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Cultural Snobbery
From Vanity Fair: James Wolcott on Cultural Snobbery. In New York City (can't speak for the other metro systems across this great land), every subway car is a rolling library, every ride an opportunity to spy on the reading tastes of fellow passengers and make snap judgments that probably wouldn't hold up in court. Single women in their 30s and 40s gripping a teenage-vampire tale or a Harry Potter-they seem to be ha...
Free?
From the New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell on Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson's reference to people who "prefer to buy their music online" carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, an...
Yoga is like writing
From Good: The Joys of Absorption. Therein lies the key to my love of Power Yoga. I am told not to think. I am absorbed. This wondrous vacation from my head is also why I love writing. Sounds counter-intuitive, I know. But in an essay, "Why Write?" Alan Shapiro nails this addictive sensation mid-essay. He suggests that we write for the pleasure of "perfectly useless concentration." We write, Shapiro tells us, "fo...
July 10, 2009
How to Go to the Zoo By Matt Kirkland You don't love the zoo. But you should. Here's how. Connecting Refugees -One Bead at a Time By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot Refugee Beads and Village Gatherings help establish connections and make lasting changes in the life of refugees - and Americans. The High Line -Manhattan's Newest Public Park By Brian Watkins New York's prophetic public space has found ...
On my favorite Kentucky poet
From Smithsonian Magazine: 35 Who Made a Difference: Wendell Berry. As a farmer, he has shunned the use of tractors and plowed his land with a team of horses. As a poet, he has stood apart from the categories and controversies of the literary world, writing in language neither modern nor postmodern, making poems that have the straightforward elegance of the Amish furniture in his farmhouse. And in recent decades, he...
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
From The Believer: Dancing About Architecture. I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I've heard the line frequently. At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be poin...
Michael Chabon on the wilderness of childhood
From the New York Review of Books: Manhood for Amateurs. Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geog...
Making food culture
From the Times Magazine: Home Sweet (Urban) Homestead. In Oakland, where backyard menageries and D.I.Y. charcuterie are the new garage band, the term "urban homesteading" doesn't need an explanation. "It fits into the Oakland sort of self-defined vibe or aesthetic of doing things from scratch and being kind of hard-core," she said, tugging at the false eyelashes she hadn't had a chance to remove since judging "Iron ...
