The link-drop will usually get right into the links, but here’s a brief explainer:
The Thursday review posts stay on-theme—reflecting on a book or article at length—but each Friday I take four articles I enjoyed over the last couple weeks and I share them. That’s it!
The Scholar
Melvyn Bragg always struck me as a kind soul. Bragg hosts the In Our Time radio show and podcast, which I’ve followed on-and-off since college. He talks about history, technology, culture, and the arts with topic experts—and it’s delightful. I was so happy to read Sarah Larson’s interview with Bragg at the New Yorker about his life and work. Take this passage, about how reading helped him conquer childhood anxiety:
[I read] anything I could get my hands on. I mean, all the English novelists: Dickens, Thackeray. American novelists, Hemingway—French and Russian novelists in English translations. And I think what happened was that I was so taken up with this that I forgot myself. Some of these clichés are perfect. You do forget yourself. I was in those books; I wasn’t worrying about whether I was going to be worried. I was worried about whether Anna Karenina was going to do this or the other. And I think that changed me.
I love it. Read the rest here.
The Playlist
This Atlantic article by Joe Pinsker asks, What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies? I’ve wondered this too. Rome didn’t last, surely Spotify won’t either? Pinsker says:
Unfortunately, the experts on media preservation and the music industry whom I consulted told me that I have good reason to fear ongoing instability. “You’re screwed,” said Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, after I asked him if I could count on having my music library decades from now.
The reason I’m screwed is that Spotify listeners’ ability to access their collection in the far-out future will be contingent on the company maintaining its software, renewing its agreements with rights holders, and, well, not going out of business when something else inevitably supplants the current paradigm of music listening. (Kahle sees parallel preservation problems with other forms of digital media that exist on corporate platforms, such as ebooks and streaming-only movies.)
So access to media is a perpetually sticky wicket. But we still have choices! Actually owning your files and supporting artists seemed like an upgrade over Spotify’s business model and their increasingly creepy patent applications, so we cancelled our Spotify and started buying artists’ mp3s from Bandcamp instead.
Geoffrey Morrison at the New York Times also wrote on digital ownership and concluded:
In reality, your digital collection is probably safe for the foreseeable future—but if the very idea of a company locking you out of your movies and music makes you angry, we suggest embracing physical media such as 4K Blu-rays and CDs, which will likely survive any digital-media apocalypse.
So maybe don’t cancel all your subscriptions…yet? There are books in the newsletter pipeline on ownership, property, and rentier capitalism, so we’ll eventually circle back to these ideas!
The Chaplains
The Olympics are done. I only watched about four hours, but I did see some women’s archery, the men’s 10k final, and discovered that the trampoline is an Olympic sport! While the stands were empty, this article by Michelle La Rosa over at The Pillar looks at another Olympic fixture taken by the coronavirus—chaplains. La Rosa interviewed Fr. Frank Mulgrew, a former Olympic chaplain, to understand their role at the games. In addition to sacraments and prayers:
Mulgrew said that if he encountered an athlete going through a particularly devastating situation, he “would just try to be there for them, empathize with them, walk with them, journey with them, pray with them. Just be a presence - maybe it would be too soon for words.”
“And maybe in time to come, if I was still in touch with them, I would share that God uses every opportunity to encounter more of His love. That in the pain, in the struggle, we meet Christ on the cross. But there’s only a cross because there was a resurrection. Where there’s pain, a cross, God brings new life from it - from any suffering we surrender and endure from Him, He can transform and bring about innumerable blessings and miracles.”
There weren’t any chaplains this time, due to Tokyo’s covid restrictions. I can imagine this was painful for some Olympians, having gone without Mass ourselves for months at a time due to lockdowns. But I still find chaplains’ stories from past years inspiring visions of public ministry.
The Secret Archive
The Stasi, the East German secret police during the Cold War, subjected civilians to mass surveillance for some forty years. The Stasi turned families and friends into state informants. But after the Soviet Union fell, what happened to the paper trail? Annalisa Quinn at the New York Times wrote this fascinating account of the researchers who are painstakingly reconstructing millions of documents that the Stasi were “shredding, pulping and tearing … by hand” as “pro-democracy protesters stormed the secret police precincts in 1989 and 1990.”
In the 30 years since, so-called “puzzlers” have been working to reconstruct the torn documents by hand, laboriously sorting and matching fragments of paper by color and handwriting, before taping them back together and submitting them to the archives. For most of this time, these were employees of a dedicated Stasi Records Agency, formed in 1991, though the files have recently come under the authority of the German Federal Archives.
The historian Timothy Garton Ash described the process as an exercise in “extraordinary, but some would say a bit crazy, perfectionism.” Some 500 sacks have already been reconstructed, with 15,500 left to go.
I am in awe—both of the historians and the paper mountains left before them. In Quinn’s account, the “puzzlers” embrace both the Sisyphean scope and public gravity of this task. The puzzlers work because the victims of espionage have a right to know.
That’s all for this week - see you next Thursday!