michelleweber

Optimization can’t be all there is to life, can it? On data, and backpacks, and technology, and gender, and messy personhood.

Recklessness, or natural evolution of an age-old impulse? “Th[e] impulse to fashion our image publicly has only increased in the digital age—which means it’s that much harder to get noticed.”

The climate is changing. It will change our world irrevocably. If the scale of the change is too staggering, maybe we need something in addition to science: “But artists can register scale. They can transpose the fact of melting ice to inundated homes and bewildered lives, gauge it against long history and lost future.”

“[I]n framing infertile women as problematic consumers of technology that they despise, many contemporary feminists ignore the actual experience, the meat and pain, of infertility. They ignore the grief.”

When Benton MacKaye first conceptualized the Appalachian Trail, it was meant to be much more than a hiking route — it was the foundation of an economic and social restructuring of the East Coast.

“An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.”

John Franzese, Jr. was an up-and-coming gangster, then a drug addict, then a rat who helped send his own father to prison, and finally “Mat Pazzarelli” — his witness protection name. Now he’s rebuilt his life, is out of witness protection and has one thing left to do — go see his dad.