The idea that these would come out “roughly weekly” is already shaky, maybe biweekly is a better goal? Anyways, here are some links I like:
I have to start off on a sad note—Rebecca Munson, a friend of mine, passed away last week at the age of 37. In addition to being a very kind and funny person, she was a talented scholar and writer. In her essay “Their Data, Ourselves: Illness as Information,” she melded her professional life in the digital humanities with her personal life as a cancer patient during the pandemic.
Josh Marshall argues that the media and the elite didn’t see what was happening in Afghanistan because they were still wrapped up in the idea of a great and noble American struggle on the global stage.
Jason Farago’s analysis of the Mannerist painting “Madonna of the Long Neck” uses interactive design elements in a way that actually adds to the essay, which is rare.
B.D. McClay writes about fan culture, arts criticism, and the admonition to just “let people enjoy things.”
Donald Antrim's remarkable New Yorker essay on his mental breakdown, confinement in a psychiatric hospital, and recovery is worth reading for many reasons, but one is the cameo by another famous writer, which made me literally gasp.
“I do not believe that we have all fully reckoned with just how much death is directly attributable to Donald J. Trump himself,” writes Hamilton Nolan. “There is a compelling argument to be made that he has achieved the remarkable feat of having personally caused hundreds of thousands of people to die.”
Some good news: Revisiting the young people from a 2012 NYT Magazine article about a summer camp for gender nonconforming children, they all seem to be doing well!
More evidence that Joe DiMaggio’s 1941 56-game hitting streak is the most impressive accomplishment in sports history.
“Humans love wallowing in a self-satisfied sense of daring moral heroism for believing whatever they were going to believe anyway,” writes Will Wilkinson.
I’m a bit late to the new season of the great podcast Decoder Ring, which investigates cultural mysteries like “what’s the deal with scary clowns,” but the episode on the concept of “selling out,” focusing on Oprah’s book club and Jonathan Franzen, is particularly interesting.
In other podcast news, Mike and Tom Eat Snacks, a pioneering comedy podcast, has returned after a five-year hiatus.
The NYT has an obituary series called “Overlooked No More” cataloguing the lives of figures whose deaths were ignored by the paper at the time, usually due to the person’s race, gender, or sexuality. Here is a belated obituary for Hettie Anderson, a model for sculptors like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose monument of General Sherman at Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza used Anderson as the personification of “victory.”
Self-promotion
On Culturally Determined, I interviewed Rebecca Panovka about her brilliant essay arguing that Hannah Arendt has been misread by anti-Trumpists.