This q and a with David French on authoritarianism and the threat of Christian nationalism is so good. Even if you disagree with him on most political matters, his careful position and sense of history here is clarifying, sobering, generous and generative. www.youtube.com/watch
We’re hiring at Northeastern: Design, Civic/Social Values, and Democracy. Open rank, broadly defined. Please share with folks you know? northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/car…
Never been so glad to be paying $$ for newsletters and journalism, rather than get analysis on latest news via social. I am not the product to be bought and sold. I pay and I get reliably smart and mixed strong thinking.
After finishing Wendell Berry’s magisterial Jayber Crow, I started and stopped several novels before picking up a favorite writer from the 90s: Robertson Davies. Every bit as enjoyable as remembered, stylistically, and thank goodness I have forgotten the stories. Reads like the first time.
Depressing as hell: even very smart folks with YouTube channels do that thumbnail treatment with colorful ALL CAPS PROVOCATIONS to get clicks. It must be working, because it’s everywhere.
Curious if profs/teachers here do a module on “how to reasonably argue in seminar.” We can easily *say: refer to the text specifically; your anecdotal experience is welcome, also insufficient on its own; no “vibes” critique, no ad hominem. But I sure would like an elegant activity to demo all.
“All sports involve some kind of disabling impediment, in the form of rules that restrict the ways in which one can achieve the object of the game…. sarahendren.com/2023/09/1…
Two things I might have studied, if I hadn’t been such an incurable melancholy poet type: midwifery or constitutional law.
New semester, new season: maybe you, like me, are trying out some new habits and patterns. Let me reassure us all with the Implementation Dip. It’s real. Be patient.
In the ongoing discovery of new-to-me books while still reading aloud to my youngest, let me add another Last Person Fanship to the list: A Wizard of Earthsea. Every sentence as musical as profound.
Maybe I missed wider discussion about it? But this piece by David Brooks on liberalism and assisted suicide is very well done as coalition-building work: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…
Finally hit a good stride on fiction reading after a bunch of frustrations. This week Tessa Hadley’s Free Love and now Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, alongside reading the first of the Earthsea books aloud to my 13 yr old.
These two got a magical Maine cove experience — sea kayaking alongside several pods of porpoises. Their surfacing breaths are so much more alive and grasping up close.
We saw Mission Impossible last night and loved it — sent me back to when I saw the very first one on a hot summer day at the Mann Chinese Theater in LA. Cruise came around a bend in one of those epic slow mo chase scenes and the whole theater erupted in laughter — the kind with utter joy in it.
I no longer think much about turning 50 — since the day has come and gone, months ago — but my inner disposition is still one of Re-Re-Beginning. What work is mine to do? What frame should shape my choices? Have I even been awake this last half century?
Last bit of summer
Derek Parfit on a consequential drive to Andalusia: sarahendren.com/2023/08/2… h/t @chrisfoley
And here’s a companion translation.
Miroslav Volf et al in the new book, “Life Worth Living”—what’s worth wanting? Like a tour through midlife. But also useful for my students this fall.
I reviewed David Gissen’s The Architecture of Disability for this month’s Landscape Architecture Magazine. Featuring the Acropolis, Yosemite, and Madrid’s Salon de Pinos: an interdependent take on the classical allée: landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2023/08/0…
