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Barack Obama politics David Remnick New Yorker interviews thought and opinion

People are complicated… Societies and cultures are really complicated… These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding.

Barack Obama, quoted in this fantastic New Yorker’s piece by David Remnick – nothing less than a work of magic, difficult and beautiful. Complement with President Obama on what his mother taught him about love.

LGBT LGBT Pride Month Frank Viva art and design New Yorker love is love

Wonderful New Yorker cover by Frank Viva celebrating love, originally conceived three years ago when the Supreme Court struck down DOMA in a major turning point for marriage equality.

Complement with Sage Sohier’s lovely vintage photos of LGBT couples celebrating their love at home.

New Yorker marriage love lit history and literature Adelle Waldman

From Tolstoy, whose psychological acuity helped to redefine what the novel is capable of, to unabashed chroniclers of sex like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth to contemporary, stroller-pushing, egalitarian dad Karl Ove Knausgaard, men have been, in a sense, the real romantics: they are far more likely than women to portray love as something mysterious and irrational, impervious to explanation, tied more to physical qualities and broad personal appeal than to a belief—or hope—in having found an intellectual peer.

Terrific New Yorker piece by Adelle Waldman about male and female novelists’ contrasting portrayals of the ideal marriage.

For an exception to Waldman’s otherwise astutely observed pattern, see Susan Sontag on marriage.

Dani Shapiro writing lit thought and opinion memoir New Yorker

We don’t choose the forms our work takes. We feel the pressure, wait for the explosion, then stand back, stunned and speechless at the shape that emerges.

[…]

Our feelings—that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it—are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters. There is no immediate gratification in this. No great digital crowd is “liking” what we do. We don’t experience the Pavlovian, addictive click and response of posting something that momentarily relieves the pressure inside of us, then being showered with emoticons. The gratification we memoirists do experience is infinitely deeper and more bittersweet. It is the complicated, abiding pleasure, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, of finding the universal thread that connects us to the rest of humanity, and, by doing so, turns our small, personal sorrows and individual tragedies into art.

A Memoir Is Not a Status Update – beautiful New Yorker essay by novelist and master-memoirist Dani Shapiro, one of the finest writers of our time. Complement with Shapiro on the pleasures and perils of the writing life.

Kathryn Schulz nature New Yorker culture and society time

On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

in a superb, if unsettling, New Yorker piece, the inimitable Kathryn Schulz explores the question of when – no longer whether – a major earthquake will destroy the Pacific Northwest.

For a complementary perspective-check on time-scales, let the oldest living things in the world rattle your “temporal parochialism.”

Rebecca Solnit New Yorker walking Thoreau culture and society

Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts.

How walking helps us think.

Thoreau made the most beautiful case for this 150 years ago and Rebecca Solnit picked up where he left off in her magnificent meditation on the history of wanderlust.

Neil Gaiman Liniers art and design illustration history and literature lit New Yorker

Henrietta’s Reading Adventures – wonderful New Yorker series of illustrations celebrating beloved books by Argentine cartoonist and New Yorker cover artist Liniers, maker of darkly delightful children’s books.

Oliver Sacks New Yorker Spalding Gray science and technology science neuroscience psychology

Oliver Sacks on What Happened to Spalding Gray

More than a decade after Spalding Gray’s suicide, legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks unleashes his science-storytelling magic on what actually happened in Gray’s brain after his injury:

The frontal lobes are among the most complex and recently evolved parts of the brain—they have vastly enlarged over the past two million years. Our power to think spaciously and reflectively, to bring to mind and hold many ideas and facts, to attend to and maintain a steady focus, to make plans and put them into motion—these are all made possible by the frontal lobes.
But the frontal lobes also exert an inhibiting or constraining influence on what Pavlov called “the blind force of the subcortex”—the urges and passions that might overwhelm us if left unchecked. (Apes and monkeys, like children, though clearly intelligent and capable of forethought and planning, are relatively lacking in frontal lobes, and tend to do the first thing that occurs to them, rather than pausing to reflect. Such impulsivity can be striking in patients with frontal-lobe damage.) There is normally a beautiful balance, a delicate mutuality, between the frontal lobes and the subcortical parts of the brain that mediate perception and feeling, and this allows a consciousness that is free-ranging, playful, and creative. The loss of this balance through frontal-lobe damage can “release” impulsive behaviors, obsessive ideas, and overwhelming feelings and compulsions. Were Spalding’s symptoms a result of frontal-lobe damage or severe depression, or a malignant coupling of the two?

Sacks’s fully New Yorker essay is very, very much worth a read, and his autobiography triply so.

Alice in Wonderland New Yorker Anthony Lane culture and society children's books children thought and opinion history and literature lit

Conversations about what is real, what is possible, and how rubbery the rules that govern such distinctions turn out to be abound in the tales of Alice. Yet they are sold as children’s books, and rightly so. A philosopher will ask how the identity of the self can be preserved amid the ceaseless flux of experience, but a child—especially a child who is growing so fast that she suddenly fills an entire room—will ask more urgently, as Alice does, “Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.” Children, viewed from one angle, are philosophy in motion.

Anthony Lane’s magnificent New Yorker essay on where Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland stands today. Incidentally, it was a philosopher – the venerable Rebecca Goldstein – who best addressed the question of this archetypal child in her mind-bending meditation on the mysterious continuity of personal identity, exploring what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of changes.

Complement with the most wonderful illustrations from 150 years of Wonderland – including interpretations by creative legends like Salvador Dalí, Tove Jansson, Yayoi Kusama, and Ralph Steadman.

Frank Viva New Yorker art and design illustration

The story behind Frank Viva’s marvelous “Golden Hour” New Yorker cover. Viva’s picture-book Outstanding in the Rain is an absolute delight.

Brian Eno music New Yorker culture and society thought and opinion art and design art

Fantastic New Yorker profile of Brian Eno. Also see his Oblique Strategies, Eno’s creativity prompts from the 1970s, mentioned in the first paragraph of the piece.

It’s interesting to consider the parallels with science, where not-knowing is also the building block of “composition,” or progress.

Roz Chast cartoons family culture and society art and design memoirs infographics New Yorker

“ Where my father was tentative and gentle,” Chast writes, “she was critical and uncompromising.” And: “Even though I knew he couldn’t really defend me against my mother’s rages, I sensed that at least he felt some sympathy, and that he liked me as a...

Where my father was tentative and gentle,” Chast writes, “she was critical and uncompromising.” And: “Even though I knew he couldn’t really defend me against my mother’s rages, I sensed that at least he felt some sympathy, and that he liked me as a person, not just because I was his daughter.“

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s remarkable, raw, relatable memoir of her parents’ aging, illness, and death is nothing short of a masterpiece.

virginia woolf lit privacy Joshua Rothman New Yorker history and literature

Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.

Joshua Rothman’s New Yorker essay on Virginia Woolf’s idea of privacy is the best thing I’ve read in ages.

It rings especially poignant in the context of her own conflicted inner life, from her exuberant appreciation of the world’s beauty to her intense capacity for love to the deathly despair of her suicide letter.

Do yourself a favor and read Rothman’s full essay here.

Bob Mankoff Tina Brown media and communication publishing media New Yorker

Here I was on the cusp of becoming an overnight success at the age of fifty. I had luck and Tina on my side, so what could go wrong? Everything, I feared. What Queen Tina wanted, Queen Tina got, and as long as I was golden, that boded well. Right now, Tina was blowing hot, but she could just as easily blow cold, and then off with your head as well as your headline. Golden boys, under Tina, could turn to lead very quickly.

Yow. New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff on Tina Brown in his fantastic new memoir about the cartoon life.

Adrian Tomine comics New Yorker art and design LGBTQ women kissing black and white

“Road Trips” by New Yorker artist Adrian Tomine, from New York Drawings.