Reviews and News:
The making of England: “Geography is history, Montesquieu argued in L’esprit des lois (1748). The warm Gulf Stream and inclement rain shaped English agriculture and settlement. The rain fed the grass and the wheat. The wheat and the rain combined with the gist, as the Anglo-Saxons called yeast, to make cakes and ale. The grass fed the sheep, and the sheep, apart from feeding the shepherds, fattened the wool dealers. Add coal, and Winder can reduce Englishness to a ‘playful equation’: E = cw4 (Englishness = coal x wool, wheat and wet weather). By his own argument, Winder should subtract a fifth ‘w’, the wolf. The ovine economy of the Middle Ages required ‘a tamed terrain, scoured of exciting wild animals’. In 1281, Edward I commissioned Peter ‘The Mighty Hunter’ Corbet to clear the last wolves from England’s forests. By 1290, Peter had earned his nickname and England could become an ‘enormous sheep estate’.”
Advocates of slavery claimed it was necessary for freedom. Defenders of abortion use the same logic: “In 1976, the Pulitzer committee awarded that year’s prize for history to Edmund Morgan, for his history of colonial Virginia. His work, entitled American Slavery, American Freedom, argued that white colonial Virginians owed their prosperity and liberty—even, eventually, their democratic and representative government—to the institution of slavery. Slavery was, moreover, the basis for colonial politics. ‘How,’ Morgan asked, ‘did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics?’ Both questions, Morgan said, led ‘to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.’ To be denied slavery was to be denied economic opportunities. The individual’s chance at economic prosperity lay in his unfettered legal ability to acquire slaves. Slavery was liberty. Lindy West of the New York Times recently, and similarly, insisted that unfettered access to abortion is essential to women’s economic and other liberties.”
The return of U. S. Chess: The American team “now boasts three of the world’s top seven players. The three found themselves in St. Louis on that sunny spring day — and playing under the American flag — in very American ways. Nakamura wasn’t born here (he was born in Japan), but he moved here when he was 2 years old. Caruana was born here (in Florida), but moved away (Spain, Hungary, Switzerland) to train. So wasn’t born here either (Philippines), but moved here (Missouri) to attend college.”
Disney to pull out of Netflix to launch its own streaming service in 2019.
Robert Rauschenberg, painting’s beribboned radical: “If an award were given for winning awards, it would surely go, by acclamation and universal consent, to Robert Rauschenberg, the most beribboned figure in the history of art. Not only did he win almost every award you can think of, but others were invented so that he could win those as well. Had the Nobel Prize been given to painters or sculptors, he would have won it, and because it wasn’t, the magniloquently named Praemium Imperiale came into being, and then he won that. Let it be said on Rauschenberg’s behalf that he does not seem to have sought out these awards or even to have valued them unduly, and if he continued to accept them long after he ceased to need the money or acclaim, that was largely because he was an affable extrovert who didn’t like to say no to anyone. But there is a paradox at the heart of his career, and it is implicit in every work on view in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (a show that began at the Tate Modern and moves hereafter to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was, if nothing else, the most sincerely radical figure in the history of American art.”
Revisiting James Thurber’s The Wonderful O: “James Thurber’s The Wonderful O, first published 60 years ago and now reissued in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Ransom Riggs, is a humorous fairytale about a couple of sailors who team up to hunt for treasure. One of them, Black, hates the letter O and makes an attempt to obliterate it from the alphabet. The concept is ridiculous—of course you can’t get rid of a letter—and so the story is hilarious, but Thurber uses humor to explore what becomes of a society when something we use to communicate—to understand and to be understood—is taken away.”
Essay of the Day:
Today’s teens are radically different from the teens of previous generations. They don’t care as much about freedom, take fewer risks, and live almost entirely online, which is making them “seriously unhappy”:
“One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. ‘We go to the mall,’ she said. ‘Do your parents drop you off?,’ I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. ‘No—I go with my family,’ she replied. ‘We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.’
“Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. ‘It’s good blackmail,’ Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. ‘We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.’
“I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
“Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.”
Photo: Virginia Tiger Moth
Poem: Stevie Edwards, “Fidelity”
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