I have some great longreads for you to enjoy during what I hope is an extended week for most of you. You’ve got time to curl up on your couch, so I say make the most of it in the most non-Netflixy way possible.
If you’re looking for something a bit less-weighty, I offer the following AM radio artifact. Remember this the next time your inner Mike Rowe asks exactly how that turkey ends up on your table each year. (Mildly NSFW.)
Recommendations
TECH: “What Is Web3 and Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About It” Reason (2021) — Andrea O’Sullivan of the James Madison Center offers a hype-muting assessment of what is nevertheless a world- and culture-changing technology. “Some of the flashier elements that are attracting comment and critique are overshadowing the new, real, and less glamorous improvements that decentralization technologies can bring.”
CRIME: “The Notorious Mrs. Mossler,” Texas Monthly (2021) — If film and literature didn’t already have a ton of prototypes for “femme fatale” characters to draw from, those fields could probably get by with Candace Mossler alone. “‘Candace was beautiful. She lived in this great mansion. She gave away money to worthy causes. She had all these children she adored. She had everything she could possibly want. And then the police announced that she and her lover-boy nephew were cold-blooded killers.’”
HISTORY: “Pompeii Still Has Buried Secrets,” The New Yorker (2021): “The new excavations in Regio V—conducted with the latest archeological methods, and an up-to-the-minute scholarly focus on such issues as class and gender—have yielded powerful insights into how Pompeii’s final residents lived and died. … ‘You only have to excavate a tiny amount in Pompeii to come up with dramatic discoveries. It’s always spectacular.’” Leporis fellas.
POLITICS: “The Failure of Occupy is Almost Complete,” Freddie deBoer (2021) — deBoer and I would probably disagree on a lot of things if we were to sit down together. But I never miss any of his posts, full as they are with raw-nerve intensity, a courage to torch the pieties and assumptions of his perceived peer set, and a powerful desire to fight, bite, claw, and kick his way across that tantalizingly asymptotic gap into a fair and just universe. This is his sober assessment of the Occupy movement. “Again, we have armies of people who insist they’re willing to take part in meaningless street combat with whatever right-wing losers show up, and take photos for social media the entire time, but we have far fewer who will actually show up week after week to do the slow and laborious work of canvassing, phone banking, tabling, handing out leaflets, and otherwise slowly changing minds. If it doesn’t feel cool, today’s left [won’t] do it. The only politics they desire is the politics of catharsis.”
ESSAY: “My Father, the Hitman,” D Magazine (2021) — An elderly man, now a psychologist, comes to terms with the family stories, the vague memories, and the reality of his dad’s career. This one has everything from family drama to the Kennedy assassination.
CULTURE: “The New Puritans,” The Atlantic (2021) — I often find discussion of “cancel culture” from the Right and Left equally inane. The Right points to it as yet-another-example of institutional capture by the Left, to which it long ago and all-too-willingly ceded the production engines of American culture. The Left glibly portrays it as “just another word for ‘consequences,’” oblivious to the irony of enforcing a false binary even as they view themselves as the group smart enough to read all of the shades of nuance in virtually any other situation. Anne Appelbaum offers the best assessment about “cancel culture” I’ve yet read: “There are currently no laws that shape what academics or journalists can say; there is no government censor, no ruling-party censor. But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes. How many American manuscripts now remain in desk drawers—or unwritten altogether—because their authors fear a similarly arbitrary judgment? How much intellectual life is now stifled because of fear of what a poorly worded comment would look like if taken out of context and spread on Twitter?”
Parting Shot
Drop what you’re doing, that is, if gravity is still a thing. Researchers have solved the mystery of our time, namely, that the evil Thanos could not, in fact, have disintegrated half of the universe’s population with the snap of a finger. Here comes the science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.