David Gessner at the American Scholar:
The script excited Redford from the start. It was, he said, “closer to the real West than anything I’d ever read or seen.” It was written by John Milius, working off Vardis Fisher’s 1965 novel Mountain Man and the 1958 biography Crow Killer by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker. That the film took place in or near the mountains Redford had grown to love added a deeply personal resonance. Consider what Jeremiah Johnson says when he eyes the land where he will build his new home: “River in front. Cliffs behind. Good water. Not much wind. This will be a good place to live.” Redford could say pretty much the same about the A-frame house he built at Sundance before fame really hit. This was a story that spoke directly to him, a mythic story of turning your back on the known world and finding an unknown one. Of starting out as a greenhorn, new to the wilderness, but gradually learning what is needed to survive, then thrive. In a life of artifice, here was the authentic.
“Finally, you don’t ‘act’ a movie like Jeremiah Johnson,” he later told his biographer. “It becomes an experience, into which you fit and flow. It was grueling and I was changed by it, no question. We re-created a way of life that real people lived in these real mountains, the same now as they were then. You learn by immersing yourself in their reality.”
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If you want a surefire way to incite hostility on social media, I suggest flaunting the fact that you work nights and weekends — or complaining about those who do. The sea of humans will suddenly part before you into two angry mobs: the workaholics, who are prepared to sacrifice their lives at the altar of capitalism, and the restaholics, whose highest ideal is slacking off and who seethe with resentment at those ruining the curve. Or so the two groups understand one another. Do we work in order to rest, or do we rest in order to work? Neither answer is very appealing. Working in order to rest sounds like a paraphrase of Freud’s death drive: as though, in an ideal world, we would just be sitting quietly, motionlessly, imitating corpses. Resting in order to work suggests the equally depressing thesis that the goal of a human life is to become a well-oiled cog in some kind of machine, a tool for the use of the leviathan called society. We need to work, because survival demands it, and we need to rest, because work is tiring, but are those two possibilities really exhaustive? Isn’t there a third state — one that we don’t need but freely choose?
The best works by the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck leave you convinced they might vanish from one moment to the next, just as a dream seems to grow sharper right before it ends. For all their winking tints and sinuous linework, the dominant mood is one of bittersweet calm, reminding us that fugacity, when it recurs often enough, eventually achieves a sort of permanence. Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 5, is a fittingly relaxed introduction to the artist, revealing Schjerfbeck’s discreet mastery, one cleverly understated canvas at a time.
NEAR MANAUS, BRAZIL—
Though “Godlike” is inseparable from the downtown scene in which it is set, the word “punk” fails to make an appearance in the book. In fact, save for an isolated reference to 
A few months ago, I was babysitting two kids, one eight and the other five years old. We were in the middle of a board game when the numbers six and seven happened to come up together. Suddenly, as if they had been struck by something. They giggled hysterically, chanting “Six-seven!” with their hands up and down. I was so confused.
A clump of human 
Without Donald Trump, the crypto industry would have met a very different fate. In the years before his second presidential campaign kicked off, crypto markets were undergoing a series of downturns that, if not necessarily spelling cryptocurrency’s death knell, were threatening to dramatically weaken the standing of an asset class that had minted a new generation of economic elites, relegating it to the status of a niche object for the likes of tech hobbyists, online gamblers, and drug dealers. 2022 in particular was such a bad time for crypto that 
THERE IS, IT SEEMS TO ME, a right wrong way and a wrong right way to see 
I find these publications compelling by their very existence and, for the most part, unreadable. Their content slides off my mind. Gray literature’s high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else’s water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious. Each publication is an invitation to speculate on a sector’s operations, to marvel at the specificity of other people’s knowledge and the focus of their working lives. My paltry library gestures toward the infinite complicatedness of human activity and the vast, disorganized array of murky buckets out of which the materiality of our lives somehow continues to emerge.
In her 1977 novel Angst, Hélène Cixous names the quarter hour of Great Suffering—“straight away,” “never again”—when the mother lays the child on the tiles and does not return. Angst divides us: either to remain in unending anguish, or to move to the anguish of an unendingness. This is the threshold into which the text plunges the reader.