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Errol Morris's Commencement address to the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism →

Basically guaranteed to be great. Filed to read soon.

The women in this photo could be models. The men in this photo are, well, typical schlubby D.C.-types. I’m sure they’re all crazy-impressive, but I wonder who sets the bar for women’s admission to the West Wing (or, perhaps, to the Times Sunday Magazine).

Regardless, this story is some great power porn and a nice source of tabloid ennui for anyone of a certain age and with a certain subset of college diplomas. Read it and self-flagellate.

# All the Obama 20-Somethings from the Sunday Times Magazine

"It’s getting easier to talk about “white culture,” maybe even white politics, without knee-jerk sarcasm or, for that matter, knee-jerk sympathy. And it’s getting easier to imagine an American whiteness that is less exceptional, less dominant, less imperial, and more conspicuous, an ethnicity more like the others. In the Obama era—the Tea Party era—whiteness is easier to see than ever before, which means it’s less readily taken for granted. If invisibility is power, then whiteness is a little less powerful than it used to be."

—

I think Kelefa Sanneh nails it here. Zadie Smith and – new to me – the fabulous Valarie Kaur both have spoken beautifully about how a flourishing of mixed/mulatta experience disrupts traditional constructions of race and racial privilege. In the latter half of the twentieth century (inaugurated, perhaps, by Loving v. Virginia), children began to be born who felt entirely at home in what had previously been distinct spheres of experience and self-understanding. I’ve been moved by the picture Kaur and Smith paint of what that coming of age offers our culture, but have been skeptical that it can really start to tear at the edges of white institutional supremacy in a real way.

I think Sanneh’s is a first answer. Whiteness is indeed defined by the unnamed-nature that allows it to take whatever form necessary. As the multivocal (Zadie’s term) and the shadow children (Valarie’s term) grow in number, they give the lie to the invisibility of whiteness. I love the Tea Party example because it’s so immediate. The more we are able to name – to make conspicuous – White America, the more difficult it becomes for whiteness to shapeshift as it did a century ago in an effort to maintain power. I don’t think this is the answer, if there were one, and I certainly don’t think white privilege is going anywhere anytime soon, but this passage from Sanneh’s solid piece really turned a light on for me.

# ‘Beyond the Pale’ in the New Yorker

View high resolution

I think about this graph a lot. At the moment, it’s because I’m rereading Clay Shirkey’s magnum opus from last spring, on the future of the industry. Click-through for a readably-large version.

# A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades

"A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it."

— The Economist (via mudd up, peterwknox, solipsism)

Times to Remember, Places to Forget →

A wonderfully pithy Times Op-Ed from the New Year, on the homogenization of place. It grazes vapidity, but I think ultimately that’s part of its strength – makes makes a smart point simply. Give it a quick read.

When the industrial smoothing of our nation’s once-variegated edges has been fully accomplished, Americans may no longer need to gather at midnight on the last day of the year to yearn for their yesterdays, because wherever they are they will see the landscapes of their youths.

"‘Yes, yes, Hemingway,’ she said. ‘But you were living in a milieu of criminals and perverts.’ I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world as it was and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them, although some of them I could not like and some I still hated."

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast [p.12].

"In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House."

—

Sends shivers up my spine to read that line. Coincidentally, I re-listened to Zadie Smith’s extraordinary lecture at the NYPL from the last winter – both pieces call me to reassess, somehow, my understanding of how race is constructed in America. Can the times really be changing, even if only a bit?

# In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery - NYTimes.com
# Speaking in Tongues – Zadie Smith live from the NYPL

On Language, 'Channeling' →

Without getting into my qualms with having William Safire, inexplicably, writing the Sunday Times Magazine’s language column, the latter half of his piece last week piqued my inside baseball sort of linguistic interest: poetic allusions in print. To wit,

Paul Krugman of The Times is doing his best to preserve the grand tradition of oblique poetic quotation. He recently wrote: “Right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.” No Bethlehem slouch, he; that’s based on William Butler Yeats’s familiar “The Second Coming,” in which “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.”

Getting at something

I wonder what it is that I feel so connected to David Foster Wallace’s own search for ontological clarity and meaning and yet guard my life with much more jealousy than it seems he ever did. By which I mean simply: he always understood something about the idea of suicide as a “solution” to deep metaphysical unrest that I doubt I’ll ever be able to fathom. I am so enamored of incarnation that I can’t stand to lose it; in D.T. Max’s telling, he was always destined to sink beneath the weight of life’s intransigencies.

His IQ was probably 60 points higher than mine, for one. He perceived (and created) with an insight and poignancy I’ll never know. Does identifying with him allow me to believe I see genius in myself? Is it an effort to exorcise the fear that with middling, unfocussed giftedness I am entirely unremarkable; that my discernment is completely of this age and nothing more?

This past year has been brewing a search for the marrow of things, or at least meaning in my life. Now I’m off to seminary, and it is explicitly a crucible of ontological engagement: I go to put aside my earthly machinations for a time, to make sense of a grander muddle. I need to commit to writing my racing thoughts these days, as middling and potentially redundant as they may be. I like the idea of serializing my reasons for enrolling at Union Theological Seminary for concerned friends and family, but also because the project will help me to sort and begin to make sense of the understandings and longings I bring to this undertaking.

I’m getting at something, is the point, and though it won’t be pretty for a while, I’ll give it a go anyhow. If you want to follow along you are welcome to watch this space.