“Generations.” Plough’s new difficulty is out, and whereas I’m ready to learn it till my bodily copy exhibits up, Peter Mommsen’s opening editorial, probing the craving for roots and the methods wherein we keep away from or domesticate these, whets my urge for food: “The “pervasive rootlessness” that [Alex] Haley recognized afflicts not solely America, but in addition just about all over the place that modernity has touched. Whatever occasional curiosity folks might take of their household historical past is simply too weak to beat a far stronger present of indifference bordering on hostility towards the previous.”
“No Other Options.” In this tragic essay Alexander Raikin particulars the tradition of loss of life that’s growing round Canada’s euthanasia regime: “Important folks — outstanding politicians, physicians, and judges — promised Canadians that their rights to autonomy can be expanded. But the image that emerges shouldn’t be a brand new flowering of autonomy however the hum of an environment friendly engine of loss of life.”
“Young Adults are Struggling with their Mental Health. Is extra Childhood Independence the Answer?” Holly Korbey describes the results of much less childhood independence and threat: “While it’s laborious to level to a single trigger, consultants say a confluence of things — together with extra time spent on smartphones and social media, much less time at no cost play, a tradition that prizes security on the expense of constructing different traits, a worry of kid kidnapping, and extra adult-directed actions — collectively have created a tradition that retains youngsters far-off from the sorts of experiences that construct resilience.”
“My AI Spiritual Director.” Ian Harber and Patrick Miller examine the data stream created by AI writing to hyperinflation: “The info age has had an inflationary impact on the subjective worth of knowledge. The extra info we have now quick access to, the much less worthwhile that info turns into — each monetarily and subjectively. . . . While folks like to difficulty jeremiads about decrease consideration spans, and the shift from literacy to orality, I’m wondering if these critiques miss the extra basic drawback: we didn’t rewire our brains for shortform content material as a result of we prefer it. We did it as a result of we’re awash in info.” (Recommended by Austin Hoffman.)
“Lead and Cadmium Could Be in Your Dark Chocolate.” Kevin Loria explains new findings from Consumer Reports about heavy metals that accumulate in cocoa and are current at comparatively excessive ranges in lots of darkish chocolate bars.
“The King of Cups.” Tara Ok. Menon has been writing wonderful dispatches in regards to the just lately concluded World Cup. Her remaining essay isn’t any exception: “What makes soccer so beautiful and so shifting is that it affords us a possibility to observe nice athletes in sync, to see them transfer collectively as if they’ll learn one another’s minds, to witness people changing into greater than the sum of their components.”
“Great, Beautiful, Terrifying.” Joy Williams wrestles with Cormac McCarthy’s two new books: “Perhaps the enterprise of The Passenger, for all its somber romanticism and Gnostic leanings, is to defer to this unconsciousness, to present form to that which could effectively be the soul, or at the least its most devoted companion.”
“Disaster Scenarios Raise the Stakes for Colorado River Negotiations.” Joshua Partlow stories on the more and more determined negotiations over the dwindling water within the Colorado River: “In 1999, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the 2 largest reservoirs within the nation, held 47.6 million acre-feet of water. That has fallen to about 13.1 million acre-feet, or 26 % of their capability. . . . Federal officers have projected that, as quickly as July, the extent in Lake Powell might fall to the purpose the place the hydroelectric plant contained in the Glen Canyon Dam might not produce energy, and then preserve falling in order that it will grow to be inconceivable to ship the portions of water that Southwest states depend on.”
“There Is No Mary Problem in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’” Clare Coffey rewatches It’s a Wonderful Life and argues that Mary is the movie’s visionary and protagonist: “George’s life is formed by a recurring attribute act: the heroic acquiescence to responsibility when circumstances require it. But Mary sees the higher imaginative and prescient from the beginning. She is set that George will lasso the moon, even when she is the one one who can see it within the sky.”
“Splinters of their Charms.” Boris Dralyuk evaluations A.E. Stallings new e book of chosen poems and commends her prosody and the imaginative method wherein she imbues mythic ladies with new life: “Rooted in Athens for greater than twenty years, the American-born Stallings has not forgotten the music that imbued her earlier work.”
“Bacon Bacon Shakespeare Spy.” In an interesting essay exploring Delia Bacon’s Nineteenth-century idea that Francis Bacon was the truth is the writer of Shakespeare’s performs, Sam Kahn delves into the which means of scientific progress and ponders how this odd however good girl would possibly assist us higher decide expertise: “even when they typically had hassle understanding her, and by no means took her authorship idea too actually, [her supporters] appeared to acknowledge that she was on to one thing: the compelling concept that the engine of contemporary historical past had been set in movement someday round 1600, that Francis Bacon’s scientific undertaking was on the middle of it, and that by a form of deft mental reorientation it could be potential to maneuver oneself out of the grip of a dehumanizing materialism and right into a extra humane mode of approaching the world.”
“What Comes Next for the Most Empty Downtown in America.” Conor Dougherty and Emma Goldberg report on the present state of downtown San Francisco, which signifies that the Richard Florida recipe for city development might not be viable: “Today San Francisco has what is maybe essentially the most abandoned main downtown in America. On any given week, workplace buildings are at about 40 % of their prepandemic occupancy, whereas the emptiness fee has jumped to 24 % from 5 % since 2019. . . . This has made the San Francisco space one thing of a check case within the multibillion-dollar query of what the nation’s central enterprise districts will appear to be when an elevated quantity of enterprise is completed at house.”
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