Basic sex-ed should have straightened us out, but instead it took writers and artists to scrub off the shame. Half a century ago, Judy Chicago threw her now-legendary dinner party in honor of thirty-nine strong, famous women, designing porcelain plates with vulva and butterfly forms for the installation.
We were proud to be Americans, “groomed to it,” to use a phrase. I do not regret this at all, for as I recall I think most of us were happy as children. Our circumstances were not such that we thought, I suppose, that it was self-evident that we should be unhappy. I do not think, for quite a while in my childhood, I really knew what unhappiness was and certainly did not know what racial grievance was or what it was to be unhappy as a Black person.
taking notice matters, these days. Maybe that is why nature writers often try too hard: they see the species dying away, the ground burning, and know they need to write about it—but there is no time left to fall in love with the facts, as the leisurely Victorians did.
Darwin himself suggested that most monkeys would drink alcohol if it were available; he even knew a pub owner who regularly got his pet monkeys drunk. German biologist Alfred Brehm announced that African baboons could be lured by strong beer.
“Disenchantment” peaked in the early 1970s (Watergate, Vietnam), and now the word pops up everywhere you look.
We still speed. The most frequently broken law in the United States is the numeric speed limit. But now we speed because we are late or angry; there is seldom any joy in it. Nor is it safe: the roads are too crowded to allow safe reaction time and maneuvering.
Still from ‘Babushkas,’ Chicken and Egg Pictures The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a 2015 documentary produced and directed by Holly Morris and Anne Bogart, which emerged from Morris’ earlier journalism and TED Talk about elderly women living in the shadow of the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear plant.
Companies saw our foreshortened attention spans and went casino on us. Simple transactions now tease and puzzle and lure us, and bells ring and lights flash if we walk far enough or slide enough merch into our cart.
Often, the traumas we fear will scar us do not. Severe pain, major surgery, getting fired or broken up with, wrecking the car, losing one’s faith, embarrassing oneself…the angst fades, and while we can recount the details and even laugh about some of them, the sting…
‘Becoming Cousteau,’ National Geographic Documentary Films National Geographic’s Becoming Cousteau (2021), directed and produced by Liz Garbus, is an interesting and timely feature-length biography of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. (The Odyssey, a 2016 film, was a biopic on his life, based on a nonfiction book.) Becoming is not…