anotherpanacea

Tag: stories

  • A Tuesday morning twelve years ago…

    A Tuesday morning twelve years ago…

    I generally hate the hyper-patriotic memorialization of this day, as I’d prefer to forget. But today saw many on social media sharing their stories, so I thought I’d share mine, too. I was in the subway, headed to work at the Civilian Complaint Review Board a couple blocks south of the towers, in the financial district.…

  • Stories of Decline, Stasis, and Progress

    Peter Levine asks, “Why do we feel compelled to argue from decline?” in areas where objective measures suggest progress or growth: You can care deeply about public education, civic education, teenagers’ behavior, or–if you must–gun rights, but there is no basis for arguing that these things are worse than they used to be. I am…

  • The Fetishization of the Dying

    Bronnie Ware was a palliative care nurse who decided to blog about her patients’ dying thoughts and regrets. The blog became a book, and now it is being advertised on the Guardian’s website as an odd list of desert island favorites: “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.” I wish I’d had the courage to…

  • Deciding Whether or Not to Tell a Story

    When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach. It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be true…

  • The Growing Field of Julian Assange Secondary Scholarship

    If you haven’t read Assange’s own self-justifications, then you can read this summary of them to get a sense of what worried me. Now, Peter Ludlow does a proper study of Assange’s political theory: this is conspiracy in the sense of the original etymology of ‘conspire’ – as in “breathe with” or “breathe together”.  The individuals are acting in…

  • The Walking Dead

    Last year, I wrote: I’d like to see what a surviving-a-day-at-a-time hero looks like. Whatever collection of writers can come up with that story and characterization will make a lot of money breaking with the current anti-hero conventions. More to the point, it might be good for us. Though we may [not] have had too…