This Week’s Posts
Monday, July 31st - The Internet is Broken and Will Never Be Fixed (subscriber only)
The incentives all point in the wrong direction.
Wednesday, August 2nd - I Keep Writing the Same Poptimism Piece Because Nothing Ever Changes
NYU literally included a question about Taylor Swift in their application, but please, tell me about how pop music is still the disrespected underdog.
Thursday, August 4th - Beware the Man Who Brings a Graph to Show What a Statistic Reveals More Precisely
Why use a graph when we have statistics that more accurately convey the same information? Only to deceive.
From the Archives
Here’s my Unherd review of Obsessive Intrusive Magical Thinking, which doubles as a meditation on the allure of being - or appearing to be - mentally ill.
Song of the Week
Non-Garbage Online Reading
The New York magazine piece on the author of The Body Keeps the Score is as good as everyone says, but since that’s already gotten a lot of pub, I want to also recommend Kristen Marten’s excellent piece on similar themes for The Washington Post.
Book Recommendation
Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World’s Coasts and Beneath the Seas, Carl Safina, 1998
A long, somber meditation on the deaths of the oceans. I say deaths and not death because as Safina makes clear the oceans are dying in many different places and many different ways. What unites all of these little deaths is the ultimate cause of all of them: mankind. We dump vast mountains of plastics into the seas, we fish species to extinction, we kill coral reefs with chemicals and global warming, we devastate fragile ecosystems with gruff indifference as we alter the environment to fit whatever pecuniary need we may have. Safina’s project is less depressing than I’m making it seem here, and there’s tons of lively science writing and gripping discussion of aspects of oceanic life that you may not be aware of. He maintains as stiff of an upper lip as he can. But it remains the case that the picture he paints here is a very bleak one, with few silver linings, and while a few things have gotten a little better in the 25 years since publication, many have gotten worse. Definitely not a book to cheer you up, but an important and challenging read for anyone who cares about our planet.
Comment of the Week
“If you don’t like Taylor Swift, then, like, you don’t understand things.”
I felt the same way about Star Wars, Fleetwood Mac, Dune, and Stephen King. Then I left high school.
(The Fleetwood Mac thing, is still true though.) - Spence in Austin
That’s it. Life is crazy right now. Should have the subscriber writing post up tomorrow evening.
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I had to do some digging for that Taylor Swift NYU question and... It's something! Seems like an inconsequential lyric to have students respond to in the grand scheme of her output, and especially in comparison to the other choices.
https://meet.nyu.edu/advice/application-tips/announcing-the-2023-2024-common-application-for-nyu/
I concur that the van der Kolk piece is excellent. Carr uses irony very deftly, I thought, it order to critique without being completely unsympathetic to the movement and its adherents. I feel like more books should be sold in pairs. 'The Body Keeps the Score' could be sold alongside Kristin Dombek's excellent 'The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism' for instance to temper the reader's temptation to invest in an overly simplistic, self-mythologising narrative...