thoughts on mourning on social media in slate:
“Social media may make it easier to launch a stream of frown-y faces into the ether, but Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invent the impulse to reach out when you’re hurting. Perhaps it’s the ephemerality of online mourning that trivializes it—the word limits mocking death’s enormity…Social media platforms favor a tone of snark and irony, not earnestness, which can make plaintive expressions of grief hard to parse. And since we use Twitter and Facebook in part to create a public persona, our posts always run the risk of appearing self-promotional, inauthentic: It’s never quite clear whether someone is actually upset about the latest Hollywood overdose or just trying to seem that way. Of course, this makes our online interactions pretty much the same as our offline ones: a stream of true and false statements mixed together, adding up to a social self that is sort of us and sort of not.”
roger ebert on life, death, dirt and the stars in a beautiful and hopeful essay in salon
“I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
terry gross talks to maurice sendak about growing older (illustrated by christoph niemann)