Big news coming tomorrow.
This Week’s Posts
May 16th, 2022 - Pity Writing Studies, the Field That Hates Itself
I discuss all the myriad ways my old academic field went wrong.
May 17th, 2022 - My Response to Daniel Bergner's New York Times Magazine Piece on Psychotic Disorders
My emotional response to a deeply wrongheaded NYT magazine essay.
May 19th, 2022 - Can an Unattractive Person Be Attractive?
Of course many fat women are sexy. But that doesn’t make their sexiness fair or egalitarian or any such thing.
May 20th, 2022 - Bodega Discourse is Downstream From the Fact That No One is Particularly Interesting (subscriber only)
The whole tiresome bodega discourse is a function of our need to distinguish ourselves from others, including geographically.
From the Archives
Song of the Week
Book Recommendation
Six American Poets: An Anthology, edited by John Conarroe, 1993
If you’ve ever decided you want to get into poetry, or at least have a taste, but find that world bewildering then this is as good a start as any. The six poets here are probably the six most commonly cited as America’s masters, and there’s a reason why. Each is given a good deal of space to showcase their work. For beginners it helps that these poets are, with the exception of Wallace Stevens, all quite accessible. Not that accessible does not mean shallow; Robert Frost, in particular, was playing a game of appearing very homespun and simple while containing hidden depths, much of them terrifying. But there’s a great deal to grab hold of here, and even the work of Stevens (who rivals Yeats as the greatest poet to ever live) is in its more accessible forms here. If you find you dig it, you might consider getting From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990, which will help free you from the common trap of not reading any poetry that came out in the past 50 years.
Non-Garbage Online Reading
Some useful, sadly-necessary pushback from James Greig against the ubiquitous and totally unhelpful “mental illness is just caused by capitalism, man” narrative. I will have to write this up longform at some point, but - there is no relationship between the size of a given nation’s social spending or rate of taxation and mental illness rates, and the most redistributive countries on earth (like the Nordic social democracies) have large mental illness problems. It’s just sloganeering.
That’s it! See you tomorrow.