Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“Serious Bill-Paying Skillage,” Laura Hudson
“Armada is for everyone who wants…a book-length love letter of cultural hyperlinks that refer you elsewhere but contain no meaningful content themselves.”
“College Ratings and the Idea of the Liberal Arts,” Nicholas Tampio
“Is there a purpose to college other than making money? Can one make this argument without sounding like a dreamer?”
“Sacred Inwardness,” Marilynne Robinson
“Perhaps the real lack of faith in modern society comes down to a lack of reverence for humankind, for those around us, about whom we might consider it providential that we can know nothing—in these great matters that sometimes involve feigning or concealment, that are beyond ordinary thought and conventional experience, and that can in any case be minutely incremental, since God really does have all the time in the world.”
“The Man Who Saw America,” Nicholas Dawidoff
“Sixty years ago, at the height of his powers, Frank left New York in a secondhand Ford and began the epic yearlong road trip that would become ‘The Americans,’ a photographic survey of the inner life of the country that Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker, considers ‘one of the basic American masterpieces of any medium.’”
“Who, What, Where, When, Weird,” Daniel Engber
“For at least a century, the genre of weird news has been driven by a pair of rival spirits—two theories of weirdness that co-exist but never jibe. First there are the satirists, the weirdness hunters who put their quarry in a circus cage: They point us at the characters they’ve nabbed so we can laugh at them together. Then there are the weirdness conservationists, the ones who see their subjects as members of a beautiful exotic species.”
“Why Murder Philosophers?,” Costica Bradatan and Richard Marshall
“Failure reveals just how close we always are to not being at all. When you experience failure, should you pay enough attention, you can see the cracks in the fabric of being. And how, from behind, nothingness itself stares at you.”