Tell Gannon I really will get this triforce put together someday.
- Out of the collapse of a civilization, new growth: It’s a classic Romantic (and American) story that Rebecca Solnit, writing about the history and present-day transformation of Detroit tells, so much so that I wonder whether sustainable is not sometimes just a new word for pastoral. Solnit knows this story, of course—it’s why she quotes “Ozymandias“—and I am certain she is trying to do more than revive Romantic images of the deaths of empires. But I’m not altogether sure she succeeds.
- If current practice is any predictor of the future, the morass that Lawrence Lessig says copyright law is heading to is frightening. It is in such contexts that I appreciate the fact my employer asserts rights of fair use for many of the texts we use, but our interpretation of fair use is tightening, much like a noose. How soon before that noose strangles us? How soon before copyright strangles us all?
- We’ve just passed the one-year anniversary of the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision upholding the rights of gay citizens to marry. In honor of that, David Cole’s essay explaining why the future of marriage is inclusive is worth reviving.
- The first part of William Langewiesche’s American Ground is a description of the subterranean levels of the World Trade Center after it collapsed. Reading it was the first time I realized that New York City, like London and Paris and all the great cities, has nearly as much history beneath the streets as above. (Ghostbusters 2 notwithstanding.) This essay about Steve Duncan, “guerrilla historian of infrastructure,” makes the point even better.
- Marlowe channels Whitman.
Dad sends this joke: “If you get a hankering to take all your clothes off, a bottle of Windex will keep you from streaking!”
In other news:
- Hearing Voices No. 86 is a Kitchen Sisters documentary about radio station WHER in Memphis, Tennessee, the first “all-girl” station in the United States.
- Surely Charles Bowden’s “Teachings of Don Fernando” is the best eulogy of a drug informant ever written. I wager it is also one of the better essays of the last decade: stark prose that marvels at a man whose decades-long success as an informant was built wholly on the belief that he knew who he was.
- Bowden’s March 2000 essay “Ike and Lyndon” is also good. By coming to terms with Lyndon Johnson, it goes a long way toward explaing how George W. Bush happened, too.
- “Ultimately what was decisive for me was not the bill, but rather the potential to create an opening for a more comprehensive approach toward health care reform. If the bill were to go down, this whole discussion about anything we might hope to do in health care in the future is not going to happen in this generation.”—Dennis Kucinich, on how he came to vote yea on the Affordable Care Act
- Avatar, says Daniel Mendelsohn, is James Cameron’s most significant reimagining of The Wizard of Oz yet. I buy the allusion, but Caleb Crain got the analogy right.
It was through mysterious means that, years ago, I first got a subscription to Mother Jones, and at first I was unimpressed. The stories were too often like brushing a turkey while it’s roasting: you know there’s something good there, but all you see is drying, cracked skin. I lobbied K to kill the scrip and find something better, but for one reason or another she never did, and quite suddenly the magazine became excellent—I remember being surprised when I realized it. On that note, I cannot recommend enough Mac McClelland’s story in the current issue about Karen refugees from Burma who sneak across the border from Thailand to document the Junta’s human rights abuses. Its familiar narrative structure of a naïf being introduced to the horrors of the world could have undermined her subjects, but McClelland keeps her focus tight on their struggles and the Junta’s genocidal actions. I think I will not quote from the story; instead, just go read it.
Anymore, 
keeping a reading list means having a dozen or more tabs open on my Web browser. Since my browser of choice is Omniweb, this means the left side of my browser window is a perpetual stack of tiny images of all the articles I am ignoring. Much of my current stack is populated by essays I should have read years ago but didn’t. These are a few of them:
- David Foster Wallace, “Federer as Religious Experience”: In 2006, Wallace went to Wimbledon and came back with one of the most perceptive analyses of modern tennis and Roger Federer’s place in it I’ve ever read. (Not that I’ve read many analyses of modern tennis, but I like to watch it.)
- I watched The Wire this summer as quickly as I could get the disks from Netflix and the Iowa City Public Library. (For realism and complexity, every television drama you have ever seen pales in comparison to it.) “The Angriest Man in Television,” Mark Bowden’s 2008 essay in The Atlantic, is a portrait of the show’s creator David Simon.
- “What exactly is postmodernism,” asks Jonathan Lethem in a spirited defense of violating intellectual property, “except modernism without the anxiety?”
- Finally, anxiety, Take 2: The newest addition is on the stack because of work (I am writing a version of it for sixth graders). Robin Henig’s New York Times Magazine account of Jerome Kagan’s longitudinal research of anxious people. The story is fascinating in its own right, but it also comes home to roost: the woman I sleep beside every night is an eternal tangle of anxiety. I wonder whether, as an infant, she too screamed at the unfamiliar world? I must remember to ask Ma.
