What role does service play in your life?
Travels with Charley #6
Hi readers,
Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.
Where I’m living
The world feels dark right now, and I hope you’re taking care of yourself and your loved ones. I hope, too, that you’re standing up for your ideals in the ways that are possible for you, whether that’s by donating to effective on-the-ground nonprofits, calling your representatives, attending a protest, learning, or having difficult conversations with your people. As a person, I’m mourning and reeling from the deaths of innocents in Palestine and Israel, and as a Jewish American, I’m reckoning with our country’s complicity and support. I’m trying to bear witness, learn, hold my elected officials accountable, and generally show up.
I’ve been thinking often about how to show up in a sustainable way. So far, what seems right is to build in donating and volunteering so that it’s a part of how I live in times of crisis and calm. I’ve thought about the practice of tithing, which historically (Biblically) meant giving 10 percent of your earnings or production to your religious organization. Personally, I’m trying to establish a practice of regular donations to those in need (although not through a religious organization); this year, I’ve started to donate 1 percent of my gross income to a different nonprofit each month. It’s nothing like 10 percent, of course, but I’m hoping to increase it every year. There’s so much that I’ve been given, and I want to make a start at giving onward.
If you’re interested in sharing, I’d be interested in hearing about what sustainable service looks like for you, whether giving time or money or expertise. What traditions or teachings have shaped your perspective?
I’m also trying to think proactively about how I’m taking in the news. I think back to how Jenny Odell wrote about the “context collapse” of social media in How to Do Nothing — how seeing a post about children dying in Gaza next to a vacation photo next to a job listing next to a post about endangered whales leaves our brains overwhelmed and unable to engage meaningfully. Here’s Odell, writing about how the natural world (in this case, birds) provide meaningful context, while social media strips away context and precludes understanding:
It's pretty intuitive that truly understanding something requires attention to its context. What I want to emphasize here is that the way this process happened for me with birds was spatial and temporal; the relationships and processes I observed were things adjacent in space and time. For me, a sensing being, things like habitat and season helped me make sense of the species I saw, why I was seeing them, what they were doing and why. Surprisingly, it was this experience, and not a study in how Facebook makes us depressed, that helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally.
Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we’re assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can’t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn’t make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.
It’s a compelling argument for getting off social media, both for our own mental wellbeing and for being more effective, present citizens.
What I’m reading
I love the rhythm and sonic delight in “Signs, Music” from Raymond Antrobus (full poem and recording of him reading it here):
The first word my son signed
was music: both hands, fingers conducting
music for everything—even hunger,
open mouth for the choo-chew spoon
squealing mmm—music.
I read The Bell Jar for the first time in years and it’s so much more funny, clever, astute, and self-aware than I remember. This book is not a downer! It’s a masterful perspective from a sharp narrator on what it’s like to mentally unravel and then put yourself back together. Read the imagery from Esther Greenwood meeting her psychiatrist below (Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar):
Doctor Gordon waited. He tapped his pencil — tap, tap, tap — across the neat green field of his blotter.
His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds fringing two green, glacial pools.
Christine Smallwood with such fine, funny differentiation between characters (The Life of the Mind):
Dorothy was at the age where choices revealed themselves as errors, increasingly acquiring the patina of irrevocability. For Rachel, life’s tragedies still had a premature, anticipated quality; they were romantic… listening to Rachel prattle on about Berlioz, and lower her voice at the word “opium,” as if it were the scandale of the season, that was a bridge too far, sororally speaking.
I’m always a Miriam Toews booster, but I’ve been re-reading her lately for her unparalleled descriptions (A Complicated Kindness):
I’d call the aura at our house a perversely peaceful one of hushed resignation. A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad’s socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh, unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you?
What I’m wondering
Are there books that you go back to and re-read? Have you had a different experience re-reading it than you did the first time?
What’s an unexpected friendship in your life?
What I’m writing
As conservatives reshape public education, many liberal parents are making a previously unimaginable choice: to homeschool their kids. For the past six months, I’ve talked with moms, largely in Florida, who were pushed into homeschooling by recent changes to their kids’ schools. One mom reached the breaking point when all the books were removed from her daughter’s elementary school library; another when her sixth-grade twins were taught that Manifest Destiny referred to Native Americans who “decided to move away for more land”; another when teachers were discouraged from using the word “slavery” in US history class; another when her trans son couldn’t use the boys’ bathroom.
This shift has ramifications for the homeschooling movement, which has historically been conservative and Evangelical; for the public school system, which is at risk of severe defunding; for working moms, who are being pushed out of the workplace to teach their kids; and for the under-resourced families who have no choice beyond public school. Read more in my feature for Bloomberg Businessweek. You can also listen to me talk about the story on the Bloomberg Businessweek Podcast.
Remember how DeSantis operatives flew immigrants from South Texas to Martha’s Vineyard? For ACLU Magazine, I wrote about what happened for those families after the spotlight moved away. In shocking and welcome news, DeSantis’ illegal stunt may have given the immigrants a path forward to staying in the U.S.
The Halloween issue of The New York Times for Kids is always a delight. This year, I profiled the guy who’s in charge of sending messages to extraterrestrials (meet Doug) and answered urgent mysteries, like where our missing socks go and why everyone else’s farts smell worse than our own. (Nothing feels professionally humbling quite like leaving a voicemail for a gastroenterologist: “I’m Charley Locke, a reporter with The New York Times for Kids, and I’m hoping to ask you a few urgent questions about stinky farts.”)
yours,
Charley
Love this!