In November 1967, Robin Farquharson ‘dropped out’. After losing his job as a computer programmer along with the flat he’d been renting, he decided to forgo the dwindling funds in his bank account and live on London’s streets. In his short memoir Drop Out! (1968), Farquharson recounted his homeless wanderings and loose associations with London’s underground scene, moving from all-night cafés to ‘psychedelic’ nightclubs; he described being robbed and beaten in the street, and his first experience of LSD. At 37, Farquharson felt too old to be a hippy, nonetheless he saw his disaffiliation within the context of a wider movement towards social and personal liberation, inspired by Timothy Leary’s injunction to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’: words he interpreted as a call to ‘rid yourself of responsibility, quit the rat-race. Don’t obey society’s paralysing conventions … Step out of the trap.’
Why heap so much praise on a sitcom dad? It's easy to disregard TV as mere mindless entertainment. But entertainment media can both reflect and reshape culture – including how fathers interact with their children. They can influence how viewers think about fathers, regardless of the accuracy of those portrayals.
As someone who studies stereotypes of fathers, I view Danny as an avatar of the changing expectations of fatherhood that began in the late 1970s.
It’s about a lot of other things, too: the pandemic, and being a Native person in America, and the carceral state, and perhaps especially books. But what strikes me the most about The Sentence, here as we prepare to enter the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, surrounded by loss, is how much time it devotes to the question of what we owe the dead, and whether we have failed to deliver.
Journalist Dan Saladino unveils the work of Harlan and other visionaries in “Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them,” his impressively researched book about the variety of crops, animals and foods that have been tossed aside in favor of the monocultures that have come to dominate our food supply. Though they were meant to improve efficiency and yield by “feeding the world,” these crops and breeds are having unintended consequences. Many of today’s “improved” crops, which lack diversity because they come from patented seeds, have no defenses against fungi, viruses and insects — all of which are becoming more of a threat with climate change. The breeds of animals we rely on for food have also been narrowed on a global scale, making them more susceptible to diseases that could wipe them out.
Before you know it, God is having coffee in an organic
Delaware restaurant. He starts to stare.