The Top 5: Fatherhood & the multiverse
Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week.
Also, if you haven’t already done so, please pre-order Michael’s book, “The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.” Pre-orders are so helpful!
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“What a motherless son knows about fatherhood” (NYT)
Because this is a beautiful photo essay and reflection for Father’s Day. “It would be fair to compare my cumulative understanding of grief and fatherhood, which I’ve acquired intuitively, incrementally and in fragments, to a carefully constructed sequence of images. Visual shards, for me, hint at more than an artist’s intent by offering the viewer a basis for introspection and extrapolation. After all, we all cling to fragments from our pasts. It’s a challenge, but for me it’s also valuable, to maintain presence of mind and procure the spaciousness to dream up my own interior landscapes of wonder, loss and healing. It’s through these embodied places, both in the world and within me, that I’ve managed to maintain an affection for life and hope for the future.”
Because this is a new phenomenon worth watching: “Strategists agree that the country has become so polarized that the candidates’ positions on issues matter much less than they once did. In general elections, many voters will simply support the candidate of their preferred party without bothering to look up their stances. But even for those competing in primaries, an ‘Issues’ page may not benefit a candidate as much as it once did. A survey of various congressional campaign websites from both parties reveals many don’t include an “Issues” page.”
“A star reporter’s break with reality” (The Atlantic)
Because Lara Logan was once a revered war correspondent for 60 Minutes, and now she is deeply embedded in the conspiracy world. “Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars. Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this ‘war against humanity.’”
“All possible worlds” (Aeon Magazine)
Because you may have noticed that a lot of people are talking about the idea of multiple universes. “The most powerful reason why the multiverse has infiltrated culture is because people are storytellers. Research shows that this tendency is universal and appears in early childhood. It is written in our DNA. Implicit in storytelling is the modification of details such that one possible world becomes another. Such narratives are essential to how our species has understood the world for millennia. Meta-stories containing conflicting possible worlds simultaneously become not only plausible but essential to how we interpret our perceptions: personal, nonlinear and qualitative, rather than objective, linear and quantitative.”
“The Age of Chat” (New Yorker)
Because “Compared with the immediacy of my own Gchats with friends—“omg american apparels website is out of control right now,” one friend wrote, in 2011—ChatGPT offers data-processing masquerading as conversation, a server farm humming at the frequency of speech.”
ICYMI on Wear We Are:
Happy Father’s Day! We’ll be back next week with our Sunday episodes.