it's okay to end the suffering of Queen Elizabeth: March 2023 Essay Recommendations
Determinedly spicy takes about Big Media's sequel fetish, the actual reason kids don't read books, gender-neutral naming + more in this month's don't-miss long-forms.
Where to begin? Where to begin?
I didn’t read as widely as I wanted to this month, but here’s some of what stood out.
it’s okay to end the story
Ted Gioia points out that Big Media and Big Entertainment have created a culture ‘without closure’ by producing stories and series of stories that don’t have true endings. Everyone’s betting that what they’ve made will be the next big thing (or big enough), so they’ve gotta keep the door open for sequels, reboots, and other forms of follow-on. However, Audiences Grow Weary of Stories that Never End, and it’s healthier for the receivers of stories to receive a proper send-off for settings and characters that they’ve come to love. Gioia writes:
Fifty years ago, Hollywood killed the movie musical by saturating the market. They did the same with western films—and motorcycle gang movies, beach blanket blowouts, and all those other subgenres they turned into stale formulas. And now they are doing the same with superhero sequels, spin-offs, and reboots.
There is, of course, a solution to all this. The movie moguls could return to holistic storytelling. They could build their offerings with aesthetically pleasing beginnings, middles, and ends. If those basic storytelling principles were good enough for Shakespeare, they ought to be good enough for Disney CEO Bob Iger.
speaking of stories…
It bothers me (and probably you) that kids don’t read as much as we read when we were coming up. They’re all on their phones, tablets, or other screen-based devices, watching videos, doing little dances, and snapchatting with friends. However, it’s not entirely Big Screens’ fault that kids aren’t falling in love with books. Some fault lies with the education system and how children are taught about reading. Katherine Marsh argues this in her Atlantic piece, Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading.
…where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s…, the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.
*weeps uncontrollably*
Queen Elizabeth…suffered?
By all considerations, the late Elizabeth II (once she became queen) lived a comfortable life. At the top of Britain’s food chain, she lacked for nothing. But Tom Holland, in his Plough piece, Two Thousand Years of Christian Strangeness, argues that Queen Elizabeth, in fact, suffered greatly. He is talking about pain and the Christian conception of it vs. pagan concepts of it. (For example, to the Romans, “the pain endured by a hero becomes the measure of a hero,” but the “servile pain”—the pain endured by a criminal on a cross—would never have been celebrated.
This piece ends with him talking about the late queen…
If we take the twentieth-century existentialists at their word, one of the worst kinds of suffering is boredom. And in that sense, the Queen actually suffered quite a lot, because she led quite a boring life. And she absolutely did so as a Christian. For her, the coronation oaths she took were a sacrament.
…but I’ll leave you to figure out how he got there. This is a very interesting piece, one that reminds me of theologian and professor John Milbank going off-roading about the monarchy and other forms of government at a Plough launch event last fall.
the irony of a name
Names are always fascinating to me and Sarah Zhang highlights the trend of gender-neutral names in her Atlantic piece, The Rise of Gender-Neutral Names Isn’t What It Seems.
“Parents are actively seeking novelty,” Wattenberg says. “That means throwing away, to a large extent, traditional names that had dominated for centuries, and that means throwing away names with gender associations. When you invent a new name … you are naturally entering a more gender-neutral territory.”
There some really interesting stuff about “names that end in the long-e sound.”
the start of a series
I read the first of a series of essays by Bethel McGrew about rational faith. In Christian Dreams (Part I), she analyzes a conversation between Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, and Steve Meyer about the decline of faith in the West and how to approach Christianity as rational. I’m fascinated to follow the rest of it.
a rip-roaring, riotous AI consideration
If I recommend a piece about AI in every roundup this year, could we conclude this entire substack is AI-generated? Possibly. But let’s at least have fun with the threat of our insidious new overlords. And that’s what novelist Cat Valente does in her piece, The Great Replacement (Not That One, the Real One).
ChatGPT is here to burn our crops, curdle our milk, seduce our lovers and corrupt our youth. That’s it, that’s the subtitle.
I think this is the longest piece of them all this month, but I had so much fun reading it.
Enjoy!