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Derek Mong writes a poetry that’s part of a growing canon of fatherhood verse. Work made in the light of little children. Geffrey Davis, Benjamin Gucciardi, Niall Campbell, Dan Chelotti, Craig Morgan Teicher, Matthew Dickman—work that springs in part from the root offered decades ago by such books as Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, or Robert Hass’s “Songs to Survive the Summer.” It’s still surprising enough to see a dad doing full-time parenting work—and to see that unfolding still constitutes a refashioning of what it means to be a man-identifying person. And probably will for quite some time. In Mong’s newest, When the Earth Flies into the Sun, part of what’s at stake is the kind of vulnerability—the sense that a father’s fears are eternal and bottomless:

There’s a music, too, to Mong’s lines, a music that sticks with you. The poet, for instance, imagines his child’s life if he were to die suddenly of the heart condition he’s just discovered he suffers from:

Yes, give us human beings credit. In our relatively brief history, it’s no small thing to have come up with two different ways of thoroughly devastating Planet Earth and its inhabitants. One of them, of course, is the long-term, slow-motion version of planetary destruction that we’ve come to call climate change. And yes, we can already feel it. In recent years, this planet has set record after record when it comes to heat, the last 10 years being the hottest in human history. Meanwhile, from the oceans to the continents, in heatwaves, floods, and devastating storms, this world of ours has been feeling the heat in an unprecedented fashion and, mind you, with far worse to come. Given how obvious... Read more

Source: Climate-Change Summer or Nuclear Winter? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Dear LinkedIn Dad,

When I scrolled past your LinkedIn headline, proudly announcing your “dad” status, I paused. It’s possible that, depending on how many hours of sleep I got the night before, I may have snorted, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Let me be clear: I think it’s great that you’re a dad, and I can appreciate that you’re proud of it. My moment of skepticism is more about what it means to be able to say, proudly, that you’re a parent in a forum where you’re also supposed to be a worker. I don’t know what that’s like.

When I returned to work in 2020, just four short weeks after an emergency C-section, delirious from lack of sleep, on two different antibiotics for post-op infections and mastitis (and maybe peeing my pants a little bit, in the literal sense?), I immediately felt conspicuous.

This was not just because there was, quite possibly, spit-up in my hair during most Zoom calls.

Unlike my male colleagues, who flashed wallet-size newborn photos and talked about how fatherhood had made them better, more empathetic, and well-rounded, I was suddenly an object of concern.

Long term readers will know that I’ve been negative on Britain for a long time. Corbyn was their last chance to turn things around, but Corbyn lacked the necessary ruthlessness to win, and was destroyed by absolutely bullshit allegations of anti-semitism. Starmer became Labour leader after him, on promises of left wing policies which even a child should have disbelieved, and ruthlessly purged Labour of all left wingers.

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

From detoxes to slow food, today’s asceticism is often about fitting in. But we can rediscover its transformative power

- by Iryna Mykhailova

Read on Psyche

A rare tribe lacks music for dancing or soothing their young ones

The post This Plaintive Song Is From a Land Without Lullabies appeared first on Nautilus.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon