarkable and brave.
And here’s David Remnick, who spent years living in and covering Russia, on the scandal. His post includes video of Tolokonnikova reading her statement.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
From the surgeon/writer’s impressive Daily Comment for The New Yorker:
The major social advances of the past three centuries have required widening our sphere of moral inclusion.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
From “Protesters in Moscow Try New Tactics to Avoid Arrests,” in the NYT:
The evolving tactics in Moscow are not novel. In a primer on nonviolent protest, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle,” Gene Sharp, an American intellectual, described a “dilemma protest” as a performance of an action so …
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
The Catholic writer, in a post at the New York Review of Books blog:
Those who do not want to let gay partners have the sacredness of sacramental marriage are relying on a Scholastic fiction of the thirteenth century to play with people’s lives, as the church has done ever since the time of Aquinas. …
Saturday, March 17, 2012
A fascinating New Yorker piece — subtitled “Who listens to a President?” — about the limits, and even potential drawbacks, of even the most finely shaped rhetoric amid our two-party system.
Friday, March 16, 2012 →