Welcome to Litsy!

While out with friends this afternoon, I was reminded of the year my kids and I hiked the same hike each week for 52 weeks, and when I got home, I read through the posts I'd published about them on my blog. This post from Week 40 reminded me of what was going on in the world in 2016, and helped explain why I felt so connected to the tagged while reading it this week: http://imperfecthappiness.org/2016/07/09/weekly-walk-40/

This series of essays written during E.B. White's first four years full-time on his Maine farm in the years immediately before and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor feels like a balm and a primer in how to balance attention to world affairs with pursuits that ground us in the daily world in which we spend most of our time. The essays are conversational and humble, and provide glimpses of the man who will become the author of Charlotte's Web.

I was recommending the tagged book to my 16-year-old son because he enjoys history, and I'm finding it a unique perspective on how to live one's everyday life as authoritarianism is spreading and fascist apologists are cropping up. He was on board until I told him the title, at which point he laughed heartily because, while he's quite an intellectual kid, he remains a 16-year-old boy.

No one writes like E.B. A (frickin) Men.

Clubs, fraternities, nations—these are the beloved barriers in the way of a workable world, these will have to surrender some of their rights and some of their ribs. A ‘fraternity‘ is the antithesis of fraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality...