#nathan heller

[lilbowchic]

Matthieu Blazy in conversation with Nathan Heller for Vogue

[apocryphics]

Nathan Heller, The End of the English Major

[doyouknowthisjewishcharacter]

Do you know this Jewish character?

Nathan Heller from Nathan Heller (book series)

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Voting ended onSep 16, 2024

[luxe-pauvre]

It matters only because everything matters. Didion once wrote, “Style is character,” and, because the phrase has seemed to apply to her life and work, it often gets quoted to mean that character comes down to nothing more than style. But the line, which appears in an essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, is actually about the burden of creative choice. “Every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character,” Didion wrote. Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are. Didion praised O’Keeffe for “hardness” in trying to render in art what sensible people told her was unrenderable. “ ‘The men’ believed it was impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O’Keeffe painted New York,” she wrote. She was impressed by O’Keeffe’s snubbing of those who received her work devotedly but unseriously: “This is a woman who in 1939 could advise her admirers that they were missing her point, that their appreciation of her famous flowers was merely sentimental.” And she lauded O’Keeffe’s frank engagement with her time. “She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees,” Didion wrote, and she meant it, too.

Nathan Heller, What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion

[theblackestofsuns]

Malika Favre’s illustration of Joan Didion for Nathan Heller’s piece on her latest essay collection in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

[newyorker]

Debt: A Reading List

“My Misspent Youth”

“I’m twenty-nine years old, and I am completely over my head in debt. I have not made a life for myself; I have purchased a life for myself.” 

“A Student-Debt Revolt Begins”

“Corinthian Colleges’ downfall has come to be seen as a symbol of the ills of for-profit higher education—the false promises of employment, the mounting student debt, the aggressive collection tactics.”

“Killing It”

“A generation has inherited a world without being able to live in it. A young college graduate might now find herself in a position akin to a homeowner with negative equity.”

“Pay Up”

“In the greater Buffalo metropolitan area, more than five thousand people earn a living as debt collectors. That’s more than the number of taxi-drivers, bakers, butchers, steelworkers, roofers, crane operators, hotel clerks, and brick masons combined.” 

“The Scold”

“Mr. Money Mustache is the alias of a forty-one-year-old Canadian expatriate named Peter Adeney, who made or, more to the point, saved enough money in his twenties, working as a software engineer, to retire at age thirty.”

“Take the Money and Run”

“A universal basic income, or U.B.I., is a fixed income that every adult—rich or poor, working or idle—automatically receives from the government. Unlike today’s means-tested or earned benefits, payments are usually the same size, and arrive without request.” 

[lemond]

Photos by Janet Delaney in Nathan Heller, "What Public Life Used to Look Like in San Francisco’s Mission District," The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/what-public-life-used-to-look-like-in-san-franciscos-mission-district

[luxe-pauvre]

In Ohio, she [Elizabeth Anderson] wore a loose black dress, trimmed in hot pink, over billowing pants and black flats. (“Feminists work to overcome the internal obstacles to choice—self-abnegation, lack of confidence, and low self-esteem—that women often face from internalizing norms of femininity,” Anderson, who holds a joint professorship in women’s studies, has written.) She crossed her right leg over her left and blinked as students formulated questions. She takes great pleasure in arranging information in useful forms; if she weren’t a philosopher, she thinks, she’d like to be a mapmaker, or a curator of archeological displays in museums. […] As the students listened, she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society. Unlike a hardscrabble peasant community of yore in which the only skill that anyone cared about might be agricultural prowess, a society with many valued arenas lets individuals who are good at art or storytelling or sports or making people laugh receive a bit of love. “Is the idea that we expand the number of values so that everyone gets a piece of the scene?” a young woman asked. She was trying to understand how hierarchies of esteem could be compatible with equality. “Or is there some sort of respectable limit, so we’re, like, We’ve sort of found the things we value, and you’ve got to aim for one of them!” […] Addressing the student’s question, she posited endless innovation within general values. “Like, every society has music, and great musical performers always get esteem,” she said, extending her forearms in a teddy-bear position of embrace. […] “If you look back at the origins of liberalism, it starts first with a certain settlement about religious difference,” she said. “Catholics, Protestants—they’re killing each other! Finally, Germany, England, all these places say, We’re tired of these people killing each other, so we’re going to make a peace settlement: religious toleration, live and let live.”

Nathan Heller, The Philosopher Redefining Equality