The Top 5: From brat summer to Zadie Smith
Welcome to the latest 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 these articles, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Autonomy Trap” (Plough Magazine)
Because James R. Wood reflects on his own story, the concept of commitment, his conversion to Christianity, and the relationship with his father in this beautiful essay.
Commitment was for suckers, I was convinced. But what I eventually came to learn was that this “safety” was not so safe after all. Was I ever known? Did I even know myself? With whom was I connected in an enduring way? Was anything stable? Would anyone stick with me? Am I simply unlovable? Are we all alone? Lewis was correct – safety through hardening is no real safety at all.
“Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones” (NYT)
Because Ezra Klein interviews writer Zadie Smith on a myriad of current events, politics, language, and identity issues through the lens of her latest writings.
All mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th-century village modifies you. But the question becomes: Who do you want to be modified by, and to what degree? That’s my only question. And when I look at the people who have designed these things — what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be — the humans I know and love, this machinery is not worthy of them. That’s the best way I can put it. And I speak as someone who grew up as an entirely TV-addicted human. I love TV. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter. And when the internet came, I was like, hallelujah. Finally, we’ve got a medium which isn’t made by the man or centralized. We’re just going to be talking to each other, hanging out with each other, peer to peer. It’s going to be amazing. That is not the internet that we have. That is not what occurred.
“The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age” (Walrus)
Because author Thea Lim writes about how so many [too many] aspects of our lives are being “captured” and then digitized, ranked, categorized, and sometimes monetized.
What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.
“The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen” (Vox)
Because Anna North looks at a new study which finds that four years into the pandemic, American kids haven’t recovered even half of the pandemic learning loss.
Kids “are learning throughout the year, but they are doing so at a slightly sluggish pace,” Lewis said — not enough to make up for their Covid-era losses.
Because Freddie deBoer looks at culture-making and fad-making — in sports and pop culture.
We are creatures that live in the flow of time but seem unable to understand our place within it even though no other fact suggests itself to us so insistently.
ICYMI on The Morning Five and For the Good of the Public:
The Morning Five: September 17, 2024
The Morning Five: September 18, 2024
I am almost done with the Sep 3 episode of the Ezra Klein show and I feel like y'all would appreciate it. He's interviewing Jia Tolentino. Some conversation about children, entertainment, and education turns into conversation about what is good. At one point Klein starts talking about society losing our ability to say that something is good (for reasons other than superficial success).