Things I Read This Week and Liked
Friday reading roundup
No one warned me, I want to say, but of course everyone tries. And maybe there are just no words to describe how it feels to realize that you have brought into the world and are now responsible for someone whose innocence you will watch the world gradually — gradually if you’re lucky! — destroy. Worse, it is your job to watch. It is even your job to do the innocence-destroying, sometimes; better you, gently, than someone else, not-gently.
Live-and-let-live used to be the Lancaster County style of conservatism, Gray said, because of the Amish influence. Living next door to people who don’t drive cars and plow their fields with mules and don’t bother anybody instills a sense of empathy for outsiders. “If you live around those kind of people, you tend to accept that being different as not being all that unusual,” Gray said.
How Middle America is treating refugees
Just to reiterate, with his actual, biological son seemingly unwilling to take part in his lame dad’s flame wars, Michael Rapaport enlisted his assistant to pose as his son in order to own the trolls online, going so far as to roleplay parenting his fake son on Twitter. And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon…
New trends in getting mad online
For the most part, I have experienced America as the place it believes itself to be. I wasn’t born here. But while I have lived here people have been good to me, institutions have trusted that I would make something of their resources, and, above all, public policy has been generous at precisely the moments it determined my path. This remains a narrow, remarkable experience. It’s only chance that any of us — walking down a street, or through airport security — are ever spared the arbitrary, corrosive spotlight that comes from being born into whichever population the white American power structure has lately decided that it should fear.
What It Means to Be American in the Trump Era
Mm, clicky: Widower seeks new fishing partner | RIP Chyna | Pwease no steppy | Just a great image choice