This is pretty great. If you were thinking about writing a highbrow literary review of some book or other, just do whatever it says, especially this,
In a profile about a corporate executive in the news, it is always a good idea to mingle a classical prototype with a contemporary idiom, e.g., “Like Augustus Caesar, he is at peace with his tradeoffs,” the “he” in this sentence being Mark Zuckerberg.
On the whole much much better than this, which is a rambling, slightly bombastic screed against the word “parenting” full of probably true facts and statistics overlaid with a lot of Marxist grievance mongering (I got the word grievance from the article above, seriously, it’s a pretty great word). Here’s what you can expect if you click the link:
A graph of usage of the word “parenting” over time looks like a steep slope moving up and to the right from the 1960s through the early part of the 2000s before plateauing. Lay that slope over a graph American income inequality over the same period and you’ll be looking at an almost perfect X. This inverse correlation indicates — though causality is obviously difficult to pin down…
No kidding. Really difficult. If you don’t feel like trying, just go look at these beautiful overlays.
Not that he’s wrong. I’m pretty sure parenting is a total scam, just like so much else in these modern times. I love the term “the parenting industrial complex” and everything he says about college loans is right on. His solution though—more government policies—I’m not particularly enthusiastic about. I’m about to dive into my quarterly homeschool reporting to some portion of that government and that always makes me feel more than vaguely libertarian by the end of it. Plus, you know, I’d love for the “family” to be evermore the pawn in political debates that it always is.
Anyway, the thing I wish women had more of was leisure. I’m pretty sure this was never a thing, even in the golden past, except for the occasional Lady who got to have a household of servants to support her “retiring to her room to write her letters” but I wish it could be. The problem with “modern conveniences” is that they just produce more work, not more leisure.
Maybe my categories are wrong, or maybe my definition of work is flawed. I do take it upon myself to do a lot of tasks that don’t technically need doing—like blogging every day—and classifying them as “work” so that I don’t feel lazy, when really, they surely must fall under the category of “leisure”.
Oh well, this is not important. I’m going to go make chili—a day late for taco Tuesday—and…who knows what else. I will quit rambling and leave you with something delectable. Try this, it’s frankly nicer than both of those other reads:
Half of earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become. For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself—and it is our glory to see it so and thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great. That is the inconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquieted of having been made in the image of God. All man’s love is vast and inconvenient. It is temping, of course, to blunt its edge by caution. It is so much easier not to get involved—to thirst for nothing and no one, to deny that matter matters and, if you have the stomach for it, to make your bed with meanings which cannot break your heart. But that, it seems to me, is neither human nor Divine. If we are to put up with all other bothers out of love, then no doubt we must put up with the bother of love itself and not just cut and run for cover when it comes. — The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Ferrar Capon
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