I thought I had changed: I had started talking to Joe, the guy on the margins. I had asked his name and even brought him lunch. For a moment, I patted myself on the back, sure I was not one of the “cold ones.” On the way home, though, something felt off.
How do we fall in love with the countries we ran from? What is the strange alchemy that turns distance into longing, and absence into affection? Distance is not impartial. It decides what to soften and what to sharpen. For some, absence polishes memory into a shining gem; for others, it preserves the edge of the blade.
As commonly portrayed, pro basketball in the 1970s suffered from Black athletes who lacked not only the dignity of 1960s pioneers such as Bill Russell or Elgin Baylor, but also the mass-marketability of 1980s icons such as Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. The popular memory of pro hoops in this era includes accounts of contract-jumping, on-court fighting, and cocaine-sniffing. Theresa Runstedtler’s Black Ball seeks to dislodge this conventional narrative.
Reverence, serenity, and compassion, courtesy of a mushroom? Well, what would be wrong with that? Humans are a broken species. Negative emotions wired into us for survival have run amok in times we call civilized, and now we hunt, or at least hurt, one another. It would be lovely to think we could all meditate our way to wholeness. But why not speed the process?
Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that his paradox has at least survived long enough to be quoted and debated in our current age of AI anxiety. Perhaps we should hope against hope that Jevons paradox will prove itself useful all over again.
In the best of times it is impossible to know other people fully. Even if we wish to act in good faith, it is hard to express to others who we think we are—and we may not know who we are.
When we are up against the inevitable limits of human invention and our capacity for patience, it is the music that matters most.
Flattery flattens a person, robbing us of complexity and crippling our will and ability to exchange and understand truths—even the hard ones—we might gain from others.
It is a redundancy to say heroism must be shown in inopportune times. The current administration recently put 59 million acres of national forestland at greater risk in an opening salvo of a commodity-mindset war against the environment.
One of the reasons I like the term “novelistic” for these sorts of documentaries is that it stresses how they deal in the mysteries of creation, its meaning, and its emotion. Joel has a song from 1977 called “Vienna,” with the refrain, “When will you realize / Vienna waits for you.”