Interesting Reads for 12 September 2014

Interesting articles this week include a look at the impact of the Mann Gulch fire, creativity, immigration, and more.

Mann Gulch and the Greatest Fire Story Ever Told – “Then, a quarter-century after the last embers sank to black, a 73-year-old retired professor of Renaissance literature at the University of Chicago started writing a book about Mann Gulch. He worked on it for 14 years and died at 87 before he could quite bring himself to call it finished. His name was Norman Maclean. The book was Young Men and Fire. Published posthumously in 1992, it hit the best-seller list, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, became a cult classic among literati and a regular classic in the fire community, shaped the culture and practice of wilderness firefighting, and turned a remote hillside into an outdoor classroom and place of pilgrimage. It was Maclean’s book, not any act of nature, that give America its signature wildfire.” New York Magazine

The new Luddites: why former digital prophets are turning against tech – “The lesson of the Unabomber was that radical dissent can become a form of psychosis and, in doing so, undermine the dissenters’ legitimate arguments. It is an old lesson and it is seldom learned. The British Dark Mountain Project (dark-mountain.net), for instance, is “a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself”. They advocate “uncivilisation” in writing and art – an attempt “to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence”. This may be true, but uncivilising ourselves to express this truth threatens to create many more corpses than ever dreamed of by even the Unabomber.” New Statesman

Creativity Creep – “How did we come to care so much about creativity? The language surrounding it, of unleashing, unlocking, awakening, developing, flowing, and so on, makes it sound like an organic and primordial part of ourselves which we must set free—something with which it’s natural to be preoccupied. But it wasn’t always so; people didn’t always care so much about, or even think in terms of, creativity. In the ancient world, good ideas were thought to come from the gods, or, at any rate, from outside of the self. During the Enlightenment, rationality was the guiding principle, and philosophers sought out procedures for thinking, such as the scientific method, that might result in new knowledge. People back then talked about “imagination,” but their idea of it was less exalted than ours. They saw imagination as a kind of mental scratch pad: a system for calling facts and images to the mind’s eye and for comparing and making connections between them. They didn’t think of the imagination as “creative.” In fact, they saw it as a poor substitute for reality; Hobbes called it “decayed sense.”” The New Yorker

Obama’s Long Immigration Betrayal – The Atlantic – “To understand why these advocates are so hurt and angry, you have to understand the meandering road immigration reform has taken over the course of the last decade—a road littered with false starts, broken promises, and a community repeatedly left in the lurch. Latinos feel that they have been jerked around by politicians who alternately pander for their votes and shunt them aside when their priorities become inconvenient—like now. Obama in particular has made a series of pledges on immigration, only to abandon them all. Now, when the president says he still plans to act—just give him a couple of months—reformers don’t know whether to trust him. “What next?” said Frank Sharry, head of America’s Voice, who has worked for immigration reform for decades. “Obama makes another promise? It turns out that other justifications for delay emerge post-election?”” The Atlantic

Reading insecurity: The crippling fear that the digital age has left you unable to read deeply and thoughtfully. – “Slate is an online magazine, which means you are almost certainly reading this on a screen. It is more likely to be morning than evening. You are perhaps at work, chasing a piece of information rather than seeking to immerse yourself in a contemplative experience. You probably have other tabs open—you will flick to one if I go on too long. Your eyes may feel fatigued from the glow of the monitor, the strain of adjusting to Slate’s typeface, which differs slightly from where you just were. You should take a 20-second screen break if you’ve been gazing into your computer, smart phone, iPad, or e-reader for more than a half hour. I’ll wait. It’s OK if you don’t come back—we both know by now that most people won’t finish this article. If you do return, though, I’d like to bring up something that has been bothering me: reading insecurity.” Slate