When he sat for an interview with Hakim Jamal, founder of the Malcolm X Foundation, Baldwin was hammered with questions about living in France: “Why on earth would you go to a country that is predominantly white?” And his sexuality: “Are you a homosexual?” Baldwin replied, “No, I’m bisexual, whatever that means,” to which Jamal responded, “Good. No, I know, because that’s what they say anyway.”
Baldwin’s somewhat cagey responses were a product of what he later described as the conflict between “my life as a writer and my life as—not a spokesman exactly, but as public witness to the situation of black people.”
There’s an irony that, in real life, it’s these animals we’ve come to love so much who create a civility and kindness we rarely have energy for with each other. The pandemic all but wiped out the many loose relationships we kept—the barista, the crossing guard, the nail technician at the salon. Hobbes and his canine friends have created a whole new network of fans, friends, and fleeting joys.
Lalami is a canny, powerful, humane writer. She has created a fictional world that we now understand implicitly and a protagonist who could be any one of us. Sara Hussein assumes she will gain her freedom by following the rules. But her sentence keeps spooling outward; following the rules has not brought her any closer to being released.
These essays are essentially journeys – knotty and meandering, with moments of pithy, clarifying insight. If you can hold someone’s interest while figuring things out for yourself in real time on the page, you’re doing something right. Perhaps the true source of authority is companionable intelligence, and what we think of as sound judgment is just a function of familiarity – comfort in another person’s psychic skin.
Inspired by a series that Marcotty wrote for The Minneapolis Star Tribune, this book tackles the momentous story of the American Prairie: the rich ecological world that existed before first contact, the European settlers who transformed that world into farmland that fed the nation, the price we’re paying now for that transformation, and the efforts to remediate damage. What emerges is a panoramic, stirring story that exhorts readers to reconsider a region that’s “feared by pioneers, shunned by tourists, dismissed today as a wasteland best viewed from thirty thousand feet” and that is also one of the ecologically richest and most endangered ecosystems on our planet.
The absurdity of these two clichés—that all older people struggle with technology and all younger people are somehow naturally adept—is obvious, especially to anyone in regular contact with either population. Yet they do persist, in media accounts and everyday life.
In “Wired Wisdom: How to Age Better Online,” Eszter Hargittai and John Palfrey look at the real differences between older and younger people in their use of digital technology, the attitudes that underlie those differences, and—where older folks do lag in adoption—what can be done to help.