Longreads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser] We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker David Remnick | The New Yorker At eighty-two, the troubadour has another album coming. Like him, it is obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny. --------------------------------------------------------------- When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry. Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.” [Read More] Tomi Lahren Has Some Thoughts Kyle Chayka | The Ringer The controversial conservative talking head and viral Facebook superstar is the perfect pundit for the age of Donald Trump. Is she the next Ann Coulter or something even scarier? --------------------------------------------------------------- “White does not mean racist.” Tomi Lahren’s face appears twice its normal size on a massive editing screen. On a dark Dallas soundstage, Lahren is recording one of her signature “Final Thoughts” monologues, the closing segment of her daily television show, Tomi. Her glossy lips twist into a grimace, dark eyelashes press into a glare, and manicured nails jab at the air as words fly out with the velocity of bullets: “Believe it or not, you can be critical of a black person or a black person’s policies without being a racist.” [Read More] Atlantic City’s Bare Ruined Choirs Bill McMorris | The Washington Free Beacon Feature: What I saw at the closing of the Trump Taj Mahal --------------------------------------------------------------- Four people assemble for a photo before a grand fountain in the shadow of minarets for a Sunday afternoon wake. A single yellow taxi, an SUV, sits in the background. The shoot takes maybe thirty seconds, a minute tops, as they pause to let the Atlantic City breeze whip past them on this grey day. Another cab, this one a dark minivan, joins the queue. They sit idle. So does the fountain that welcomed fleets of taxis and valeted cars, celebrities, card sharps, and amateur aspirants to the Trump Taj Mahal. It is “an awe-inspiring architectural masterpiece…unprecedented in craftsmanship and opulence,” the largest and, at $1.1 billion, the most expensive casino ever built when it debuted in 1990. The casino that opened with Donald Trump giving a personal tour to Michael Jackson trailed by Robin Leach will close in 14 hours and the only celebrity on hand to witness it is Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. [Read More] The High & The Low: Recipe for Longevity Julia Reed | Garden&Gun A decidedly Southern take on healthy eating. --------------------------------------------------------------- For the last eight weeks I’ve received an e-mail with the subject line “What’s your address? (sending you a cookbook)…” from an outfit called Paleo Reboot. Every day, I dutifully unsubscribe, report the message as spam, and delete, and every day I get another one. (I realize I could avoid many such irritating missives by getting rid of my AOL account, but old habits die hard and I’ve decided it’s cool rather than lazy to be a holdout.) I have no intention of sending these people my home address, but I finally did take a look at the website, where I discovered a young man named Dr. Ryan Lazarus (not an MD, exactly, but rather a “certified practitioner of functional medicine and Doctor of Chiropractic”), who was touting books related to the phenomenon that is the Paleo diet. [Read More] Elon Musk Isn’t Religious Enough to Colonize Mars James Poulos | Foreign Policy Silicon Valley wants to explore space as tech entrepreneurs. We should be traveling as pilgrims. --------------------------------------------------------------- At a technology conference this summer, Elon Musk suggested that if humanity is not yet living in a computer simulation, it is probably already doomed. The only alternative, he explained, was so-called base reality (what most of us would refer to simply as “reality”), where some calamitous event — whether climate change, nuclear war, or an asteroid — was eventually liable to snuff our existence on Earth once and for all. “Either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist,” he said. “Those are the two options.” --------------------------------------------------------------- [Read More] The Sentimentality Trap Benjamin Myers | First Things A textbook I use for my introductory poetry classes, the classic Western Wind, defines sentimentality as “emotion in excess of its object.” Sentimentality is not simply too much emotion, but an imbalance of it, an over-investment of emotion relative to that in which it is invested. I have never put down a poem and complained that it was too moving, too resonant. Sentimentality is a defect in the quality, not the quantity, of feeling in a poem. But how is a reader to recognize this defect in feeling that we are calling sentimentality? The best guide is wide experience of the art. Reading those poets we have, by an election lasting generations, inducted into the canon, one finds very little that is sentimental. The great tradition is a highly reliable guide in this matter. Millennia before sentimentality was given a name in the eighteenth century and elevated to prominence in popular literature, the imbalance between emotion and its object was resisted in the sober wisdom of Homer and the frank self-evaluation of Donne. [Read More] Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. Our mailing address is: The Federalist 8647 Richmond Highway Suite 618 Alexandria, VA 22309 [Add us to your address book] This email was sent to [{EMAIL}] [why did I get this?] [unsubscribe from this list] [update subscription preferences] The Federalist · 8647 Richmond Highway · Suite 618 · Alexandria, VA 22309 · USA