News 03.04.24: Five Essential Articles from Around the Web

Darrell rotated home, got through the final three years of his service commitment, and retired. He took a job in law enforcement at the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta. Working security felt like a natural next step after the military, but he found dealing with civilian life—“dealing with civilians, period”—to be challenging. At work, he struggled to hold back swells of aggression. At home with his wife and children, he contained those moods by drinking. Night after night, he would pace the house, drink until he blacked out, hide in a closet, and howl. He drank to “numb the pain, numb the guilt, numb some of the nightmares,” but flashbacks to that morning in Anbar Province continued, along with waves of survivor’s guilt. The harder he tried to suppress them, the worse they got.

Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker

The saying goes that if you run into an asshole in the morning, then you ran into an asshole. But if you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole. What happens, though, if you keep running into assholes, keep dealing with them and becoming them, back and forth, over and over, never stopping, never retreating into yourself or into isolation, just flaying yourself and others alive every day for your entire life? What kind of narcissism is that? What kind of vulnerability?

Larry David has been the asshole people keep running into and the asshole who keeps running into them on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm for nearly 25 years. It seems impossible, doesn’t it, that a man so irritated and irritating in turn could anchor one of the longest-running live-action comedy series outside of Saturday Night Live. The series finally wraps up this week, after 12 seasons, and as we come to the end of this epic journey, it’s fitting to ask what’s sustained this show, what’s sustained him for all this time. Pettiness, self-regard, rage, insecurity, wealth, privilege, impatience, impetuousness, even just old age, these are all, in their own specific ways, true. But watching this final season of Curb over the past few months, and thinking about it in the context of its own ending, the answer I keep coming back to is this: wonder.

Larry has sustained this show through an unceasing, unslakable sense of wonder about the social world. Sure he’s bothered, sure he’s wrong, sure he’ll shout about it, but, in doing so, he’ll always manage to make it new to us. In an early episode of this season, Larry’s talking to Leon, and Leon keeps ending his phrases with, “you know what I’m saying?” It’s a phrase you hear so much as to be unworthy of comment, even unworthy of noticing. But Larry notices. As Leon speaks, Larry begins to get that look, of annoyance, yes, but also of inquisitiveness. He’s just hearing this. Like a baby, like an innocent, Larry is just now noticing the strangeness of this locution. Larry and Leon do not argue about this, they do not fight, but Larry gloms onto the phrase, its strange redundancy, its compulsive deployment.

Read the rest of this article at: The New Republic

Many of the Indigenous people Cook met had never before seen a European. Cook recognized it was in his interest to convince them that he came in friendship; he also saw that, in case persuasion failed, the main advantage he possessed was guns.

In a journal entry devoted to the Endeavour’s first landing in New Zealand, near present-day Gisborne, Cook treats the killing of the Māori as regrettable but justified. The British had attempted to take some Māori men on board their ship to demonstrate that their intentions were peaceful. But this gesture was—understandably—misinterpreted. The Māori hurled their canoe paddles at the British, who responded by firing at them. Cook acknowledges “that most Humane men” will condemn the killings. But, he declares, “I was not to stand still and suffer either myself or those that were with me to be knocked on the head.”

Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker

If you listen to the experts, much of the place I’m from is not a place at all. Suburban Michigan is full of winding roads dotted with identical houses, strip malls stuffed with chain restaurants and big-box stores, and thoroughfares designed for cars, with pedestrian walkways as an afterthought. The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term non-places to describe interchangeable, impersonal spaces lacking in history and culture that people pass through quickly and anonymously. Non-places—such as shopping centers, gas stations, and highways—can be found everywhere but seem to particularly proliferate in suburbs like the one I grew up in. The writer James Howard Kunstler memorably called this sort of landscape “the geography of nowhere.”

In his book of the same title, Kunstler traces the history of the suburbs from the Puritans’ 17th-century conception of private property up to the early 1990s, when The Geography of Nowhere was published. He argues that, enamored with both automobiles and the sheer amount of space in this country, the U.S. built a sprawling empire of suburbs because, as he puts it, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” But this arrangement has proved to be “deeply demoralizing and psychologically punishing,” he told me in an email—not only because the design of suburbia is unsightly but because it is at odds with human connection and flourishing. He doesn’t mince words about what he sees as the consequences of this way of life, writing in his book that “the immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible,” and suggesting that America has become “a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.”

This sort of dismissal is a common posture, though few have put it quite so colorfully. Perhaps because of the sometimes bland and homogenous built environment, many people assume the suburbs have a conformist culture too. These places have long been associated with boredom, with a vague, free-floating malaise. (Or, as one writer bluntly put it, “You know it sucks, but it’s hard to say exactly why.”) There is a Subreddit with 60,000 members called “Suburban Hell.” All of this adds up to a popular conception of suburbs as indistinct and interchangeable—they are “no-man’s-land,” the “middle of nowhere.” And this idea doesn’t come only from city slickers sneering at “flyover country.” Jason Diamond, the author of the book The Sprawl, said in an interview with Bloomberg that he’s noticed a “self-hatred” among people who come from suburbia.

Yet the majority of Americans live in this “nowhere.” Being precise about the proportion of the U.S. that is suburbia is difficult—the federal government, in much of its data, doesn’t distinguish “suburban” as a category distinct from “rural” and “urban” (perhaps implying that it, too, considers these places not worth caring about). But in the 2017 American Housing Survey, the government asked people to describe their own neighborhoods, and 52 percent classified them as suburban. These neighborhoods aren’t frozen 1950s stereotypes, either; they are evolving places. For instance, once synonymous with segregation, the suburbs are now more diverse than ever.

Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic