Kiri Wagstaff
Monrovia
A story about this — 50 weeks ago
WORTH CONSUMING!
Interesting articles from this issue:
- Atlantic Retrospective on Politics: excerpts from articles in this magazine going back to 1862 (!). The oldest one is an article by no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson (quote: “We want a state of things in which crime shall not pay.”)
- Perplexing ad from Capella University: picture of a black woman setting a table, with a child in the background running towards the table. Text reads: “Knowledge is finding the place where mom and PhD can actually co-exist.” Punctuation gaffe aside, I can only assume that they mean the conflict between raising kids and finding time to study for a Ph.D., not that having a Ph.D. somehow precludes you from reproducing. I’m no raging feminist, but I would have preferred a version that replaced “mom” with “parent”.
- “The Drama of the Gifted Parent”: Sandra Tsing Loh is back with her usual scintillating wit as she reviews four books on the high-stress existence led by overachieving, gifted children. I really enjoy her particular sort of vaguely subtle sarcasm, at least partly because she is so willing to turn her own criticisms on herself and to acknowledge her own foibles.
- “Making Sinatra Sinatra”: an obituary for Bill Miller, Sinatra’s pianist. I find the Atlantic’s two-page obituaries unexpectedly compelling; they tend to be written in a lively fashion, and I come away with a real sense of a person whom I otherwise would never have known. (I have yet to read an obituary for someone whose name I recognized—but that makes them all the more interesting, like extended character sketches for a novel.)
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