There is a deep fascination with shipping containers… The best reading on all of this is of course the classic The Box by Marc Levinson – but recently there are a lot more links. Here are a few more: This piece on the 60th birthday of the container – including great conversations with a longshoreman, a […]
I think I read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner some years ago when i was young, but like a great many great works of literature, it is a poem that is wasted on the youth. Its sense of regret, loss, of cussedness, of deadened lives and of an anxiety so overwhelming that cannot be overcome […]
In an extraordinary essay titled “The Smell of Infrastructure,” Bruce Robbins argues that the scaffolding of our lives, the infrastructure that carries shit and coal and lobsters and water and electricity is often made invisible. He has a rousing call to arms: Infrastructure needs to be made visible, of course, in order to see how our […]
John McPhee has taught David Remnick and Richard Stengel and a few other famous journalists to write, and apparently he is a fixture of The New Yorker, but his work is so much more interesting that those of his proteges, and I don’t ever remember having read his pieces in the New Yorker. I would have remembered […]
There is a lot to chew on here, but this sentence really struck me: “As for finance, there’s been no tendency for its executives’ pay to outpace that of nonfinancial executives. On the contrary: even during the bubble years of the 2000s, top 0.1% finance executives in public companies saw their pay rise by 52%, while nonfinancial […]
There is an amazing bit in Alan Sekula‘s magisterial Forgotten Space where Angelenos of Latino origin sit at an outdoor space drinking beers and watching enormous container ships glide towards the unloading docks and cranes. Ever since watching that, I really wanted to go visit the ports and on my trip to Los Angeles I did. LA/LB […]
There is a kind of romance around piracy. It is the romance of anti-authority figures and of a life lived not just in the margins but outside the boundaries. Just think about the masses of novels and films about piracy and the scholarship (and I will eventually write about Marcus Rediker’s extraordinary work). Or think […]
A facebook friend sent me a URL to a blogpost which introduced Sons of Sinbad by Alan Villiers… What struck me was the contention that the book was “probably the only work of western travel literature that focuses on the seafarers of the Arabian Peninsula.” I bought the book and read it cover to cover on a plane […]
