Isak

Cities and the Art of Making Things

I had a lot of conversations as I traveled around for this new Forefront feature for Next City (you once knew it as Next American City) about the art of making things, and how it has come in and out of favor as part of a city's self-identity. Here's how my story opens (and yes, the pun in the lead character's name is just an amazing coincidence):

He might appear mild-mannered, what with his collared shirts, thin-rimmed spectacles and white hair. But John Workman is sort of a superhero.

A pilot who owns World War II-era planes, Workman leads flyover shows that awe citizens in his town of Muskegon, Mich., on the Lake Michigan coast. He volunteers to fly sick children in west Michigan across the country, for free, so they can get life-saving medical treatment. And, in dim rooms shot through with sparks, employees of the company he co-owns work with molten steel at temperatures of 2,900 degrees.

This last bit might be Workman’s most impressive feat: He is a 21st-century American manufacturer.

With gorgeous beaches and a tradition of thriving industry (its timber rebuilt Chicago after the 1871 fire), Muskegon is both a place of play and a place of work. But about a decade ago, the city considered cutting its losses and reorienting itself entirely for tourists. Muskegon’s community developers came together to debate the point, because it didn’t look like manufacturing jobs would ever come back to the United States, let alone the Rust Belt. It was tempting to see Muskegon’s history of making things, from beds to heaters to porcelain enamel, as just that — history.

But they didn’t do it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this story, as always. And it's worth mentioning that your subscription to the in-depth Forefront series is totally worth it, and helps create space for longform journalism about cities; you can also purchase stories individually for less than the price of a macchiato.

Doodling and Neuroscience with Lynda Barry

You too can join cartoonist Lynda Barry for her "Unthinkable Mind" university course. It's based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but you can audit it from home (san enrollment) and, as Open Culture details, Barry will be "posting her weekly assignments and curriculum materials on her tumblr, a forum where her abiding interest in science is as apparent as her devotion to undirected doodling." The course is designed to appeal to both those in the humanities and the sciences. The class was limited to twenty students, who applied for it with a questionnaire that asked, for example, "Was there something you made by hand as a kid that made you happy?"

From the description of Barry's course:

A writing and picture-making class with focus on the basic physical structure of the brain with emphasis on hemispheric differences and a particular sort of insight and creative concentration that seems to come about when we are using our hands (-the original digital devices) —to help us figure out a problem.

No artistic talent is required to be part of this class, but students must have an active interest in learning about the physical structure of the brain, how memory, metaphor, pictures and stories work together, the relationship between our hands and thinking, and what the biological function of the thing we call ‘the arts’ may be.

This is a rigorous class with a substantial workload. Along with twice weekly writing, picture making, and memorization assignments, students will be required to complete a handmade book using visual and written elements by the end of the semester.

Via Open Culture, catching us up on the course, which has just begun:

Your first assignment, posted above, requires a box of crayons, the coloring pages of your choice, downloaded to four types of paper, and a significant chunk of time set aside for brain-related articles and vintage videos starring Cognitive Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga and astronomer Carl Sagan. You should also be committed to keeping a four-minute diary and serving as your own guinea pig.

Who’s in?

40 Years Roe: True Story

Lest it is difficult to read the Guttmacher infographic, it says this: By age 45 about half of American women will have an unintended pregnancy, and nearly one in three will have an abortion. It's true: and it means that it's awfully unlikely that you don't know one or many women who have had one, or a partner who supported a woman through it. (Or you, dear reader, are one of them yourself.) It's a surprising reality, though, that we just don't hear about very often from the people we know: few women, relatively, feel like they can speak about their abortion to others. "More state-level abortion restrictions were enacted in 2011 than in any prior year; 2012 brought the second-highest number of restrictions ever." The public conversation about abortion is ... well, you know how it is. Many of us argue our abortion beliefs among friends, families, and other groups in theoretical or political terms, assuming nobody in the group has a personal abortion experience. To mention that you've had one must feel like throwing yourself to the lions.

So: nearly 1 in 3 American women. Four crucial decades of abortion affirmed under our right to privacy, even as politicians use the issue as bait, throwing up every shaming and arduous obstacle possible.

There are a lot of stories there, a great many of them untold. (UPDATE: "What keeps black women from going public with our stories?" asks Dani McClain in Ebony.) They call for listeners. Reading is, I believe, a kind of intimate listening. That's why I'm reviving something I started last year on this day: sharing the most honest, brilliant, and important stories about abortion and the full scope of reproductive justice. All have been teachers to me.

And let's pause to say a prayer of gratitude. As Guttmacher puts it:

There are no women of reproductive age in the United States today who were of reproductive age prior to Roe. U.S. women of this age have never known a nation in which abortion was illegal and unsafe.

That is remarkable. Let us keep it that way. Let us listen.

Articles/Radio:

• "Birthright." Jill Lepore, The New Yorker. (See also her dispatch on the 40th anniversary of Roe.)
• Lepore's interview on NPR's "Fresh Air": "How Birth Control and Abortion Became Politicized".
• "Teaching Good Sex." Laurie Abraham, The New York Times
• "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives." Mimi Swartz, The Texas Monthly
• "The Message and the Meaning: Is Pro-Choice Passe?" Katha Pollit, The Nation.
• "Nursing Grudges." Dahlia Lithwick, Slate.
• "'We Have No Choice.'" Carolyn Jones. The Texas Observer.
• "Lucky Girl." Bridget Potter, Guernica.
• "An Abortion Battle, Fought to the Death." David Barstow. The New York Times.
• "The New Abortion Providers." Emily Bazelon. The New York Times Magazine.
• "Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash." Linda Greenhouse & Reva B. Siegel. The Yale Law Journal.
• "Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern." Martin Luther King, Jr., 1965.

Visual/Multimedia:

• New Yorker slideshow: "Roe v. Wade and the Forty Years' War"
• Gorgeous art posters on reproductive rights that take a "people's history" slant
• Exhale: Pro-Voice
• The incomparable Scarleteen: an exhaustive site on "sex ed for the real world"
• Bill Moyers on Choice
• "Listening Beyond Life and Choice." Frances Kissling featured on PRI's "On Being" with Krista Tippett. Kissling is the former head of Catholics for Choice.
• MTV special: "No Easy Decision."

Supreme Court Decisions:

• Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which established the constitutional right to privacy. It struck down a Connecticut state law that prohibited birth control even for married couples.
• Roe v. Wade (1971), which was decided simultaneously with Doe v. Bolton to uphold the right to privacy under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• "Interview: Sarah Weddington." TIME interviews the 26-year-old lawyer who argued in the Roe. v. Wade case before the Supreme Court. Martha Burk also interviews Weddington for the PRX show "Equal Time with Martha Burk."

Books:

• The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World - Michelle Goldberg. See also my interview with Goldberg here.
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty - Dorothy Roberts
• In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution - Susan Brownmiller
• S.E.X: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College - Heather Corinna
• Our Bodies, Ourselves - Boston Women's Health Book Collective

 

Related:

• 39 Years Roe: Read Up
• 37 Years of Roe v. Wade: Winter, Discontent
• 36 Years of Roe v. Wade: In Thanks
• Say You Want Revolution
• Abortion, Excommunication, and Kids

Poem: "Look"

Look
By Laura Kasischke

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds now. It's pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking magazine on this shelf for free. They tell us that most of the billions of worlds beyond ours are simply desolate oceanless forfeits in space. But logic tells us there must be operas, there have to be car accidents cloaked in that fog. Down here, God just spit on a rock, and it became a geologist. God punched a hole in the drywall on Earth and pulled out of that darkness another god. She —

just kept her thoughts to herself. She just —

followed him around the house, and every time he turned a light on, she turned it off.

 

From Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke. Poet Tracy K. Smith chose it for an NPR segment as one of her three favorite poems of 2011.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 1/6/2013

 

-- A manual on sex and pregnancy from 1680 (above) has been banned from sale for more than 200 years in the United Kingdom. But Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece will be in bookstores this month.

-- Chris Ware and "the comic-book novel" get epic treatment in the New York Review of Books. Ware also spoke with the wonderful Michael Silverblatt of KCRW's Bookworm recently.

-- "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year." I'm not surprised. Also: thrilled. I can't wait for this.

-- Natasha Trethewey takes up residence in the nation's capital as our new poet laureate. "I like the idea that people might even get to sit down and have a conversation about poetry with me."

-- Sharon Olds: "I want a poem to be useful."

-- Writing is for mornings.

-- The American Reader, a new literary magazine, is getting a ton of top-tier buzz. I feel both intrigued and .. put-off by it. I'm skeptical about the literary interest of a magazine that seems to start, from Day 1, on an elite status that seems to already inspire pandering media attention, commenting on the editors' fashion sense. On the other hand, it does have lot that's unique and smart and beautiful going for it. For one, it's helmed by a 25-year-old African Catholic who just graduated from Princeton who speaks fluently about the view from the cultural margins on literary white privilege.

-- Zadie Smith writes about joy.

-- Edith Grossman on love and translation, via Words Without Borders.

-- Four Way Press is kicking it.

-- "The House Eudora Built." Visiting Ms. Welty's home in Jackson, Mississippi.

-- "Tolkien vs. Technology," via the New York Review of Books. Also: The economics of Middle Earth.

-- The Sorrows of Young Forster: E.M. Forster's journals and diaries are reviewed by Alan Hollinghurst.

-- "...at the hour when the parricide feels a cat purring against his feet..." Worldly Thornton Wilder, via Harper's.

-- Balancing literacy and oral traditions in academia.

-- Reader favorites: 12 incredible webcomics.

-- Zeno in court.

-- The woes of Blithering Heights.

-- In transit: people caught reading.

-- Edmund White offers sex tips for writers.

-- I constantly find myself arguing for the value of "objectivity" in journalism as a practice, rather than a state-of-being: a critical value in reporting that is not to be confused with the "he-said, she-said" journalism known as false balance. Margaret Sullivan, public editor of the New York Times, pens a column on just this issue: "When Reporters Get Personal."

-- An oral history of Newsweek magazine.

-- The perks of delusional optimism.

-- Here's why front-page obituaries more than doubled in the New York Times in 2012.

-- The amazing story of the woman who "at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women’s rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades." She was one of the last living people who wrote Japan's postwar constitution.

-- Fact: For the first time since 1984, this past presidential election featured not one question on global warming. Four out of 10 people on earth have never heard of climate change, even if they've experienced its harsh consequences. Bill Moyers on "Moyers & Company" talks about ending the silence on climate change with Anthony Leiserowitz, who spends his life doing just that.

-- And, as federal action on climate change is seriously lacking, some cities are taking real leadership. Here are 12 cities with the best workable policies on sustainability.

-- Hill Valley Telegraph: The terrible newspaper from "Back to the Future." I love it all the same. For an alternative view on the journalism in "Back to the Future," see Slate.

-- "Saving his own soul first: The redemption of a Globetrotter."

-- A gorgeous black meteorite from Mars has more water than any other we've found in Earth.

-- NASA marks fifty years of space photography.

-- One Hundred Years of Solitude persuaded Francine Prose to drop out of her PhD program.

-- Christian Wiman is leaving Poetry magazine for Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

-- Jessa Crispin on materiality and the power of religious relics.

-- "I want women’s history to be legitimate, to be part of every curriculum on every level." Gerda Lerner has died. She almost singleheandedly made women's lives a legitimate subject of study for historians.

-- One of dictator Pinochet's last acts was to ban abortion in Chile in all circumstances. It had been legal since 1931. Today, there's a nervy effort to push back with an abortion hotline that walks a heated grey area.

-- Egad: 2012's deluge of "Africa is a Country" moments.

-- Arundhati Roy speaks on the misuses of democracy.

-- "Survival of the wrongest": How personal health journalism does it all wrong.

-- On the class politics of vaccination.

-- Civil Eats: The best food and agriculture books of the last year.

-- Physicists consider the rise and fall of words.

-- Why don't more girls study physics?

-- Gender in academia: men dominate philosophy and history, but aren't much of a show in education. There's a big difference in how gender participate on campus. Diversity will lead to better science. Misconceptions of the school-to-prison pipeline.

-- Abraham Lincoln as prose poet.

-- Reading aloud, fashionably.

-- "The last word is beauty."

12 Great Homes For Your End-Of-Year Donations

Offering my money to people, places, and organizations I believe in is one of my great joys, and is something of a year-round activity. But as this solstice season brings our year to a close, I know many of us are looking for what we might have missed. I offer here 12 suggestions that would be great homes for your end-of-year generosity and love. Please also check out Katha Pollitt's annual column in The Nation dedicated to wonderful causes -- I always look forward to it -- in which the clarion call is: "This year, be more generous than ever." And don't forget that in Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories, I profile several outstanding places for your gift donations, all with a distinctly bookish bent. And of course, if you value Isak, I'd be unbelievably grateful for your support for my work on this site: see the "Support Isak" box on the right.

But here are others.

 

National Center for Science Education
One of my all-time favorites. This nonprofit provides tools, resources, and advocacy to ensure that evolution and climate change are taught well in public school classrooms. It was founded in 1981 to provide support for legal and political challenges against science education, to educate the public through media outreach and journalist training, and to support educators who want to do their work well. NCSE states that, "Our 4500 members are scientists, teachers, clergy, and citizens with diverse religious and political affiliations." NCSE's good work resonates with me because it is both about the teaching of scientific fact (how our world works) and scientific process (how to make an evidence-based search for truth). Subscribe to the free "Education and Climate Education Update"  newsletter here. Donate here.

 

Medical Students for Choice
I love these folks. After years and years of hostile politics, and violence targeting abortion providers, you might not be surprised to learn that fewer medical students are choosing to go into abortion care ... or even learning how the procedure works, given that many schools are ignoring it in the curriculum. This translates into a scary dearth of people with skills to provide needed health care. (More of the story here.) MSFC, based in Philadelphia, is dedicated to creating tomorrow's abortion providers and pro-choice physicians. It is an effective and whole-hearted intervention, shaped in a participatory way by chapter organizations at medical schools in the U.S. and Canada. Here, there are resources to donate, shop online in a way that supports MSFC, and throw a house party to benefit MSFC.

 

Haley House
Okay, I'm biased. I used to live and work here. But I'll tell you from the inside that this Boston-based nonprofit and live-in community is worth your time and love. It is home to a soup kitchen that works in a radical community-based model, a food pantry (I used to run it! Say hi to Demetrius, one of the regulars, for me if you stop by), affordable housing, and a bakery that provides employment for people who have recently left incarceration or rehabilitation programs. Haley House extends its "food with purpose" model to providing cooking classes to community members and schools.

I've read that, despite their urgency, direct services are a distant third behind other, sexier, charitable giving to education and media/arts initiatives. Please don't forget people who need practical things like food and warmth. Donate here.

 

Forgotten Harvest
Picking up on the thread of providing for basic human needs: Forgotten Harvest is both food-rescue and hunger-fighting nonprofit based in Detroit. Since 1990, it has saved prepared and perishable food from waste, and distributed it, via 250 food banks and pantries, to people in need across the metropolitan region (2,000 square miles). Surplus food is culled from "grocery stores, restaurants, caterers, dairies, farmers, wholesale food distributors, and other Health Department-approved sources." Over 93% of funds go toward food programs. If you're local, here is how you can give food. Donate (the traditional way) here.

 

THAW (The Heat and Warmth) Fund
I know of several deadly fires caused by space heaters and other patchy solutions used by families who have had their heat cut off in the chilled Michigan winters. THAW provides emergency energy assistance to people who need warmth. Most of these people are elderly, unemployed, underemployed and/or disabled. Since its founding in 1985, THAW has 1985 distributed more than $110 million in assistance to more than 160,000 Michigan households. Donate here.

 

Women, Action, & the Media
This is gender justice in the media. This is about shifting the dynamics of whose stories get listened to, and how well those stories are told. WAM has been a crucial part of my journalism life: the community at WAM events and on its vibrant listserv effectively mentored me from the newbie who submitted print-letter queries addressed "to whom it may concern" into a person who can actually make a living from freelance writing. I like it so much, I carried it with me to Nairobi. Detroit, too. You can become a WAM member and get all sorts of discounts and services. Or donate straight-up here.

 

Earthjustice
"Because the earth needs a good lawyer." That's the tagline for Earthjustice, and it's a good one. This nonprofit has provided free legal representation for more than 1000 clients, ranging from big nonprofits like the National Resources Defense Council to small community groups. Headquartered in San Francisco, it builds hundreds of cases each year, defending laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Earthjustice helps "safeguard public lands, national forests, parks, and wilderness areas; reduce air and water pollution; prevent toxic contamination; preserve endangered species and wildlife habitat; fight the causes and effects of climate change; and defend the right of all people to a healthy environment." Donate here.

 

Natural Resources Defense Council
Considered one of the most effective environmental nonprofits in the country, particularly in fighting climate change, NRDC is a potent force. Besides sustainable energy (on a broad scale), NRDC is also focused on ocean revival, defending endangered animals and plants, ensuring a safe and abundant supply of water, and sustainable urban development. NRDC is a policy advocate and movement-builder: here are the successes it counts for 2012. Donate here.

 

Union of Concerned Scientists
Scientists and citizens unite here under the belief that rigorous scientific analysis, rather than political and corporate hype, "should guide our efforts to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices." UCS is also considered one of the most effective organizations in combating climate change. Its policy work and advocacy also prioritizes scientific integrity, clean vehicles, clean energy, and food and agriculture, among others. Donate here.

 

Freedom House
This is a temporary home in Detroit for survivors of violence and persecution from around the world who are seeking asylum in the United States and Canada. In thirty years, it has never turned anyone away who needed shelter here: men, women, and children are regularly living here, where they have access to food, shelter, legal support, social services, education, job training, and support in finding transitional housing. Freedom House also works to educate the public on refugees and the human impact of international political crises. Learn ways to volunteer or partner with Freedom House, and donate here.

 

RAINN (The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network)
This is the largest and maybe the most effective national organization dedicated to ending sexual violence. It provides services to victims, including a very effective National Sexual Assault Hotline (free and confidential), and it spearheads numerous education and prevention efforts. It also is an advocate for sane public policies, and it provides technical assistance to over 1,100 crisis centers nationwide. It's been a major force in getting untested DNA from a backlog of rape kits examined. Donate here. If you give by December 31, your gift will be matched.

 

Center for the Art of Translation
Because international literature matters. Being able to share our stories across borders is both urgent and joyful. CAT publishes and champions extraordinary literature in translation. It publishes the wonderful Two Lines journal, runs a bilingual reading series in San Francisco, and facilitates poetry translation workshops with children. Donate here.

Isaac Asimov on the Morality of Science

This conversation unfolded as part of Bill Moyers' "World of Ideas" tour during the presidential election year of 1988, which elevated the voices of writers, educators, historians, poets, scientists, and many other deep thinkers in a rather remarkable interview series. I wrote about it here, with special attention to Moyers' interviewing tactics. I featured his discussion with E.L. Doctorow of the political novel here. The above image is a still from Asimov's interview with Moyers.

At the time of this interview, Isaac Asmov had written nearly four hundred books: not just science fiction, but also nonfiction science books and children's books featuring history and math. He had just become president of the American Humanist Association, and had been credited by one scientist as the greatest explainer of the age.

 

MOYERS: Are we romanticising this, or do you think that Saul Bellow's character Herzog was correct when he said that the people who come to evening classes are only ostensibly after culture. what they're really seeking, he said, is clarity, good sense, and truth, even an atom of it. People, he said, are dying for the lack of something real at the end of the day.

ASIMOV: I'd like to think that was so. I'd like to think that people who are given a chance to learn facts and broaden their knowledge of the universe wouldn't seek so avidly after mysticism.

MOYERS: What bothers you about mysticism?

ASIMOV: The same thing bothers me about mysticism that bothers me about con men. It isn't right to sell a person phony stock, and take money for it, and this is what mystics are doing. They're selling people phony knowledge and taking money for it. Even if people feel good about it, I can well imagine that a person who really believes in astrology is going to have a feeling of security because he knows that this is a bad day, so he'll stay at home, just as a guy who's got phony stock may look at it and feel rich. But he still has phony stock, and the person who buys mysticism still has phony knowledge.

{...}

MOYERS: You wrote a few years ago that the decline in America's world power is in part brought about by our diminishing status as a world science leader. Why have we neglected science?

ASIMOV: Partly because of success. The most damaging statement that the United States has ever been subjected to is the phrase "Yankee know-how." You get the feeling somehow that Americans -- just by the fact that they're Americans -- are somehow smarter and more ingenious than other people, which really is not so. ...

{...}

MOYERS: In 1980 you were afraid that the fundamentalists who were coming into power with President Reagan were going to turn this country even further against science, especially with their demands that biblical creationism be given an equal footing in the classroom with science. Have they made these inroads that you feared?

ASIMOV: Fortunately, the currents have been against them. But they still put pressure on school boards and parents, and it's become a little more difficult in many parts of the nation to teach evolution.

MOYERS: The fundamentalists see you as the very incarnation of the enemy, the epitome of the secular humanist who opposes God's plan for the universe. ... Are you an enemy of religion?

ASIMOV: No, I'm not. What I'm against is the the attempt to place a person's belief system onto the nation or the world generally. ... My objection to fundamentalism is not that they are fundamentalists but that essentially they want me to be a fundamentalist, too. Now, they may say that I believe evolution is true and want everyone to believe that evolution is true ... Fundamentalists say they want to treat creationism on an equal basis. But they can't. It's not science. You can teach creationism in churches and in courses on religion. ....

MOYERS: But this is what frightens many believers. They see science as uncertain, always tentative, always subject to revisionism. They see science as presenting a complex, chilling, and enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal laws. They see science as dangerous.

ASIMOV: That is really the glory of science -- that science is tentative, that it is not certain, that it is subject to change. What is really disgraceful is to have a set of beliefs that you think is absolute and  has been so from the start and can't change, where you simply won't listen to evidence. You say, "If the evidence agrees with me it's not necessary, and if it doesn't agree with me, it's false." This is the legendary remark of Omar when they captured Alexandria and asked him what to do with the library. He said, "If the books agree with the Koran, they are not necessary and may be burned. If they disagree with the Koran, they are pernicious and must be burned." Well, there are still these Omar-like thinkers who think all of knowledge will fit into one book called the Bible, and who refuse to allow it is possible ever to conceive of an error there. To my way of thinking, that is much more dangerous than a system of knowledge that is tentative and uncertain.

MOYERS: Do you see any room for reconciling the religious view in which the universe is God's drama, constantly interrupted and rewritten by divine intervention, and the view of the universe as scientists hold it?

ASIMOV: There is if people are reasonable. There are many scientists who are honestly religious. Millikan was a truly religious man. Morley of the Michelson-Morley experiment was truly religious. There were hundreds of others who did great scientific work, good scientific work, and at the same time were religious. But they did not mix their religion and science. In other words, if something they didn't understand took place in science, they didn't dismiss it by saying, "Well, that's what God wants," or "At this point a miracle took place."  ...

MOYERS: Is there morality in science?

ASIMOV: Oh, absolutely. In fact there is a morality in science that is further advanced than anywhere else.  ... The morality of science is that you report the truth, you do your best to disprove your own findings, and you do not utilize someone else's findings and report them as your own. In any other branch of human endeavor -- in politics, in economics, in law, and almost anything -- people can commit crimes and still be heroes. ...

MOYERS: You love the field, don't you? You love science.

ASIMOV: Oh, I'm very fond of it. I think it's amazing how many saints there have been among scientists. ...

Literary & Media Indulgences - 12/7/2012

-- Let's listen for Madeleine L'Engle. Even more echo is heard here.

-- "The real and unreal: Ursula K. Le Guin, American novelist."

-- I'm five kinds of excited for the debut of Symbolia, a new digital magazine of comics journalism helmed by the talented Erin Polgreen. "... incendiary storytelling from around the world. We’re merging longform journalism and sequential art ..." Yes, please! See also an extensive profile of Symbolia in the Columbia Journalism Review (illustrated, naturally) and listen to Erin talk Symbolia on WBEZ.

-- "Young Latino Students Don't See Themselves in Books."

-- "We lose the subject of animals when we move out of childhood." Bookforum talks with fiction writer Lydia Millet.

-- Zoe Heller is swiftly becoming one of my favorite literary critics. Here she is on Salman Rushdie's new book about his life as Joseph Anton, in hiding after the fatwa pronounced upon him for his novel, The Satanic Verses.

-- Kwani Litfest kicks off this weekend in Nairobi, themed Conversations With The Horn: Writers, Artists In Exchange. It's bringing together Somali poet Hadraawi, Sudanese-English novelist Jamal Mahjoub, Eritrean writer/historian Alemseged Tesfai, Egyptian writer/activist Nawal El Sadaawi, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, and Ghanian novelist Kojo Laing, among others. I utterly wish I were there. Friends in Kenya, tell me all about it.

-- Cultivating Bulgaria into a dynamic and world-renowned literary center. Novelist Elizabeth Kostova is doing some very interesting work.

-- “What happens when everyone is a poet?”

-- "I feel like I have to earn my breakfast." Jane Fine interviews A.M. Homes for BOMB Magazine.

-- Remembering the Montreal massacre: The 1989 mass killing targeting female engineering students has been memorialized in ways that have scrubbed the atrocity from its political repercussions. The 25-year-old man who shot the students screamed: "You're all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!"

-- U.S. state science standards are "mediocre to awful," according to a new report.

-- Oscar Niemeyer, the modernist architect who designed Brasilia, died at age 104.

-- "The Fracking of Rachel Carson." Via Orion Magazine.

-- What's it going to take to go home by the home through the United States, retrofitting them for energy efficiency and reducing our massive residential carbon footprint?

-- A liiterary look (sort of) at our taste for oil.

-- This exists: a Calvin & Hobbes search engine.

-- The Hawkeye Initiative pictures male comics characters in the same extraordinary positions as female comics characters. Hilarity ensues. An important point is reaffirmed. Here's the submission from Matt Bors.

-- A graphic turn for academic librarians.

-- On the hunger that young readers have for dystopian fiction.

-- High school journalists try to figure out newspaper economics.

-- The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, an excellent and important newspaper, is working very hard to prevent cuts. The Columbia Journalism looks at what "resetting" the paper for the future means.

-- Brendan Nyhan discusses the future of fact-checking in the wake of the 2012 election.

-- Chris Hughes and the transformation of The New Republic (one of the magazines that I listed as a favorite gift subscription in the Choose Books guide).

-- In Guernica: what does it mean when your name doesn't mean anything?

-- Rebecca Solnit essays on urban agriculture and  "revolutionary plots."

-- Herman Wouk on writing novels in his late-90s. (Via Chris M.)

-- See it here: "Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap." This is the documentary Ice-T made about the writing craft of rap, which is, amazingly, not talked about too much.

-- It's about time that this source of exploitation got more attention.

-- "Teach for America's Deep Bench." The American Prospect looks at how "the education nonprofit is also training the next generation of politicians, who have very specific ideas on school reform." Curious stuff. And did I ever tell you how I almost joined the TFA teacher corps in Las Vegas? Left a shadow life behind there...

-- "Writing is about specifying individuals, being very attentive to them and caring for them. It insists on nuances." Guernica interviews Israeli author David Grossman about war, art, Palestine, and tragedy.

-- What an American Civil War soldier has to do with Homer.

-- Irish love for Irish poetry.

-- Jeremy Bass on the forgotten dialect of poet Jack Gilbert, who died in November after a long illness. Here is the New Yorker's eulogy for him. Likewise from the Los Angeles Times.

-- Sifting through the poems of Octavio Paz over at Bookslut.

-- Roxane Gay's Year in Reading, part of the annual series at The Millions, which I always look forward to.

-- "Translating America, into Wolof."

-- Tim Parks on growing up with an artist.

Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories

 

My song to you this season is a simple one: Choose books as your gifts. The gift of a great story is at best transformative and soul-opening; at basic, it is a joy.

And it so happens that to play bookish matchmaker is a delight.

I have for you the fourth edition (revised, expanded, updated, all-around wonderful) of Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories (PDF).* Here's what you can look forward to:

• This one goes to thirteen: Thirteen more pages of bookish delight in this 82-page expanded edition. 82! 
• Many hundreds of thoughtful and original book recommendations, including those featured in expansive profiles and those recommended for particular groups of readers—including history buffs, activists, people going through hard times, mystery-lovers, politicos, children, and wannabe cooks
• New listings on the book profiles for books that are “of an ilk,” in case what you see isn’t quite what you’re looking for, or you want to make a gift of two or three books, or you’re looking for another way to get a feel for the book's style
• An updated rendering of the Top Ten Eleven Magazine Gift Subscriptions 
• A new feature on the top book—yes, book!—subscriptions from extraordinary and innovative publishers and booksellers
• A much-expanded feature on the best books to pair with a cinematic experience: that is, books that should be given along with their film adaptations (which you should watch alongside the gift recipient, of course).
• A reprise of the best literary organizations to offer your gift donations—a meaningful gift on your behalf or in someone else’s name when giving donations are for many of us are a luxury. 

As always, this is more than a mere list of personal favorites. Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of different styles for different tastes and ages. These are both contemporary titles and classics, authored by both esteemed and emerging writers, and released by both small and large publishers.

While updated for the 2012-2013 winter season, this gift guide can also help you navigate the year’s birthdays, holidays, ceremonies, and, simply, those days when the thing to do is to give another a story they just might adore.

It's worth reiterating: Your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture at a time when the book world is struggling, and even literacy is horrifically low.

Choosing to give books translates into a choice of being an active and engaged participant in a thriving literary culture. And it's not as if this is something to be done out of charity: there are so many wonderful books out there, dynamic and strange and absorbing books, books suited to so many different personalities and tastes. A carefully-chosen book is more meaningful than giving someone, say, a necklace or another plastic toy with too much packaging.

Choose Books because your choices matter. Choose Books because it is joyful.

This 82-page gift guide is free and accessible, my gift to you. It's also 100% free of ads and sponsorships. If you find this guide worthwhile, however, I'd very much appreciate it if you'd pitch in a donation.

 

 

 

And also, I'd love to hear your recommendations. What's missing in this gift guide? What books have you given to others that they've loved? Feel free to contact me at annaleighclark-at-gmail-com.

I want to hear all your stories.

 

* UPDATE: For a few hours on 12/2, last year's version was live at this link. All fixed now. Get your clean copy today -- sans the weird 2011 references!

About the Image: I'm reading with my niece Joan on a Sunday afternoon in April. 

Speaking: Brené Brown

"I'm really talking about that kind of warm wash that we experience of not good enough. You know, I always say that shame drives two primary tapes: not good enough, and who do you think you are? So to me, it's a very formidable emotion. Its survival is based on us not talking about it, so it's done everything it can do to make it unspeakable.

{...}

"Creativity was on the other side and I think, before this, you know, I was one of those people who, if someone said, you know, "Hey, do you want to take this painting class with me, or do you want to scrapbook or do you want to …" you know, I was like, aw, that's really cute. You know, "You do your A-R-T, I've got a J-O-B." You know, it's so funny because as a shame researcher, my lens on this was very different. My lens was not just like, oh, OK, so we should be more creative and we should incorporate more rest and play into our lives.

"My question was like, OK, so I get rest, it's important, and play and creativity and all these things that make me super uncomfortable. But what are the shame triggers that get in the way of us doing these things? Like I wasn't satisfied with just knowing what we were supposed to do. I wanted to know what is it that the wholehearted, if they were just like us, what did they have to overcome in order to soften into some of these things? So like with creativity, the primary shame trigger around that is comparison.

{...}

"To me, vulnerability is courage. It's about the willingness to show up and be seen in our lives. And in those moments when we show up, I think those are the most powerful meaning-making moments of our lives even if they don't go well. ...

{...}

"And so I think we buy into some mythology about vulnerability being weakness and being gullibility and being frailty because it gives us permission not to do it."

 

-- Brené Brown, interviewed for PRI's "On Being with Krista Tippett"

 

Brené Brown is a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Her research focuses on vulnerability, shame, courage, and empathy, which she conceptually fuses together as Wholeheartedness. Brown's TEDxHouston talk went viral a few years ago, bringing her work a swift and deep amount of public attention. She also blogs and podcasts at Ordinary Courage. Brown is the author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (2012), The Gifts of Imperfection   (2010), and I Thought It Was Just Me (2007). She is a sixth-generation Texan, and she lives in Houston.

 

Related: 

• "Brené Brown on Vulnerability" (On Being)
• Melissa Harris-Perry (then Harris-Lacewell) speaks brilliantly on historical shame and present-day justice
• "Book Review: Melissa Harris-Perry's Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America" (Isak)
• "Speaking of Shame" (Isak)
• "Out Loud Anna" (Isak)
  

Image Credit: The PRIME Book

Literary & Media Indulgences - 11/10/2012

-- Pulitzer-winning fiction writer Marilynne Robinson (who you know I love so much) and astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser are interviewed together about the cosmos, mystery, and the dangers of pieties.

-- And you know what? The "On Being" interview with Rilke translator and philosopher of ecology Joanna Macy is really worth another listen or three. (Its cover image is above.)

-- "The discord between a desire for stability and the very real possibility of destruction is intractable." Ingrid Norton writes of hurricanes in life and literature, and "this fragile, suspended mood," for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- The longform guide to climate change.

-- This is how Philip Pullman has reimagined the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Related: Marina Warner (wonderful) talks fairy tales and the art of "retelling" with The Rumpus.

-- A sneak preview of Symbolia, the new magazine of illustrated journalism! Hurray!

-- "I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?" Poet Mary Oliver, interviewed on NPR.

-- "Evidently most English people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic." From the diaries of George Orwell.

-- Tim Parks, who I persist in considering must-read, on the internationalization of both sports and literature.

-- Roxane Gay edits Guernica's erotic fiction issue. She picked six stories that, Gay writes, examine "desire in an original, unexpected way. These writers rise above categories. They walk carefully along that fine line between the erotic and the explicit and do so with grace and intelligence."

-- "I have learnt to balance my own books, because the ones I write are dependent on the person I am." Jeanette Winterson on money and its lack. (via The Literary Saloon)

-- Louise Erdrich writes about "voting in Little Earth" -- that is, Election Day among Native Americans in Minnesota.

-- Why Charles Darwin got 4,000 votes in Georgia.

-- The formidable Adam Hochschild reviews Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's new memoir, Of Africa (which has been overshadowed this fall by Chinua Achebe's memoir, which Dayo Olopade writes about in The New Republic.) Hochschild's review includes lines like this: "Among the Africans who deserve some kind of secular sainthood is Wole So­yinka" and "His commitment to freedom has always been absolute." But praise for the man does not parallel praise for the book ...

-- Okey Ndibe on Achebe's "would-be critics."

-- An astonishing data visualization of women as academic authors over four centuries (1665-2010).

-- What admirers of Eleanor Roosevelt do, fifty years after her death.

-- "How Sioux Falls marked the death of George McGovern."

-- What happened when Truman Capote set out to profile Marlon Brando in 1957.

-- Matthew Specktor interviews Paris Review editor Lorin Stein in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- A brief history of sports, told through political cartoons.

-- Eight leading female photographers choose their favorite portraits of women for the Telegraph.

-- The historical fakery of photography, via the New York Review of Books.

-- The University of Michigan is now home to the world's largest Orson Welles archive.

-- Dwell has a map of independent bookstores in America -- and you can add your own favorites. Related: Melville House talks shop with Porter Square Books.

-- On the art and history of note-taking.

-- "I am perpetually reading the culture." A.M. Homes writes in the New Statesman about growing up in 1960s Washington, D.C.

-- The new Granta features Brazil's best young novelists.

-- Tanya Paperny writes on the deep loss of Micheal Henry Heim, and why we still need activists for literary translation.

-- How to translate humor.

-- What Detroit needs is more letterpress printing shops.

-- "Flint artists here want to make a living."

-- Write or Die. (via Jacob C.)

-- "It's not the load that breaks you down; it's the way you carry it."

-- My dear friend Matt Erickson has an essay in PowerPlay that is by turns hilarious and provoking on "Freedom Watchers: Schools and Literary Fetishism in the Age of the Digital Native" (PDF).

-- After all the drama this summer, the University of Virginia has voted to extend President Teresa Sullivan's contract through 2016.

-- Fact-checking at The New Yorker.

-- "In 1967, an ambitious young reporter broke a promise to a troubled source and inadvertently made her famous. Forty-three years later, he set out to find her and apologize." The tagline on the original 1967 Newsweek cover story was "Trouble in Hippieland."

-- Dave Hickey is really, really angry about modern art. And he has good reason to be.

-- The Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam makes its entire 125,000-piece collection digitally available to all of us.

-- Problems with the phrase "corrective rape."

-- Somali poet and comic playwright Warsame Shire Awale has been murdered.

-- When the couplet caught fire: Eavan Boland reviews the new book of Adrienne Rich's new and selected poems.

-- Walt Whitman, Soren Kierkegaard,  and Johnny Rotten are all mentioned in a single sentence here in Justin Bigos' interview with poet Matt Hart for the American Literary Review. 

-- Sonia Manzano -- you likely remember as Maria on "Sesame Street" -- writes about revolution for children. (Related, from The Millions: "Big Bird in History: Why We Fund PBS.")

-- In defense of literary excess.

-- On the animal appeal of the human voice.