Decomposure: Caitlin Doughty and The Order of the Good Death

The University of Chicago Magazine just published my profile of Caitlin Doughty, the person that you really want to bury you. Caitlin’s a practicing mortician, the founder of The Order of the Good Death, and, according to some, “the Bill Nye of Death.” She produces the delightfully macabre web series “Ask A Mortician.” Here’s a link to the online version of the piece, though I prefer this, a pdf of the piece with more photos and a more sophisticated layout.

Caitlin tends to say things like this:

“All of these things that we’re doing, like embalming and heavy sealed caskets, to keep our body from going through that natural process [of decomposition] are denial mechanisms. They’re tangibly, factually denial mechanisms. That’s just a fact. You can think that’s more important than not – you can say, ‘oh but it’s very important that we do this because it’s what makes us human, its what makes us a more sentient, higher being.’ You can say that. But it is a lie that you’re telling yourself. I’m not saying that it’s not a beautiful lie and that it can’t mean a whole lot to people and can’t bring them great comfort in their time of death. But it is a lie.”

The Future of Longform Journalism

This Monday, March 4th, I’ll be hosting an all-star crew of writers and editors for a discussion about the state of narrative nonfiction, literary journalism, longform writing, etc etc etc.

The discussion will feature David Grann, staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon; Max Linsky, co-founder of Longform.org; Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet; Evan Ratliff, co-founder and editor of the Atavist; and David Samuels, contributor to the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, and other publications.

The details:
The Future of Longform
Monday, March 4
6:30pm
Free, no reservations
The Elebash Recital Hall
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave (at 34th St)
212-817-7132

http://www.gc.cuny.edu/News-Events-Public-Programs/Calendar/Detail?id=16331

 

“Soundings” & Marie Tharp

Last Sunday, The New York Times Book Review ran my review of Hali Felt’s “Soundings,” a biography of oceanic cartographer Marie Tharp. Tharp, the first person to draft a comprehensive map of the sea floor, is one of the least acknowledged, most essential, contributors to what we know about the Earth’s surface.

Here’s a bit of the review:

The only thing mid-20th-century scientists disliked more than being wrong was being told they were wrong by a woman. Marie Tharp, barely acknowledged in her life and nearly forgotten since her death in 2006, frustrated her male colleagues on both fronts. Working at a time when female scientists set off reflex skepticism, Tharp drafted the first comprehensive map of the ocean floor, which led to the acceptance of the once-mocked, now fundamental theory of continental drift. Not bad for someone whose discoveries were initially dismissed as “girl talk.”

 

Christopher Hitchens’ “Mortality”

Back in September, The Boston Globe  ran my short review of Hitchens’ Mortality. Here’s a link.

Subversives

My review of Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power ran in yesterday’s Boston Globe. Here’s a link.

The first two paragraphs:

Paranoia masquerading as vigilance has been the catalyst for many American witch hunts, from fearful Salem to the wretched House Un-American Activities Committee. During J. Edgar Hoover’s directorship of the FBI, such aggressive suspicion — we think he’s a communist, so let’s prove he’s a communist — was often standard operating procedure. The political, personal, and social damage wrought by Hoover’s bureau is well-chronicled, but Seth Rosenfeld’s “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power” offers a grim, powerful reminder of Hoover’s ruthlessness.

“Subversives” is much more than a rehash of Hoover’s previously revealed folly, though. The product of a decades-long battle with the FBI, “Subversives” draws on 250,000 newly released FBI documents. The bureau fought Rosenfeld, a former investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle, every step of the way. But after 30 years, four lawsuits, and nearly $1 million of taxpayer money spent by the FBI to thwart his efforts, Rosenfeld lays bare the bureau’s sometimes illegal, 1960s surveillance and intervention efforts aimed at student and faculty activities on the University of California-Berkeley campus. Rosenfeld also shows us a long suppressed, unflattering side of Ronald Reagan, then an aging actor and fledgling politician.

America the…Philosophical?

Today the San Francisco Chronicle ran a version of my take on Carlin Romano’s new book, America the Philosophical. For whatever reason – the piece sat in their inventory for a bit and had to run in a smaller, Monday hole, or maybe it was too harsh – they lopped off about 150 words, in many ways pulling the piece’s teeth. Here’s a link to the published version. And below is the raw copy.

***

This isn’t a joke. “America in the early twenty-first century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, nineteenth-century Germany or any other place one can name over the past three millennia.”

Thus speaks Carlin Romano in “America the Philosophical,” his sprawling attempt at counterintuitive intellectual assertion. Rallying against ubiquitous arguments that America is the land of the vulgar and home of the lowbrow, Romano draws on several registers of American intellectual life to argue that the country is a hothouse of results-oriented philosophy. “America the Philosophical” is ambitious in concept and in scope. At 672 pages the book is even ambitious in size, which may be its most unimpeachable feature. What “America the Philosophical” ultimately proves is that sometimes ambition is really just arrogance unrestrained.

Which isn’t to say that Romano is entirely uninteresting. Let’s quickly extract the essential from the excess.

Greetings from Asbury Park

Last Sunday also saw the publication of my very short piece on Asbury Park, NJ in The New York Times Travel Section. Here’s the link. It’s a short piece focused primarily on the newly polished Bangs Avenue, which has transformed into a bit of a scene over the last year or so.