Nathanael Yellis

The era whose stories I enjoy the most is America from roughly 1890 through 1950. It's the era of my grandfather's first decades and perhaps the era where your average fifty years of life saw the most change. The earliest stories include ice blocks keeping your root cellar chilled and the latest have you driving your air conditioned car to Dairy Queen for soft serve ice cream. The book from last week's essay chronicled the rural west from 1905 through the 30s. Its opening saw the closing expansionist west of the pioneers; its ending was somewhat metropolitan, although our heroes still drove cheap cars, they no longer had doubts of gas stations along the way.

My first summer read was a 500-page Wallace Stegner novel published in 1943. A friend hefted The Big Rock Candy Mountain from the counter and chuckled, "well this seems light."

A few months ago, I experienced something amazing. I saw an eclipse of the sun at Sugarloaf. That's accurate, but does nothing to convey what it was.

One of the things that makes religious institutions countercultural is their resistance to change. Everything in our society prefers new & improved. You don't really have to explain why the new way is better than the old way: the new is to de facto preferred. This, of course, has its drawbacks. We have an ongoing disaster from putting front facing cameras on phones, connecting them to social networks, and giving them to our kids. But we didn't really question when the cameras on phones were better: they were new. And that was enough. The opposite is generally true when it comes to church: it exists to uphold the old.

So far as I can tell, these email's last check-in on the financial independence movement was in 2018. Email #97 had three links under the "frugality" heading. First was a nice story about how some diligent savers helped their 13 (!) children go to college, debt-free. Then, we had two competing headlines:

Remember what activism was like in the 1990s? I sure do. The people who didn't like world trade broke some Starbucks windows in Seattle; the ones who objected to smoking got to put body bags all over New York City (or maybe just the famous parts); to get us to never forget to think about illegal drugs, the ad people updated their campaign, "this is your brain on drugs."

The second essay in the 2012 version of The Best American Essays, is Marcia Angell's "The Crazy State of Psychiatry", originally published in The New York Review of Books. Reading it now makes you realize just how much has shifted. Not in the sense of the psychoactive drugs she questions having become more demonstrably effective nor in the sense of psychiatry's diagnostics becoming more scientific. These are more-or-less unchanged. Also unchanged is our willingness for drug-based solutions to most medical problems (see Ozympic). What surprised me about the essay is that the books it reviews are classic left-of-center attacks on pharmaceutical companies; it takes for a given that a progressive person ought to be skeptical of medicines, like vaccines, and their side effects. The good leftist assumes that right-leaning people are carrying water for drugs of unknown origin with unknown side effects.

A lot of the more entertaining reading these days amounts to nervous hand-wringing about potentially bad futures. A lot of the best writing is the essay equivalent of ruin porn. Smartphones, front-facing cameras, and mobile social media accounts are ruining kids (especially girls). Increasing personal atomization is ruining the social fabric of our society. The nationalization of our politics promotes national tribal division and increasing violence. Various of the crazies are perpetually attempting an immanentization of the eschaton, with ruinous results. I've linked to enough of these pieces for you to know the authors getting worked up about the ruination.

I like reading what's well-written. If there's a recurring theme here, it's that the topic matters less than the quality of the writing. When I try to make a point with what I share, the links are always less fun for you.