Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Roger Angell, chronicler of the experience of caring

Nobody Did It Better Than Roger Angell

...Angell profiled generations of the biggest stars in the game. He wrote about every World Series for decades; he covered spring training and the minor leagues and entirely forgettable weekday contests. But what tied all of this work together was its sense of purpose: Angell understood just why people watched baseball and just why people wanted to read about it. He knew what made the game important alongside what made it anything but. And he understood all of this because he lived all of this: Roger Angell was a baseball fan. If this seems like it should be a given for a baseball writer, it hasn’t always been, and that’s illuminated by the gap between his work and that of so many others. Who else could write this experience of spring training from the stands (1962) and this incisive profile of Bob Gibson (1980) and this meditation on watching a blown save with his wife (2011)? The common thread is the understanding of what it means to love the game...
https://www.si.com/mlb/2022/05/21/roger-angell-death-nobody-did-it-better

Twain on travel

https://www.threads.net/@debpixcom/post/C32XsXXrl_l/

No cult required

Christopher Hitchens Dismisses the Cult of Ayn Rand: There's No "Need to Have Essays Advocating Selfishness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Reinforcement"

https://www.threads.net/@openculture/post/C31zYOTLoX0/

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Flying Dutchman

"He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himseIvlf. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman."

"Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World" by Walker Percy: https://a.co/jbrgM0E

Ur OK

https://substack.com/@figsinwinter/note/c-49915469?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

A former slave’s remarkable letter to his old “owner”

Letters of note

https://open.substack.com/pub/lettersofnote/p/i-meet-the-proposition-with-unutterable?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Friday, February 9, 2024

‘Reading is so sexy’: gen Z turns to physical books and libraries

Can this be true?!

They have killed skinny jeans and continue to shame millennials for having side partings in their hair. They think using the crying tears emoji to express laughter is embarrassing. But now comes a surprising gen Z plot twist. One habit that those born between 1997 and 2012 are keen to endorse is reading – and it's physical books rather than digital that they are thumbing... Guardian

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

What all prospective parents need to know

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams." ~Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Monday, February 5, 2024

Reconstruction Amendments

"…It seems clear that the men who wrote the Reconstruction Amendments expected men like former president Trump to be disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment, as 25 distinguished historians of Reconstruction outlined in their recent brief supporting Trump's removal from the Colorado ballot.

But the Fourteenth Amendment did far more than ban insurrectionists from office. Together with the other Reconstruction Amendments, it established the power of the federal government to defend civil rights, voting, and government finances from a minority that had entrenched itself in power in the states and from that power base tried to impose its ideology on the nation." HCR

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-4-2024?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Ontological Airbnb

"...I don’t desire a personal God. (When I went to Jewish services with my wife and read the translations of the prayers, the relentless praise made me cringe.) What I want is not a superhero dad but for the universe to make sense, for it to meet what Hegel called our “absolute need” to be at home in the world. I can see why Baddiel might frame this need in filial terms, as a desire for God the Parent. But those who didn’t feel at home at home may crave a more impersonal consolation: a rational proof, or truth, or narrative that salves our ontological homelessness.


We may also be more modest in our hopes. I’m as terrified of death as anyone, but I have no dreams of immortality. I cannot think that justice will be done in some divine tribunal, that everything has happened for good reason in the best of all possible worlds. My hopes are more precarious, more painful, more provisional: that we will bend the arc of future history towards justice—an ontological Airbnb..."


Kieran Setiya
https://open.substack.com/pub/ksetiya/p/ontological-airbnb?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

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