Long Reads 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. Becoming Chris Cornell: Inside the Early Days of Soundgarden Mark Yarm | Billboard Evan Schiller didn’t know Chris Cornell very well -- when it came down to it, few people really did -- but the drummer for the ’90s Seattle band Sadhappy cherishes one particular memory of the late Soundgarden frontman. It was December 1991, and their mutual friend Soozy Bridges was throwing a party at her beachfront house in West Seattle. On what was perhaps the coldest day of the year -- “19 degrees out, snowing,” in Schiller’s recollection -- he and about 10 others gathered outside around a roaring bonfire. Around midnight, Cornell showed up. “He didn’t make a big production of it, but he proceeded to rip off his shirt and pants and jump into the pitch-black Puget Sound,” says Schiller. Cornell quickly swam out so far that no one could see or hear him. “We were all freaking out, going, ‘Holy shit! What do we do? Call 911?’ ” recalls Schiller. “Then Soozy says, ‘Oh, he always goes out swimming in the Sound at night.’ But he was out there for five minutes, then 10, then 15 or 20 -- it could have been as long as half an hour.” [Read More]( The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and BDS Armin Rosen | Tablet Magazine How a storied philanthropy came to lend its legitimacy—and money—to groups that push boycotting Israel --------------------------------------------------------------- At the time of his death in March, at the age of 101, it had been nearly 30 years since David Rockefeller, the legendary family heir and former head of Chase Bank, had last led the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF). As Stephen Heintz, president of the RBF, explained to me, Rockefeller was content to hand his brothers’ chief philanthropic project off to the family’s younger members. “He was the last chair of the board of that founding generation,” said Heintz. “He really believed that it was important to have a generational transition and let the next generation take leadership and be the active participants.” Rockefeller was the last surviving grandchild of John D. Rockefeller, and the last surviving child of John D. Rockefeller Jr. He considered RBF, which now commands $842 million in assets, to be one of the most significant aspects of his legacy. In 2006, Rockefeller announced that his estate would make a $225 million bequest to RBF after his death—by far Rockefeller’s most sizable single gift to any recipient, larger than the combined total of his estate’s planned bequests to Rockefeller University and the Museum of Modern Art ($100 million each), two other institutions that his family helped found. [Read More]( Cover Story: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview David Kamp | Vanity Fair Star Wars devotees who can’t wait for December need look no further. With exclusive access to writer-director Rian Johnson, plus interviews with Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and others, V.F. presents the ultimate sneak peek at The Last Jedi—and Carrie Fisher’s lasting legacy. --------------------------------------------------------------- The first trip to Skellig Michael was wondrous: an hour-long boat ride to a craggy, green island off the coast of Ireland’s County Kerry, and then a hike up hundreds of stone steps to a scenic cliff where, a thousand years earlier, medieval Christian monks had paced and prayed. This is where Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1983, standing opposite Daisy Ridley, whose character, Rey, was the protagonist of The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams’s resumption of George Lucas’s Star Wars movie saga. The opening sentence of the film’s scrolling-text “crawl,” a hallmark of the series, was “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Atop Skellig Michael, at the picture’s very end, after an arduous journey by Rey, came the big payoff: a cloaked, solitary figure unhooding himself to reveal an older, bearded Luke, who wordlessly, inscrutably regarded the tremulous Rey as she presented to him the lightsaber he had lost (along with his right hand) in a long-ago duel with Darth Vader, his father turned adversary. It was movie magic: a scene that, though filmed in 2014 and presented in theaters in 2015, is already etched in cinematic history. [Read More]( The tragic sensibility Robert D. Kaplan | The New Criterion On the unpredictability of humanity, both in politics and on the stage. --------------------------------------------------------------- The great classicist Edith Hamilton, writing in 1930, explained that tragedy is the beauty of intolerable truths, and that real tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good but the suffering caused by the triumph of one good over another. When the ancient Greeks realized that there is “something irremediably wrong in the world,” while such a world must be judged “at the same time as beautiful,” tragedy was born. “The great tragic artists of the world are four,” Hamilton announced, “and three of them are Greek”: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The fourth, of course, was Shakespeare. Precisely because Periclean Athens and Elizabethan England were periods of “unfathomable possibilities”—and not periods of “darkness and defeat”—the idea of tragedy could flourish. Those audiences, separated in time by over 2,000 years, were awestruck by the heroic and often futile struggles against fate, even as they were in a position—owing to their own good fortune—to accept it with serenity. To be clear, tragedy is not cruelty or misery, per se. The Holocaust and Rwanda were certainly not tragedies: they were vast and vile crimes, period. “The dignity and the significance of human life—of these, and of these alone, tragedy will never let go,” Hamilton observes. Thus, the tragic sensibility is neither pessimistic nor cynical: rather, it has more in common with bravery and supreme passion. Not to think tragically is to be “sordid,” she writes. [Read More]( What Is It Like to Know? Ari N. Schulman | The New Atlantis "If I asked you about art you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo — you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling.... You’re an orphan, right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?" --------------------------------------------------------------- So says Robin Williams, as a world-weary psychologist, to Matt Damon’s callow boy genius in the famous park bench scene from Good Will Hunting. Meant as a rebuke to the young man’s conceit, the speech also inadvertently describes one of the most important thought experiments in contemporary philosophy, an experiment that itself scolds a central conceit of modern intellectual life. [Read More]( Monks with guns Michael Jerryson | Aeon Westerners think that Buddhism is about peace and non-violence. So how come Buddhist monks are in arms against Islam? --------------------------------------------------------------- The recent violence in southern Thailand began on 4 January 2004, when Malay Muslim insurgents invaded a Thai Army depot in the southernmost province of Narathiwat. The next day, after the burning of 20 schools and several bomb attacks in a neighbouring province, the Thai government declared martial law over the three southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. Shortly after, two Buddhist monks were killed during their morning alms, and a third injured. In these provinces, the majority population is Muslim, and Buddhists are a minority. By the summer, journalists and scholars had written articles about the insurgents and the role of Islam in the violence. But since Buddhism was associated with peace, no one thought to investigate the role of Buddhism. How could a Buddhist monk participate in the violence? Yet clearly, Buddhism was involved in the conflict. 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