Writing Inspiration | 8 | Feb 18 — Feb 24
Words
- truculent: aggressively defiant; from trux, truc- ‘fierce’
- louche: disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way; from French, literally meaning ‘squinting’
- inculcate: teach (someone) an attitude, idea, or habit by persistent instruction; from Latin inculcat- ‘pressed in’
Headlines
- Total recall: the people who never forget (The Guardian)
- No Death, No Taxes: The libertarian futurism of a Silicon Valley billionaire (New Yorker) [The article is a profile on Peter Thiel, an investor pursuing, among other things, the reversal of human aging]
- How technology disrupted the truth (The Guardian)
- Memory Laps: Summers on the swim team (New Yorker)
Excerpts
But my freedom was always conditional, and perhaps never very important to anyone but me. I’m afraid that the empathy and respect that I have always had to display to survive as a woman of color will never be required from men or from whites. I understand, now, that I mistook a decrease in active interference for progress toward a world in which my personhood was seen as inextricable from everyone else’s.
from On the Streets, by Jia Tolentino, part of the New Yorker’s Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America
When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
from East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Goldin contributes to the tradition a fissure that is internal, not between the self and the world but right down the self’s middle. People used to wield a clinical term for this condition of psychic disjuncture: “narcissism,” pronounced in tones of corrective disapproval…If she doesn’t upset you, pay closer attention.
from A Fine Rawness by Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker
