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Tuesday, January 1, 2019

A Kind Of Forgiveness, by Sady Doyle, New York Review of Books

I’d had my reasons. I grew up in the Catholic Church, where “forgiveness” was constantly advocated, despite the fact that God did not do much of it Himself. “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” we recited at each Mass, “but only say the word and I shall be healed.” God absolved our sins in confession, but only if we listed everything bad about ourselves first. God’s forgiveness was a passive-aggressive note from the author of Creation, a reminder of exactly how much we’d done wrong.

But if God did not forgive, women had to. Women in the Church were pressured to forgive men constantly, and rarely for good reason. Sexual violence was something women and girls in my church were sometimes asked to forgive. So was domestic violence, and child abuse, and so was a husband who cheated on you, or talked down to you, or made you call in to his work to say he had the flu whenever he was hung over, which he was every Monday, until he got fired and you lost your house. “Even if they don’t repent, we still have to forgive,” Focus on the Family tells us, in its marriage-counseling section. Women were expected to do the work of forgiveness so that men did not have to do the work of change.

A Photographer’s Quest To Reverse China’s Historical Amnesia, by Amy Qin, New York Times

The photographer Li Zhensheng is on a mission to make his fellow Chinese remember one of the most turbulent chapters in modern Chinese history that the ruling Communist Party is increasingly determined to whitewash.

“The whole world knows what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said. “Only China doesn’t know. So many people have no idea.”

How Hollywood Gets The Publishing Industry Wrong, by Sloane Crosley, New York Times

When I worked as a book publicist, my boss told me that the blessing and curse of our industry is that “everyone thinks they can do what we do, even though no one has a clue what we do.” This comment was prompted by a marketing meeting during which we were lauded for glowing review coverage that no reasonable person could attribute to our efforts, while simultaneously being asked whether we had “tried the ‘Today’ show.” Because pitching the “Today” show is just the kind of thing that would never occur to a book publicist.

Inside An Early 1900s Attempt To Catalogue All Of The Information On Earth, by Justin Caffier, Vice

A short train ride from Brussels, in the sleepy university town of Mons, Belgium, is an inconspicuous white building that houses a relatively obscure testament to humanity’s thirst for knowledge. Called the Mundaneum, the building houses an early-1900s attempt at collecting and cataloging the entirety of the world’s information, nearly a century before sites like Google and Wikipedia made access to such repositories easily accessible from anywhere with a Wi-Fi signal.

Founded by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, two Belgian lawyers with big turn-of-the-century futurist ideas, The Mundaneum began as a continuation of the duo’s earlier efforts to create the perfect classification system. Their index card-based Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system—still used in over 150,000 libraries today—improved and expanded upon the existing Dewey Decimal System, methodically classifying all the factions of human knowledge into easily searchable groupings and subgroupings. Utilizing this system, the duo launched their Répertoire Bibliographique Universel or “Universal Bibliography Repertory” (UBR) project in 1895, which sought to catalog any-and everything ever published into a “global city of knowledge.”

The Philosopher Redefining Equality, by Nathan Heller, New Yorker

As a rule, it’s easy to complain about inequality, hard to settle on the type of equality we want. Do we want things to be equal where we start in life or where we land? When inequalities arise, what are the knobs that we adjust to get things back on track? Individually, people are unequal in countless ways, and together they join groups that resist blending. How do you build up a society that allows for such variety without, as in the greater-Detroit real-estate market, turning difference into a constraint? How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?

In 1999, Anderson published an article in the journal Ethics, titled “What Is the Point of Equality?,” laying out the argument for which she is best known. “If much recent academic work defending equality had been secretly penned by conservatives,” she began, opening a grenade in the home trenches, “could the results be any more embarrassing for egalitarians?”

Father Time, by David Sedaris, New Yorker

“So what happened?” I asked, though I already knew. Lisa had told me that morning on the phone that his grandfather clock had fallen on him. It was made of walnut and bronze and had an abstract human face on it, surrounded by numbers that were tilted at odd angles. My mother always referred to it as Mr. Creech, after the artist who made it, but my dad calls it Father Time.

I’d said to Hugh after hanging up with Lisa, “When you’re ninety-five, and Father Time literally knocks you to the ground, don’t you think he’s maybe trying to tell you something?”

A Book That Will Make You Terrified Of Your Own House, by Robin Marantz Henig, New York Times

There’s a real sense of “gee-whiz” in this book, but it’s mostly in service of Dunn’s overarching goal: to preach the preservation of biodiversity, not only in the lush forests and streams that fit our traditional image of nature’s abundance, but in the most humble places, too, where the vast majority of us will have most of our cross-species encounters — our basements, mattresses, refrigerator drawers and showerheads.

Friday Black By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Review – Deliciously Daring, by Bernardine Evaristo, The Guardian

Adjei-Brenyah is a versatile writer who creates a micro-universe with each story that explodes our expectations and takes us inside frustrated lives.

Advent, by Heather Christle, New Yorker

It’s hopeless, the stars, the books
about stars, they can’t help themselves