For Further Reading - September 2021
Here’s what I’ve been reading this month
I love Twitter. I follow a carefully curated selection of people (journalists, scholars, theologians) who really engage with the world. It’s a great cross-section of commentators who engage in good faith, allowing me to really see both sides of an issue without ever seeing talking heads demonizing or vilifying. My twitter feed is not dramatic, it’s just really smart.
I’ve come to believe that the best thing any of us can do is find smart, kind, faithful people who we disagree with and listen to them. For real.
And while I probably spend too much time on that silly little app, my favorite thing about it is that these people are always sharing the most amazing articles. So below is a little sampling of what I read this month: reflections from a priest on the call for Christians to sacrifice for one other, a poignant profile of Will Smith, a beautiful and painful glimpse into a young woman’s struggle to move beyond poverty, and a nice long piece on why it costs so much to build infrastructure in America.
They’re great. I hope you learn something new, find some beauty in words. I know I did.
Tish Warren | The Limits of ‘My Body, My Choice’
It’s rarely admitted aloud but asking someone to seek the good of others is often a call to suffering in one degree or another. When pro-lifers ask a mother to carry a baby to term, they are asking her to take up inconvenience, sorrow, financial strain and pain on behalf of another.
Over the past year as we’ve asked people to go into lockdown, cancel their travel plans or family gatherings, close or curtail their retail businesses, wear masks and get vaccinated, we are asking them to assume some level of financial and personal risk for the greater good — for strangers, for the elderly, for the immunocompromised, for the medical community. We can and should enact legislation like paid family leave, no-cost health care and other measures to support mothers, just as we support economic relief for those affected by Covid prevention. But we cannot deny that even if we seek to lessen the load, we are asking people to bear a burden.
Wesley Lowry | Introducing the Real Will Smith
For decades, Smith has seen himself as a coward. His desire to please people, to entertain the crowd, and to make us all laugh, he explains, is rooted, at least in part, in the belief that if he kept everyone—his father, his classmates, his fans—smiling, they wouldn’t lash out with violence at him or the people he loved. If he could keep making his mother proud through his accomplishments, he reasoned, perhaps she would forgive his childhood inaction. “What you have come to understand as ‘Will Smith,’ the alien annihilating M.C., the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction—a carefully crafted and honed character—designed to protect myself,” he writes. Later he says, “Comedy defuses all negativity. It is impossible to be angry, hateful, or violent when you’re doubled over laughing.”
Andrea Elliot | When Dasani Left Home (adapted from “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City”)
The unspoken message is clear. In order to leave poverty, Dasani must also leave her family — at least for a while.
Dasani lies awake that first night. She has never slept alone. She keeps reaching for Lee-Lee. “I don’t know how to sleep with nobody,” she will later tell me. Outside, the sky is wide and dark, the snow almost silver. Hershey is so quiet that any noise is jarring — the rustling of branches, the thrum of a truck…
It’s not just homesickness that keeps Dasani awake. She is feeling the pressure that Hershey represents. “I believe I can achieve my dreams in this school,” she writes in her journal. She makes little mention of her 11 housemates, for fear they might read the diary and turn against her. Earlier, they greeted Dasani warmly at dinner, bowing their heads for grace. She ate quickly, as if the food might vanish. New students are not used to second helpings or side dishes. Sometimes they guard their plates, hunching over each meal, or they try to ration it, hoarding food in their napkins…
Each girl brings her own idiosyncrasies. The McQuiddys notice that Dasani cuts her food with a knife, then picks it up with her hand, placing it in her mouth. She is accustomed to eating street food in a rush. No one uses a fork with French fries or chicken wings, especially when the meal is shared by eight siblings.
Jerusalem Demsas | Why does it cost so much to build things in America?
On a per mile basis, America’s transit rail projects are some of the most expensive in the world. In New York, the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile, in San Francisco the Central Subway cost $920 million per mile, in Los Angeles the Purple Line cost $800 million per mile.
In contrast, Copenhagen built a project at just $323 million per mile, and Paris and Madrid did their projects for $160 million and $320 million per mile, respectively. These are massive differences in cost…
As transit researcher Alon Levy writes in a report for the Niskanen Center, “This is not about our wealth: there is no correlation between a country’s GDP per capita and its subway construction costs. Nor is it about geological factors: the biggest factor behind a project’s cost is what country it is in, and costs are fairly consistent even across different geologies ... This is purely institutional.”
And when it comes to roads and the bulk of the high costs — “the new construction bit” — Turner says even though he has “no idea why those prices are increasing,” he can “eliminate a lot of things.” Turner explains that common theories like unions or the way we’re building roads or where we’re building them (for example, in more urban areas) are not supported by statistical evidence.
