Neal Brennan Longs For Connection

Is Neal Brennan my favorite stand-up comic? Not by a long shot. But as a co-creator of Chappelle’s Show, his impact on the culture is indelible — and more than anything else, he deeply loves the art of comedy, and it’s almost never a bad idea to read conversations with people who truly love what they do.

I think artists should be able to edit their shit. You know what I mean? The same way they edit a joke that doesn’t work, doesn’t get a big enough laugh. There’s got to be some jury process, even within your own mind. I think you should be free in your first draft. You should be able to fuck around at the Cellar. But, after that, after you put it out into the world, I think people can criticize you all they want. It’s one of those dichotomies: speak your truth and live with the consequences, but, also, you’re a social animal that needs connection. I want to be able to say whatever I want to say, but also I have a glass jaw and I want total approval from everyone. And maybe that’s, like, the new human condition.

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Forest

Chinese Cambodian American writer April Lim writes a beautiful and poignant essay about her family’s escape from Cambodia to Vietnam and then to Thailand; her mother and father’s journey toward a new life in America, and reconnecting to her heritage through a bracelet passed down to her.

In my parents’ Cambodia, no records exist to prove someone’s existence. “You’re alive, you’re living, that is good enough,” my father nonchalantly states, “If you die, you’re gone, back to the ground.” Paper will never prove a life to me—I know my ancestors’ existence through scriptless stories, spoken word by spoken word, like the tale of my family’s forest that no longer exists. If a tree falls in the forest, the forest will feel it. The body decays and the tree becomes part of the forest again, back to the ground. It does not turn to paper.

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Reading Joan Didion Taught Me How to Not Write About Hawaiʻi

“I think about the many ways peers and mentors and editors have pushed me toward the stereotype of Hawaiʻi that they consume every day in popular culture,” writes Mariah Rigg. “I think about how to write away from all of this.” In this essay, Digg critiques Joan Didion’s depictions in Hawaii, namely in the essays “Letter from Paradise” and “In the Islands,” calling them reductive and prescriptive and not anything like the Hawaii she remembers — the place she calls home.

To “wrench,” to “shape,” to “render” and “remake” are largely violent verbs. They are things one often does without consent. What Didion proposes, in her literary claims to place, sounds a lot like what Trask calls deculturation, like the distortion, disfiguration, and destruction of a place and people, which are among colonialism’s main goals. What Didion is proposing resembles literary imperialism.

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Souvenirs of Climate Catastrophe

In this beautiful and haunting essay, Anna Badkhen remembers playing with amber necklaces as a child, suggesting that sentience could very well be trapped within each bead. As she considers the catastrophic repercussions of the flood and drought cycles that have taken place on Earth since the beginning of time, she writes of how humans have recorded the suffering from these weather events on “hunger stones” only visible in Europe in times of severe drought.

Each bead was a memento from a time when much of Europe and Central Asia were underwater and no ice capped the poles of the Earth, each necklace an abacus of planetary memories that I was still too young to compute into a warning.

Because of its soft warm feel and because of the insects it sometimes captured, I always suspected that amber was more living matter than gemstone. Even now it seems to me almost sentient, only a wandflick away from being able to speak and tell us all it knows—advents and vanishings of plants and animals, human and nonhuman, and of water, and of land, and even of the soil and rock that make up land: it could remind us that even terra firma is impermanent, that it, too, can migrate.

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Bed Habits

In an essay that manages to be hilarious as well as informative, Rachel Handler looks at how we sleep. Experimenting on herself, this may not be the most scientific look at insomnia, but it is one of the most fun.

I interview my partner, Adam, who falls asleep instantly, no matter if he is in a cozy bed or being dangled by his ankles over a cliff. I have often wondered if he is an undercover psychopath, and now seems like the right time to ask him. He denies the charge but confirms that he has always been an incredible sleeper. In fact, the main disrupter of his sleep is me.

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The Demon River

A year ago in British Columbia, there was a massive flood — a disaster to the tune of $13 billion in damage. It was caused by an “atmospheric river,” a type of rainstorm that flows up from the tropics into Western Canada and Alaska carrying so much precipitation that it’s sometimes called a Hawaiian Fire Hose. In this case, the river in the sky caused rivers on the ground to rise to unprecedented levels, and it changed the way that some people affected by the flooding talk about nature:

The idea of nature as something that can give warning, that can be angered, that can be — as Aldous Huxley wrote — “occasionally diabolic,” stands outside the Western tradition of science. Yet people up and down the Nicola spoke of the flooding river in that older way.

They saw the river of November 15 as a different being, with a different character. “That was the demon river from Hell,” said Michael Coutts. Charleen Johnson said the river was angry; she said, “We’ve pissed off the entities or the gods somewhere.”

Kim Cardinal said flatly, “The river has taken its land back.”

Whatever the scientific merit of these kinds of thoughts, they have had their uses. In the mountains of Europe, the mysterious movement of large boulders across long distances or high into the branches of trees, or scenes of unimaginable destruction, were long assigned to giants and dragons.

Such stories served to warn residents against building their homes in geologically dangerous places, long after the deadly events had been forgotten.

An Icelandic writer, Andri Snær Magnason, recently wondered aloud whether we, as a global society, might not have done better at protecting the planet over the past few centuries if, alongside our science, we had never given up the idea that nature could be holy or sacred or — I might add — could reach out and smite us if it was mistreated.

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Was This Professor Fired for Having Tourette Syndrome?

Barry Yeoman considers what happens when two progressive imperatives — protecting the rights of people with disabilities, and ensuring that no one experiences harassment in schools or workplaces — appear to be at odds. If you’re looking for tidy narratives or easy answers, this isn’t the story for you. For moral complexity, read on:

Conflicts also arise for students with autism, who are entering higher education in greater numbers than ever, in part because of better K-12 support services. Autistic students sometimes have difficulty reading social cues and thus engage in behaviors that, to their neurotypical classmates, resemble stalking. In college, the support services that earlier might have intervened are gone.

“You take a kid who’s had a life jacket on, and that’s how they’ve been swimming for years, and then you put them into a different pool, take off the life jacket, and say ‘Good luck,’” said Lee Burdette Williams, the executive director of the nonprofit College Autism Network. “And they just plunge to the floor of the pool. And one of the ways that happens is around their social interactions.”

The object of an autistic student’s attention might file a stalking complaint under Title IX, the federal education law barring sex discrimination. “And then you have [campus officials] swooping in to say, ‘That’s not allowed here, and now I’m going to have to sanction you,’” Burdette said. “And here’s the kid, furiously trying to stay above water.”

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