Saturday Good Reads

A marketing executive in Bethesda, Maryland, sees one or two strange messages on LinkedIn. He dismisses them, thinking they’re spam. Then a trickle of mentions on Twitter becomes a flood, and the LinkedIn messages climb into the thousands. Someone had identified the bicyclist who had rammed into children and adult for passing out protest literature. The problem was, he wasn’t. Welcome to the society where you get doxed for taking a bike ride, says Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine.

Paris is emerging from coronavirus lockdown, and Stephen Heiner at Front Porch Republic discovers that the old normal is alive and well. “The much-mooted ‘second wave’ which the media seemed to almost hope for so they could continue to be one of the few ‘essential’ workers hasn’t materialized,” he writes.

Writer Dean Wesley Smith laments that publishing is losing one of its tried and true art forms – the descriptive blurb or tag line on the front cover. It’s one of the most powerful tools to sell a book, and it’s disappearing. 

More Good Reads

Writing and Literature

Reasons for Liking Tolkien – Jenny Turner at The London Review of Books.

Losing an Art Form in Book Sales – Dean Wesley Smith.

Life and Culture

In Defense of Those Who Protect Us – Louis Markos at The Imaginative Conservative.

JK Rowling, Cancel Culture, and the Gradual Demise of the West – Murray Campbell.

A Visible Mark Upon the Earth: Why Wendell Berry – Tony Klemmer at The Aspen Institute.

What Hath Gondor to do with Geneva? – Keith Mathison at Light in Dark Places.

Poetry

Declaration – Fenton Johnson via Kingdom Poets.

Mar de Hoces – Daniel Platt at The Chained Muse.

Sudden Death in Middle Age - poem by Jason Tandon – Brian Brodeur at How a Poem Happens.

The Poet’s Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke – Mary Harwell Sayler at The Poetry Editor.

On the Radical Afterlives of William Wordsworth – Jonathan Bate at Literary Hub.

American Stuff

Monuments, Mass Demonstrations, Race, and Reconstruction – Patrick Young at Emerging Civil War.

The Odd History of the Whig Party – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

Faith

China's Religious Awakening After Mao - Ian Johnson at Church Life Journal.

Wayfaring Stranger – Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra

Painting: Reading Devotions to Grandfather, oil on canvas (1893) by Albert Anker (1831-1910); Kunstmuseum Bern.