odds and ends / 7.16.2019

Still from Francis Alÿs' Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (Strait of Gibraltar, Morocco-Spain), 2008: 'A line of kids each carrying a boat made out of a shoe leaves Europe in the direction of Morocco, while a second line of kids with shoe-boats leaves Africa in the direction of Spain. The two lines will meet on the horizon.'

On display as part of The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, an exhibition exploring 'both real and imaginary geographies, reconstructing personal and collective tales of migration.'

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[I]f you haven’t been moved by now by the many reports of abuses, injustices, in-custody deaths, and bodies that have turned up in the borderlands, then you cannot be moved.

Tina Vasquez, 'The Image America Shouldn't Need.' NYRDaily, 6/27/2019.

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Saying, 'This is rape!' or 'That is a concentration camp!' or 'The government is abusing innocent children!' is not having the desired effect, because the president and his allies are leeching the powerful stigma attached to these crimes.

Josephine Livingstone, 'The Death of Taboo.' The New Republic, 6/27/2019.

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The regulators of news language recognize that to evaluate a person, an event, or a phenomenon as racist is to do just that: to evaluate and observe the situation, and to listen to the facts. Not to breed doubt or inaccuracy where precision and lean language ought to live—e.g.: the sky is blue. Or: the President is racist.

Doreen St. Felix, "Trump, the Squad, and the 'Standard Definition' of Racism." The New Yorker, 7/16/2019.

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Legitimizing complete irresponsibility is also exactly why the mainstream, respectable GOP eventually embraced Trumpism. It’s a force that protects the monstrously unfair world they’ve built.

Alex Pareene, 'Teenage Pricks: Trumpism's brand of boy power.' The Baffler, No. 45.

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Rebecca Solnit: 'Monsters rule over us, on behalf of monsters.'

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Bad News, a game where 'players gain followers and credibility by going through a number of scenarios, each focusing on one of six strategies commonly used in the spread of misinformation [impersonating people online, using emotional language, polarization, conspiracy theories, discrediting opponents, and trolling people online].' 

It was designed by researchers to see if they could 'pre-emptively debunk, or ‘pre-bunk,’ fake news by exposing people to a weak dose of the methods used to create and spread disinformation, so they have a better understanding of how they might be deceived,' and it seems to work.

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Can you spot a fake photo online?

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Stories dictate their own span: beginning, middle, resolution. This is not how major change happens, and the strength of social storytelling—its ability to make problems seem individual and ordered—can also become a weakness. Storytelling looks past all the interlocking motions of society in favor of the personal, the private, the atomized view ... We risk building a theatre in which individuals are led onstage, told to perform their moving stories, showered individually with cash and allyship, and then summarily dispatched. In general, the people who benefit most reliably from our storytelling moment—the people in power and in control—aren’t the speakers but the stage managers. Many right-minded journalists, if pressed, would admit to feeling an undertow of awkwardness about trying to stir an audience of peers by trawling for stories that expose the suffering of people whom they’d never write about in good fortune.

Nathan Heller, 'The Hidden Cost of GoFundme Healthcare.' The New Yorker, 7/1/2019.

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Five practices for listening to the language of birds.

imaginary outfit: thanksgiving

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work ...

Wendell Berry, 'The Real Work.'

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One night this week, desperate to find a way to pass the long hour after sunset and before dinner, I remembered a mini camping lantern we had stashed away. Hugh was smitten.

First, we used it to light up the cardboard box he's been using as a play house, collecting all his stuffed animal friends to sit in the friendly glow. Next, we looked under the couch, peered in corners and closets, and under tables. Hugh raced from room to room, carrying his little light.

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I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.  

Rebecca Solnit, “The Arc of Justice and the Long Run” — an essay that gave me great comfort (and resolve) this week.

Other things:

• an advent of peace and justice.
• 'You should treat people like adults, which means respecting them enough to demand that they understand the consequences of their actions.'
• 'What we think of as normal shapes our field of vision; it tells a story of the world and its possibilities.'
• five fallacies about racism  
• 'This is not the apocalypse'
• 'A believer is one who can remain loyal to life no matter what'
• a new map of wonders

Also: simple actions for good: signing the Southern Poverty Law Center's petition to reject hate and bigotry; for Ohioans, co-signing Senator Sherrod Brown's letter.

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I had drafted a whole other post celebrating mundane things like sweaters and filled casserole dishes, but my thoughts bent another way. So: giving a little thanks that the world has pretty, distracting things like loopy sweaters, bronze shoes, pretty earrings and Fair Trade spoons carved from stumps.

Happy Thanksgiving.

*As ever, you can click through the image above to find sources for everything pictured.

'the banality of "happiness"' + 'a better language to describe'

Goff made a distinction between the everyday spiritual condition of “joy”—an intense awareness of the gift of life, the fruit of hope, joy as the very condition of being alive—and the banality of “happiness.”

David Remick, "Blood at the Root." The New Yorker, September 28, 2015.


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I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn’t call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person — honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope.

Rebecca Solnit, "The Mother of All Questions." Harpers, October 2015. (Read thanks to 118. READ. LOOK. THINK.)