Essays I've been reading, March 2020
"What one is invited to consider here is the notion of artists whose work mattered supremely at the moment and in the place it was first performed, and depended largely on the physical presence of the artists themselves." nybooks.com/articles/2020/…
"In 2020, we are not only atomized, but we know we are atomized. We are aware that romance, especially, has become a hideous, empty shell." americanmind.org/essays/worse-t…
"As a wandering writer — she is widely acclaimed for inventing a way of writing about cities that blends history and imaginative description and a sort of psychology of place — Morris made much of herself being an outsider." theguardian.com/books/2020/mar…
"There is a nontrivial chance that following a presidential defeat and a few more developments that are not too difficult to imagine, the Democratic Party could collapse." nybooks.com/articles/2020/…
"'I belong to a generation,' he once said, 'which refused to choose between literature and philosophy, and between political engagement and journalism.'" newstatesman.com/2020/02/jean-d…
"The program suffered from a lack of funds, for which Nkoloso blamed 'those imperialist neocolonialists' who were, he insisted, 'scared of Zambia’s space knowledge.'" newyorker.com/culture/cultur…
"If the problem is that the population is being split algorithmically into target groups who are believed to occupy distinct and multiple views of reality then the solution is not furiously to serve your own target group with fictions it wants to hear." lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/…
"It is suggested more than once that, for people in Florent’s situation, the only two real choices are either spending time in a monastery or going to Thailand for sex tourism. Unfortunately for our Florent, the monasteries are all booked up." commonwealmagazine.org/nothing-left-w…
"What makes her so impressive to some is precisely what doesn’t resonate with the bulk of the population. After all, if voters wanted to elect writers and intellectuals to office, we would have more of them." vox.com/2020/3/3/21162…
"The old-school argument about who wants what for dinner will be resolved by a driver who pulls up to your home with one Chinese meal, one Italian, one vegan, and one hot-chicken plate." thecounter.org/why-restaurant…
"In his holism there is a lot of resonance between Buber and the metaphysics of Christopher Alexander, who is also convinced that 'wholeness' is fundamental to the structure of reality. Both of these writers I find maddeningly tantalizing and fascinating." ribbonfarm.com/2013/08/20/i-a…
"The truth is that the corporate-liberal media are comfortable with the Trump presidency. They have prospered wonderfully from his entertainment value, even as they staked out a high ground in the anti-Trump ‘resistance'." lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/marc…
"The free and accountable human being accepts legitimate authority and the limits inherent in the human condition with grace and equanimity. He does not confuse them with coercion and imperious domination." newcriterion.com/issues/2020/3/…
"If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing, risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it clear that you tried." thecut.com/2020/03/will-t…
"Cahiers was never 'chic'; it was austere; it was world-admired and culturally central when it was at its most confrontational and polemical and, yes, sometimes insulting." newyorker.com/culture/the-fr…
"A passion fruit tiramisu may be unique, but the authenticity of tiramisu is judged by its conformity to a conventional recipe. Similarly, it appears that the more we conform to social conventions about how a person should act, the more authentic we feel." blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/t…
"The gregarious informality of rustic lunches à la bonne franquette to dinner parties with copains are being sacrificed to the individualism and planning associated with personal food requirements." life.spectator.co.uk/articles/why-f…
"The books discussed here inherit this ancient conviction that the attempt to write well is a bettering one. Composing a crisp sentence demands attention to fine detail and a craftsmanlike dedication to perfection." the-tls.co.uk/articles/good-…
"'Resignation haunts our present civilization,' Douthat writes, with 'therapeutic philosophies and technologies of simulation' having displaced passion, conviction, and faith." commonwealmagazine.org/sustainable-de…
"Living on the coast, owning a Subaru, dicing scallions to NPR: these comprise the 'lib' in 'libtard.'" newyorker.com/books/under-re…
"The wannabe writer now offers himself to the ideological architects of the media and academe, providing fodder for their deterministic interventions in a discourse increasingly more about remaking the world than investigating it." firstthings.com/web-exclusives…
“Among his English tutors was Elizabeth Vining, an American Quaker, who nicknamed him ‘Jimmy’. ‘His interests in those days were almost entirely confined to fish,’ she wrote later.” lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/…
"The meanings of its words do not change in the way that words in contemporary languages do. No Roman, after all, ever said that at the end of the day he was weaponizing multiple existential threats to ensure a level playing field." firstthings.com/article/2020/0…
"He told his mostly white, red state, un-degreed audience that the art world hated them. The 'experts,' he argued, want you to feel stupid. I was struck by the fact that I didn’t disagree." thebaffler.com/outbursts/the-…
"Theories locating the origins of the virus in a Chinese lab provide a measure of cognitive refuge for those who advance them. It is not that the modern project can never be completed, it is simply that we screwed up somewhere and need to do better." theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/why-the-viru…
"Defenders of the BBC often cite as a doomsday scenario the bleached teeth, melodramatic behaviour and detachment from reality of Fox News anchors, or even the less repulsive but undeniably smug Beltway smarm of MSNBC." lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/…
"When Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, he announced it to the government on December 9, and was on his way to Austria three days later. But Edward didn’t want to do voice-overs for Disney." theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
"The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor." theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
"In the orgy of demonstrative pseudo-grief that followed her death, Mr Blair said the people had found a new way of being British. Indeed so: they had become emotionally incontinent and inclined to blubber in public when not being menacingly discourteous." blogs.britannica.com/2007/08/the-di…
"We are better at addressing fast-moving crises than slow-building ones. It wouldn’t be surprising, then, if we simply absorbed current conditions as the new normal. We are good at muddling along." newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…
"American orchestras play Brahms and Schubert and Shostakovich. So far as American music goes, an opportunity to bear witness lies fallow. Or has the American experience simply not inspired concert music that binds a nation?" the-american-interest.com/2020/03/15/fur…
"The public intellectual requires a public, and as Michael Warner argues in Publics and Counterpublics, the idea of a single public is a historical fiction." thebaffler.com/salvos/the-tro…
"Our entire political and economic ecology is leveraged all in on one particularly myopic understanding of expertise, because, in the short term, it delivers to us what we want." americanmind.org/features/the-c…
"Western society fetishizes the appearance of leadership even as actual leaders recede into a malfunctioning technocratic machine that prunes individual agency and leaves behind only a phantom limb sensation of what once was." aelkus.github.io/problem/2020/0…
