Showing results for "David Wallace" in Social Sciences

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

Have a glimpse of things from a higher perspective

By the late 1970s, the fishermen of the Texas Gulf Coast were struggling. The bays that had sustained generations of shrimpers and crabbers before them were being poisoned by nearby petrochemical plants, oil spills, pesticides, and concrete. But as their nets came up light, the white shrimpers could only see one culprit: the small but growing number of newly resettled Vietnamese refugees who had recently started fishing. Turf was claimed. Guns were flashed. Threats were made.

The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man."

L’aclamat i malaguanyat escriptor David Foster Wallace reflexiona sobre alguns dels aspectes més importants de la vida en aquest manifest agut i profund. A mesura que busca respostes a preguntes gens senzilles, plasma les seves creences i deduccions sobre la naturalesa humana i dissecciona sense complexos una de les decisions més importants i alhora inconscients que prenem constantment: què pensem del món que ens envolta i de quina manera ho fem.