Longreads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser] We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. Tocqueville and Democracy’s Fall in America Samuel Gregg | Public Discourse For Alexis de Tocqueville, American democracy’s passion for equality was a potentially fatal flaw—one that religion could help address. But what happens when religion also becomes preoccupied with equality? --------------------------------------------------------------- Over the past year, lots of people, I suspect, have been reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/1840) as they ask themselves how the United States could have found itself having to choose in 2016 between two of the most unpopular candidates ever to face off for the office of president. Historical factors contributed to America reaching this political point. These range from profound inner divisions characterizing American conservatism to deep frustration with the political class, as well as preexisting philosophical, cultural, and economic problems that have become more acute. Tocqueville, however, recognized that such problems are often symptoms of subterranean currents that, once in place, are hard to reverse. A champion of liberty, Tocqueville was no determinist. He nevertheless understood that once particular habits become widespread in elite and popular culture, the consequences are difficult to avoid. In the case of democracy—perhaps especially American democracy—Tocqueville wondered whether its emphasis on equality might not eventually make the whole thing come undone. [Read More] What Comes After the Beer Snob Jake Tuck | Eater Beer poptimism: the over-thinking thinking person’s rationalization for drinking mass-market beer --------------------------------------------------------------- It was once a given in music criticism that pop music, the ear candy of the masses, was not worthy of the same intellectual consideration as rock music, especially that of the auteur or cerebral indie darling. But then, about a decade ago, a new critical paradigm took hold: poptimism. Defined most simply by the critic Jody Rosen in Slate in 2006, it’s the idea that "pop (and, especially, hip-hop) producers are as important as rock auteurs, Beyoncé is as worthy of serious consideration as Bruce Springsteen, and ascribing shame to pop pleasure is itself a shameful act." [Read More] Cover Story: Chris Pratt’s Call to Stardom Rich Cohen | Vanity Fair Chris Pratt’s rise to fame is so improbable he sees it as divinely ordained: the friend who sent him a ticket to Hawaii, the stranger who led him to a church, the actress he waited on at Bubba Gump Shrimp. Recalling the leaps of faith that turned him from a door-to-door salesman into a box-office king, Pratt considers what he has to prove now. --------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Pratt wanted to cook me lunch—you can tell a lot about a person by the way they cook. And not just any lunch—a lunch made from an animal that Pratt himself had killed, in Texas, where the mesquite blooms and the buzzards turn and the wild boar does not care nor even know that the handsome man sighting the scope of a .25-caliber Winchester is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, best of this new batch—it’s never who you expect—with hits behind (Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World) and hits ahead (Passengers, Guardians Vol. 2). And Pratt did kill that animal. And dressed it and shipped it back to this beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, where he lives with his wife, actress Anna Faris, and their four-year-old son, Jack. But something went punk at the butcher, and the meat was going to take a lot longer to prepare than Pratt had expected—“Most of it’s being turned into jerky anyway”—so the steak Pratt was basting on the counter in his modern kitchen had in fact been purchased at Whole Foods. “I could tell you this is the boar I shot, and who would know, but, dude, I’m not gonna lie. This is not that boar, but this boar stands for that boar.” [Read More] More Than A Year After My Children’s Father Died, We’re Still Learning How To Transition Mary Katherine Ham | The Federalist These transitions are wistful and a little frightening. But after the year we’ve had, I greet them with reverence and wonder. --------------------------------------------------------------- It sounded simple enough. “Stripes in the corner?” “Yeah, the rest of the room will be peach, but the corner will be striped— gray and peach,” I said, seeing myself pulling the painter’s tape triumphantly from a flawless straight line, revealing my perfect DIY handiwork while wearing spotless cropped jeans and a tasteful cardigan, like the aspirational couples of Home Depot commercials. I winced at my own imagination. Never a calm ride, my subconscious had become prone to slamming me into previously harmless thoughts, its handling downgraded to something like a clumsy bumper car by recent tragedy. A couple. [Read More] The Epic Story of O.J.: Made in America’s Creation Angela Watercutter | Wired WHEN EZRA EDELMAN set out to make the documentary O.J.: Made in America, he had one goal: To make a five-hour movie about how the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder case became a flashpoint for talking about race and the American criminal justice system. Not only did he hit his goal, but he overshot that runtime by about three hours. “No sane person would do this,” Edelman says now, sitting in a lounge in New York’s Post Factory, where his doc was edited. “Talking about it now it’s like ‘This is fucking crazy.’ The whole thing is a huge leap of faith. You have no knowledge of what exists from an archival standpoint—you don’t know anything. You just go, ‘Let’s try to tackle this to the best of our abilities.'” [Read More] Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. 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