by Max Sirak
I’m pretty crappy at taking my own advice.
Back in November of 2016 I wrote a column titled “What To Do With Our Expectations.” In it I wrote about the importance of not judging events by their outcomes and I outlined a strategy for doing so. But it turns out, surprising no one at all, it’s a lot easier to write about things from an abstracted distance than it is to put them into practice in real time.
This summer hasn’t exactly been breezy and light.
A very good friend of mine recently lost his father.
Some of my nearest and dearest had to bid farewell to their doggy-daughter.
As for me…
One of my closest friends and his family moved across the country. Another was killed by a drunk driver. And lastly, I had to let go of the primary source of love, joy, connection, affection, and touch in my life.
“Write about what you know,” they say. Right now, it seems, endings are all I know. So endings are what I’ll write. Read more »
As a child, I feared dogs. A neighbor kept his German Shepherds, Heidi and Sarge, in a large pen along the alley. The yard and house, his parents’, were the biggest for many blocks. On the alley side, the chain link fence stood 10 feet. The dogs would charge out of their houses silently and hurl their bodies at the fence snarling and barking. I was caught unaware at the fence a few times. My stomach curdled and legs buckled. My mother’s family are dog people. My grandparents cared for a series of large overfed dogs who cavorted in the swamps surrounding their Massachusetts home and otherwise slumped under the kitchen table waiting for my grandmother to put together meals of breakfast scraps bound with maple syrup or for treats from a cookie jar on her counter. My uncles had shambling dogs who would leap into rough water off Cape Cod to retrieve balls from seaweed choked waves. As their fur dried, they smelled of sour salt water and general funk. At the rented house, they showed a gentle deference to humans and lolled on the grass or carpet while my cousins and I ate and talked.
This weekend, the New York Times’ print subscribers received something kind of crazy: A 66-page magazine with only a single article — and it’s on climate change. The long-form piece, written by Nathaniel Rich and titled “Losing Earth,” 
Charlotte Higgins
On a cool spring day in April 2014, Dayne Walling, the mayor of Flint, Mich., entered an old water-treatment plant and, amid cheers from a crowd of city officials and engineers, pushed a small black button on a cinder-block wall. With that gesture, the mayor switched Flint’s water supply from a tested and reliable source provided by the city of Detroit to a cheaper and untested one, the nearby Flint River. City officials defended the move as necessary cost-cutting for a bankrupt city. Like his colleagues, Walling — a Rhodes scholar who had a master’s degree in urban studies — believed that Flint, by deciding to rely on its own river for water, was taking control of its destiny. He called it “a historic moment.”
Particularly since the publication of Elizabeth Costello (2003), a strong academic conversation on literature and philosophy has developed around the writings of J.M. Coetzee. As literary scholars and philosophers have approached this nexus, they have confronted questions about what counts as “philosophy” or “literature,” and what benefits are afforded by conversing across the disciplines. So, as this dialogue continues moving forward, there may be some benefit in also slowing down, pausing, and looking back at the one monograph to expressly locate Coetzee’s writings on a spectrum between literature and philosophy. Although not the most recent publication on the topic, Jan Wilm’s The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee (2016) merits renewed attention for its use of both literary and philosophical tools in explicating how Coetzee’s texts act upon their readers’ very modes of thinking.
I am staring 
April 13, 1947, holds little significance in the American historical memory, and yet that day was one in a long series that led to the legal desegregation of American schools. On that morning, Marguerite Daisy Carr, a 14-year-old black girl from Washington, D.C., attempted to enroll at Eliot Junior High School, the all-white middle school closest to her home. Carr’s efforts to integrate the school, which were supported by her family and local black community, preceded the landmark Supreme Court decision in 
4:30 Movie, then, is a book about the general ambience of film, although Masini does invoke specific titles—most notably, the original drive-in version of The Blob (1958), which screened in the 4:30 slot during Masini’s childhood and inspired the title of her book. In the film’s final scene, the hero—“his name was Steve in the movie and Steve in real life,” Masini writes, referring to lead actor Steve McQueen—and the police douse the blob with fire extinguishers to freeze it. A police officer observes that the gelatinous creature can’t be killed but can be stopped. The Air Force drops the blob into the Arctic, and then The End? appears on screen, a playful hint that perhaps the terror isn’t over. Masini is bemused by how hokey and silly the film is, the blob “mindless, deadly, malignant. Amorphous, devouring monster. / Why didn’t we laugh?” But by the end of the poem, she asks herself, “Why am I so frightened?” The whiplash of the question mimics the way viewers abruptly surrender to the magic of film.
On almost every page, The Five Quintets praises conversation’s endless interplay—“those evenings when time’s rigid arrow bends,” as we dance from one topic to another. So it’s appropriate that, when I came into New York to discuss the book with O’Siadhail (pronounced “O’sheel”), I first spotted him on a street corner, leaning into a conversation. The seventy-one-year-old O’Siadhail is hard to miss. He has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including his eight-hundred-page Collected Poems in 2014, and he looks every inch the poet: tall and handsome, with a craggy face, deep-set eyes, and a hawk-like nose. And there he was, a few blocks from Commonweal’s offices, where we’d agreed to meet, asking a woman where he might grab a bite to eat. He was “feeling a bit peckish,” he later told me, and was thinking about getting a snack. He wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk first and then eat or have lunch and then talk.
When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.
The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia.
Jennifer Schuessler in the NYT:
IT WAS THE