Hoosiers. Our kids both play basketball, so we figured it was time to sit them down for this 1986 classic. Gene Hackman plays a new coach with a checkered past who takes over a tiny Indiana high school team and leads them on an unlikely run at the state championship. He ruffles feathers and fights to earn the respect of his players, the town, and a doubtful teacher/love interest. It’s a pleasant, feel-good movie (with an 80s synth soundtrack that feels amusingly out of sync with the 1950s setting) that makes the Indiana countryside look awfully bucolic. Great to watch after your March Madness bracket has been busted.
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man by Tom Junod. Tom Junod is widely considered one of the greatest magazine writers of his generation — he spent decades at Esquire penning the kind of long profiles that made you feel like you’d met the person. This is his first book, and it’s a memoir about his father, Lou, a charismatic, larger-than-life philanderer who cast a long shadow over Tom’s upbringing and adulthood. What starts as a son trying to understand his dad turns into something much heavier. Digging around in the past, Tom uncovers family secrets that had been buried for decades. The book is both touching and devastating — devastating in its revelations, and also in how dang well it’s written.
Devil’s Den State Park. Our family did a 16-mile spring break backpacking trip on the Butterfield Trail in Devil’s Den State Park in northwest Arkansas this week. While the Ozark Mountains don’t pack the height and grandeur of the ranges out West, they don’t mess around. There are some long, steep inclines on the Butterfield Trail that reacquainted us with the hurts-so-good satisfactions of strenuosity. We camped at a spot called Rock Hollow right next to a river, which made for a nice burbling background to our sleep. The rest of the park has a lot of pretty spots, as well as structures built by the CCC in the 1930s, which adds a cool historical layer to the whole thing. If you’re anywhere in the vicinity of NW Arkansas, Devil’s Den is worth the trip.
Americans Didn’t Panic About the Telephone. We Didn’t Need To. When concerns about what the internet and the smartphone are doing to our minds and culture are brought up, people sometimes dismiss them by saying that folks have always wrung their hands about new technologies. But as Andrew Heisel points out in this piece, that’s not actually the case. When the original telephone became mainstream, people weren’t much concerned about what it was doing to the world. That’s because it was genuinely useful, and its upsides very clearly outweighed any potential downsides. Our (legitimate) worries about the smartphone arise because we sense that, in its case, the dynamic is the reverse.
On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: Say Yes to (This) Life and DB Dialogues: Zena Hitz on the Religious Life.
Quote of the Week
All human situations have their inconveniences; we feel those of the present, but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.
—Benjamin Franklin
