Tag: good story
A Novel That Forces Readers to Look in the Mirror
“Thinking ecologically about global warming requires a kind of mental upgrade,” Timothy Morton, the environmental philosopher, has written, “to cope with something that is so big and so powerful that until now we had no real word for it.” In 2008, Morton tried to invent one: hyperobject. The term doesn’t necessarily connote a value judgment, that this enormous thing is good or bad, but simply that in its hugeness it is inescapable, like air. To wrap one’s mind
China Will Have to Live With COVID Too
America has long thought itself exceptional, a blessed place destined to bring freedom to the world. China has an even longer history of self-proclaimed exceptionalism and, spurred by its many modern achievements, is more assertively promoting its brand of governance as a model for the world. The widening confrontation between the United States and China is thus becoming a “clash of exceptionalisms.”
From the Chinese viewpoint, the country’s successful containment of the coronavirus over the past two years is
This Is No Time for Passive Patriotism
Every nation is a story. It’s almost never a simple one, and the story’s meaning is usually contested. National identity itself depends upon how we tell the story—about our past, our present moment, and our future.
Many national stories are rooted in a particular ethnicity or religion that forms the core of that national identity. Here in the United States, things are more complicated. Since our founding, our national identity has been the story that we tell ourselves