November Recommendations
Masechet Zevachim: I often have daf yomi related recommendations, and here is another one. (Recommendation: learn mishnah first if you are compelled by daily learning!) Last time I learned it, all of Seder Kodshim felt like a slog. This time, perhaps now that there is less pressure in my second daf yomi cycle, I am finding Zevachim incredibly endearing, The Rabbis just love the Beit Hamikdash in their imaginations so much! They are so deep in world-building; Zevachim is like the first part of a fantasy novel where the author lays out the magic system in great detail, including the little maps in the front. It’s so cute and sweet and actually helping me get into the weeds about sacrifices and understand them better.
“The Internet is a city” by Tara Isabella Burton
I came of age when the internet was fun. The internet was the vehicle for my discovery of feminist blogs, progressive (and later leftist) politics, funky fashion, and a general entire world of ideas and creativity beyond what I was exposed to in person. (A careful reader will note that I ignored “fandom” in this list – that too, but I feel cringe about it.) And I miss that Internet, and have reveled in the tastes of it in the resurgence of independent essay platforms. Tara Isabella Burton, one of my favorite writers, recently published a gorgeous essay on what the Internet is now, including how one ought to engage, that I cannot stop thinking about. Here’s an excerpt:
For all that the Internet can be an atomizing place, after all, it’s also a place where we can come into contact with so much, too much, that shapes us. And we can come in contact, too, with a surfeit of ways to interpret that information. I can delegate the ability to form an opinion on an article I’ve read, a book I’m working through, a show I’ve watched, not only to Claude or ChatGPT but to Reddit, to recaps; hell, to my groupchats, whom I’m sometimes guilty of consulting before I’ve spent sufficient time in solitude to form my own opinion.
What interests me most about the Internet, in other words, is not the much-vaunted loneliness it is supposed to engender but rather its opposite: the teeming nature of real-life friends and internet friends and interlocutors and also celebrities and journalists and Substacks we admire and also memes and takes and opinions and brainworms. There is nowhere, on the Internet, to be truly alone. Even a night scrolling Reddit feels to me, sometimes, like eavesdropping in a noisy bar. To be intensely suspicious of the Internet, as Paul Kingsnorth is, would require me to be intensely suspicious of cities. Kingsnorth of course is. But I’m a New Yorker. I love New York too much to hate cities. I love cities too much to hate the Internet.
I love (and miss!) New York, so this hit me hard. If you read and love this essay, I then recommend “Bad Traditionalism,” an earlier essay of Burton’s that has been one of my very favorite pieces of writing for years.
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