Saturday, October 15, 2022

Saturday Good Reads - Oct. 15, 2022


For those of us who remember the 1960s, it was something of a crazy time, with the Vietnam war and it protests, free speech movements, widespread use of drugs on college campuses, “free love,” and other developments and events. One movie seemed to catch it all in 1968 – ‘Wild in the Streets.” Michael Gonzales at CrimeReads talks about the movie and its director.  

Last week, PayPal announced a new user agreement. If a user engaged in “restricted activities” or spread “misinformation,” the account could be debited up to $2500. Once again, a corporation shows what can happen when it blunders into the culture wars. The reaction, including from one of the company’s founders, was so severe that PayPal backtracked and claimed the new agreement had been posted “in error.” They made changes but kept some provisions in place. Helen Raleigh at The Federalist discusses PayPal and the rise of the digital gulag.

 

Do you know who the bestselling American poet of all time is? Do you know what happened to him? Dan Kois at Slate has the story on the poetry phenom of the 1960s and 1970s – Rod McKuen. (I dated a girl in the late 1960s who thought McKuen’s Listen to the Warm the best poetry ever written. I read it, just to placate her. She was wrong. And I was canceled.)

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

What we owe the dead – Brendon Sylvester at The Critic Magazine.

 

Human Monogamy Has Deep Roots – Blake Edgar at Scientific American.

 

The Role Reversal – Hannah Sanders at Story Warren.

 

Book bans: Are these fights about a Christian nationalist plot or something else entirely? – Julia Duin at Get Religion. 

 

The 10 Best Hats in Crime Movies – Olivia Rutigliano at CrimeReads.

 

American Stuff

 

In Search of the American Myth – Wilfred McClay at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

An Extraordinary Life: Mohammad Ali Nicholas Sa’id, Polyglot Genius of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts – David Dixon at Emerging Civil War.

 

Eric Foner on the Life of Southern Historian C. Vann Woodward Who Helped Change How We View the Civil War and Reconstruction – Patrick Young at The Reconstruction Era.

 

Ukraine

 

Had enough war? – David Warren at Essays in Idleness.

 

Russia’s brutal strategy of war is failing – Charles Lipson at The Spectator.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Cake of Many Layers: Walking a City through Time – Nadya Williams at Front Porch Republic.

 

Discovering Charles Dickens’ ‘The Signalman’ – Laurie Lowenstein at CrimeReads.

 

Faith

 

The Reformation Ideal of Marriage – Michael Haykin at Ligonier.

 

News Media

 

“Every four years we shoot ourselves in the foot”: Should news outlets still endorse political candidates? – Gregory Perreault & Volha Kanonovich at Nieman Lab.

 

The Internet Can Protest and Overthrow, But It Can Never Govern – Chris Martin at Terms of Service.

 

Art

 

The Waning Years of Edward Hopper – Richard Lacayo at Literary Hub.

 

Walk by Faith – Aaron Williams



 Painting: Man Reading the Newspaper, oil on canvas by Albert Anker (1831-1910).

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