2010
You are browsing the archive for 2010.
My favorite discovery of 2010 was Meghan Daum. Her first book was a collection of essays called My Misspent Youth, and I read it this year at once aghast that I hadn’t known about it before, and grateful to be able to come to it both fresh and late. Soon after, I sat on a [...]
As below, Haley Barbour’s dreamy nostalgia for pre-civil rights Mississippi is not “false nostalgia,” but it is a rather insidious false memory–the kind of misunderstanding of history that should probably bar one from becoming a serious presidential candidate, but probably won’t. (An editorial in the Times calls it “the faulty memory all too common among [...]
2010: The Year of 90s Nostalgia, possibly, maybe?
At The Awl, Josh Kurp writes about what VH1’s shows “I Love the 80s” and “I Love the 90s” did for our memories of those decades—basically, he argues, they undermined and falsified and replaced the truth of what we actually experienced. Revisiting them recently, he also discovered that the shows had less actual content than [...]
paint’s peeling
Some repairs to the bathroom revealed these cross-sections of the many, many layers of paint that have been applied to the walls over the years. I think they’re kind of beautiful.
(Um, apparently I took the month of November off?)
Jack Shafer looks at how Boomers dominate the media, and when this might shift: “By sheer force of numbers, boomers quickly toppled the martini-drinking, WW II generation and substituted their cultural references. In recent years they’ve repelled the next generations—let’s call them the post-boomers for lack of [...]
at the drive-in
Fall clichés are my favorite kind. Every year, sometime in October, I have to get out of the city for a couple of days and smell the air and hear the crunch of leaves under my feet and get my first shiver and all of that. Lately, on top of the usual seasonal clichés, there’s [...]
Surprise: Philip Roth is not a fan of e-books and “the distracting influences of modern technology, which he feels diminishes the ability to appreciate the beauty and aesthetic experience of reading books on paper.” He says, “I like to read in bed at night and I like to read with a book. I can’t stand [...]
I’m about a month behind, but I loved this article about Peter Knego, who collects decor from post-war cruise ships. It’s a little scary to imagine what his house looks like, but this is coming from someone whose floor has warped so much that her bathroom door cannot even begin to close, so. (And actually, [...]