PBS is good, among other things

I. American-made bombs in Yemen are killing civilians

I'm not big into, "Hey, have you seen this terrible news? Simply knowing about it makes you a better person." But, I mean, have you been following the news in Yemen? I have only a little, but it's very, very bad. 

A PBS three-part series (8-11 minutes each) tackles the American-backed crisis. Maybe this all boils down to "War is bad, and even just wars (should such unicorns exist) are rare enough we should be skeptical of all war," but I think the details matter:

The aerial bombing campaign has not managed to dislodge the rebels, but has hit weddings, hospitals and homes. The U.S. military supports the Saudi coalition with logistics and intelligence. The United States also sells the Saudis and coalition partners many of the bombs they drop on Yemen.

II. All Reproduction is Assisted

...all reproduction, even reproduction that appears “natural,” is assisted. Some forms of assistance are simply rendered invisible because they are taken for granted by people for whom reproduction is not an obviously political issue. If you do not have to pay money to conceive, it may not occur to you that conception can be prohibitively costly. If you do not have to transform your body to gestate, it may not occur to you that gestation is hard and risky work. If a physician has never hurt you or mocked you or ignored you or lied to you, it may not occur to you that being deemed healthy enough to have children is an ideology rather than an ontology. If you do not have to worry about the legal status of your relationship to your child, it may not occur to you that she can be taken away. If you do not fear for your safety, it may not occur to you that you need to stay alive to create life. 

I don't agree with everything in the article quoted above, but Merve Emre is one of our most compelling public intellectuals (is that still a thing? is that stuffy? she's not stuffy, okay, she's just super smahrt). Her line about ideology versus ontology is especially worth considering, and perhaps unpacking further, but I think she's probably letting the rhythm of the rhetoric run away with the argument just a bit. I'd go on, but if I did I might never stop because her points are so well delivered that even the ones I think are wrong deserve robust rebuttal. (The bottom of reality, to keep my rebuttal short, isn't political. Hell, the basics of human interaction aren't even solely political, and to suggest that a doctor's clean bill of health is fundamentally political to such a degree that more likely valences of meaning are nearly irrelevant is at the very least reductive.)

III. Do Women Exist? by Mary Townsend

Within any other group, Beauvoir argues, common cause, common action, and common feeling are more imaginable than they are among women as a body. We live “dispersed among men,” tied by interest to nearly every other thing than merely being a woman, which fact seems trivial compared to ties of social group or class, race, religion, or nationality, beauty, skill, or age. Women do not proclaim themselves a “we,” says Beauvoir, except in the artificial circumstances of academic prose (touché). “In Lysistrata,” she notes, “Aristophanes lightheartedly imagined a group of women who, uniting together for the social good, tried to take advantage of men’s need of them”—so far, so good. She concludes by saying this, however: “But [the Lysistrata] is only a comedy.” The joke is always on us: Our revolution is undercut before it’s begun.

IV. What Is It Like to Be a Man? by Phil Christman

“What is it like to be a cis-gendered, heterosexual man?” a friend, a trans man, asks on Facebook. “What is it like to feel at home in your body?” The only answer I can come up with is that I never feel at home in my body. I live out my masculinity most often as a perverse avoidance of comfort: the refusal of good clothes, moisturizer, painkillers; hard physical training, pursued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of physical pain or self-imposed discipline that I owe the universe. [...]

When I try to nail down what masculinity is—what imperative gives rise to all this pain seeking and stoicism, this showboating asceticism and loud silence—I come back to this: Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect. By “protect” I don’t mean the actual useful things a man (or anyone else) may do for other people—holding down a hated but necessary job, cleaning the toilet, doing the taxes if he happens to be good at it, even jumping in front of a bullet if he is quick enough off the mark. All functioning adults are “protective” of others in this sense, to the best of their ability. Rather, I mean precisely the activities that stem from a fear that simple usefulness is not enough: that one must train and prepare for eventualities one has no reason to anticipate, must keep one’s dwelling and grooming spartan in case of emergencies, must undertake defensive projects that have no connection to the actual day-to-day flourishing of the people one loves.

This article, and the one quoted above, are honestly worth reading twice, in my opinion. They can both be found in The Hedgehog Review, which is one of the best "little magazines" currently publishing.

V. Opinion

The best ghost story I've recently read is Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. It has all sorts of Bad Male problems, though most of the nonsense is mitigated by the book's indictment of the protagonist's self-destruction (partially delivered via his wife). Amis isn't any sort of heavy-handed moralist, but he 's not exactly confused about bad behavior being bad. Also, it has a scene with the supernatural which I honestly think rivals the Devil's appearance in The Brothers Karamazov. But do not trust me. I mean that. I know nothing. I just like books that are both fun and smart.

Happy reading!