Inventing Anna for Ourselves
"Inventing Anna" was a Netflix triumph, scooping up 77.3 million hours of viewers’ time the week after its release. Critics were lukewarm, but the show was crack. And I am still trying to figure out why.
By Jeannette Cooperman
Why Positive Thinking Is Useless for the Poor and Dangerous for the Rest of Us
Self-regulation starts to look trivial, even pathetic, when most of your life’s shape is already colored in by circumstances that lie outside your control, and the surrounding society has already left you behind.
The Drumbeat of War
At the times we most need to communicate calmly and comprehensively, we blur and obfuscate, posture and lie, or package the news in clichés. That is a telltale sign that the speech serves a private agenda, not the common and urgent need for clarity.
How Sensitivity Enables and Disables Our Nervous System
One of the few points of agreement left to us is that our whole culture is “oversensitive” now—that favorite castigation—though in different directions, canceling and banning and vilifying. We are miserable about it, here in this land that lauds bold and fearless action.
Nothing Works for Everybody
What is a “good” night’s sleep, anyway? Like pornography, we know it when we experience it, waking happy and bright, stretching luxuriantly.
How Words Can Change a War
Borders are curious things. They change. Those who benefit claim that the new borders are set in stone; those who lose claim the old borders were set in stone. And in time, the borders will change again, perhaps benefiting a third party.
Cuckoo. Cuckoo.
Even carved in wood, the cuckoo is a mess of contradictions. The man credited for inventing it in 1730 was not even born until four years later, and there is a description of a mechanical cuckoo that dates to 1629. Though the classic Swiss chalet version of the cuckoo clock is now iconic, the first popularizations were made in Germany’s Black Forest and bore hunting scenes.
Distracted Daydreaming
A daydream is like a pill we pop to numb our misery. It pushes us from a grim present into a sunshiny future—one that is not likely to materialize. Yet there we stay, for as long as we possibly can, luxuriating in fake warmth.
Nero Did Not Fiddle!
Nero was loved by soldiers and commoners but deeply resented by the Roman aristocracy. The stories about Nero were recorded years after his death—by suicide, at the age of thirty, when the Roman Senate declared him a public enemy. By the time his life was written, politics was being adjusted to favor a different dynastic line.
Get Rid of Those Books—It’s Time for Volleyball!
In 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics informed us that we were spending about fifteen minutes a day reading for pleasure—and two hours and fifty minutes watching tv. In 2021, the tv total had risen to more than three hours a day. Reading was no longer even measured.
We Are No Longer 314
St. Louis was always more than its 314. You could argue that a second area code overlaid on this one’s territory will somehow expand our reach, reminding us of growth, of all the communication flying back and forth.
Artists Start a Seed Library in Monsanto’s Backyard
Written into Seed as Idea are rich themes of community food resilience, security, sustainability, diversity, and social justice—and a chance to educate the rest of us.