Fresh Stacks: 4/19/23
Clawing through the Notes
Substack just got a lot louder thanks to its new feature, Notes.
Your internet farm cat is here to help you cut through the noise.
The range of this week’s finds might give you a little whiplash, but bear with me. They’re all worth digging into, I promise.
Tasha Kheiriddin nails down Canada’s political landscape.
It’s not everyday that I find myself nodding along to a piece written by someone with bylines in The National Post, but I’m loving Tasha Kheiriddin’s new Substack,
. This piece breaking down the need for the Liberals and Conservatives to aim their focus on the geopolitical is a perfect example of why.Kheiriddin might lean a different way than me on some issues, but she’s looking at our country and the world with clean glasses—a refreshing thing to see by anyone discussing politics. Instead of taking sides and cheap shots, she calls on Trudeau and Poilievre to quit the mudslinging and pay more attention to the world around them.
If only!
David Lerner brings Satan down to earth—in a good way.
Of all the age-old literary forms, poetry might be the one best suited for the email newsletter. There's nothing like starting your day with a few short words to shift your thinking. I've mentioned
here before, but I also follow , a mostly-free Substack that sends a short, punchy piece (usually a poem, but not always) to you every day.Often, the posts consist of work from classic “literary rebel” names, many of which you probably recognize. D.H. Lawrence, Carl Jung, and Charles Bukowski are regular sources. But the Substack has also introduced me to people like Anne Sexton and the author of the poem below, David Lerner.
People on either side of the religious sphere will come to a poem about Satan with a lot of strong, preconceived notions. I venture to say that none of them will be validated by Lerner’s piece below.
Noah Berlatsky skewers a beloved WWII narrative.
This one stung a little, because I love a couple of the films
takes aim at, but it’s hard to deny the truth in his recent piece on . You likely won't watch Schindler's List or Jojo Rabbit the same way again.Berlatsky starts with an easy target: Ben Shapiro’s defense of a billionaire Republican’s collection of Nazi paraphernalia. But instead to focusing on Shapiro’s icky logic, he makes a pretty good case for retiring the term “Judeo-Christian” altogether.
Personally, I can see the term’s potential to dissuade those ascribing to the one religion from continuing their history of violence toward those who belong to the other. If used in the right context, it can highlight the shared origins of the two.
But, as Berlatsky points out, more often than not, it’s used to erase that violent history instead. And the Christian-savior holocaust narratives aren’t helping either. Maybe we need a story or two highlighting the religious arguments that perpetuate anti-Semitism. You know, to balance the scales. Just a thought.
Rae Katz does what we all talk about doing and then tells us about it.
The conversation goes like this:
“Let’s all get together, pool our resources, buy a plot of land, and live on it together. We’ll live off the land and have communal dinners and never be lonely again!”
I’ve had this conversation more than once, with more than one group of friends. In my own little way, I even tried it by living in Abbotsford’ Atangard Community Project for a couple years. In most contexts, this idea gets relegated to pipe-dream status. But
and her friends decided to turn it into their reality—and it worked. Read the post to learn more, and get ready to be inspired/jealous.Thomas De Moor starts a sci-fi path with promise.
I love a particular corner of science fiction: the kind that makes you think twice about your relationship to technology and the corporations putting it in our hands.
's "Broken Dreamscapes" series lands squarely in this category, starting in an imagined, VR-infused future and introducing a familiar source of trouble.I'll leave this blurb short to avoid giving away too much. Just know that if you’re into the same kind of sci-fi as me (Arrival, Black Mirror, Severence, etc.), you’ll enjoy the world De Moor creates here.
Damon Krukowski talks about what artists really need.
It’s compensation.
Yes, I recommended
last time. I don't care. I love this post too much to pass it up. In it, sidesteps the “copyright” conversation by focusing on what the concept of copyright was originally designed to do: give people a way to survive off the work they do.Copyright hasn’t successfully done that for a long time, so it shouldn’t be surprising for someone like Krukowski to suggest we create a new system. That the suggestion kind of blew my mind says something about our current situation, I think. Or maybe it’s just me.
That’s all for this week.
Got a Substack or post you think deserves the internet-farm-cat treatment? Leave a link in the comments below.
Honored to be part of a list of excellent recommendations. Thank you so much, Andrew! Glad you're enjoying Broken Dreamscapes so far.
Thanks for all these recommendations, everyone of them sounded so interesting. So many newsletters, so little time!