A Link to the Past
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.
