Reading for Sustenance

the picture I took of the Loch Ness monster

by J J Cohen

Hello, it's JJC, as I await the plane that will take me from Edinburgh and "Time's Urgency" the conference that has been so fulfilling over the past week. I've been in Scotland for nearly two weeks, and it has been quite a country from which to observe Brexit and its aftermath. Scotland, as you will recall, voted overwhelmingly to REMAIN in the EU and is now reconsidering its recent vote to remain a part of the UK. Vast anger at the LEAVE vote is mainly what I have observed ... and a re-surfacing of a feeling that Little England never did care much for the country to its north, other than as a resource farm. Its people feel like they have been told once again that they do not matter. Well, they have ... as have the many who have rightly felt that Brexit is a xenophobic backlash.

So. Here is some reading that is keeping me going in these troubled times. Much of it re-frames the moment over a longer duration -- whether that of a person's life or a country's.

• Karl Steel being eloquent on the myth of the brutal Middle Ages and our modern smugness
• Cord Whitaker being brilliant on freedom, obligation, race, globalism, hate and slow change
• Jo Livingstone being profoundly right on Allen J. Frantzen and #femfog and the toxicity we too easily tolerate in academia
• Anne Galloway being insightful and humane on muddling through, and compassion over passion
• Jeremy Corbyn rebuking the easy antisemitism of the left and Irina Dumitrescu on "deliberate and stupid innocence."
• and check back here on ITM in a few hours to read an awesome post by David Wallace on Brexit, globalism, the future humanities, the study of Chaucer, and moving forward in a world gone wrong (it may in fact be up by the time you read this: I have set it to publish at noon EDT today so it will not pre-empt a paper David is giving in York)