Old-world words, new-age maps
Welcome to the third installment of Not Dead Yet, my monthly-ish roundup of compelling writing. It's a little late, but it's my newsletter and I can procrastinate if I want to. Let's get into it!
Do you think of cancer as a uniquely modern disease? I hadn't ever given it much reflection, but I never really thought of cancer existing in society before Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope.
This ragged claw by Ellen Wayland-Smith gives us new words — and old words — to grapple with that "biting, grasping, greedy beast". Exploring ancient and medieval attitudes towards cancer, intertwined with the author's personal story in a contemporary hospital room, this essay will re-calibrate your thinking.
The modern English sense of the word ‘worry’ – to feel ‘mental distress or trouble’ – is of relatively recent origin. The original Old English word was much bloodier: wyrgen, to ‘strangle’, or to kill by biting and shaking an animal by the throat.
In How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement, Dean Van Nguyen celebrates and laments an era of hip-hop writing that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
I'm particularly struck by this statement, from Michael A. Gonzales, about the cultural mood in 1977:
Growing up in these surroundings—as he puts it, “the height of disco, punk, the blackout; New York is going to shit”—influenced Gonzales’s streetwise style.
There's an edge there, a cynical despair at the state of the world, that seems fitting today. Are we ready for a renaissance in hip-hop writing? Recent works by Hanif Abdurraqib and Amanda Parris appear to be carrying that torch. Let's look to the poets and the playwrights, and maybe we'll find that the golden age of hip-hop writing never left.
Before reading this article, I had never heard of The Word Movement. I suppose it's only a surprise to people who haven't been paying attention to Black writing over the last 30 years. Good thing there's an extensive reading list at the end of the article.
Alicia Elliott calls out our collective failure to engage with Black writers in her recent piece for CBC, Black Canadian writers offer us vivid portraits of Black life — but we have to actually listen.
Black writers have been putting their history on the page for decades and continue to do so today — but if most Canadians don't know this history, all that are left are stereotypes, which are continuously repeated and reinforced by elected politicians, then turned into policies that further hurt and criminalize Black communities.
Any article about maps and infographics is clickbait for me, so of course I immediately bookmarked Emma Willard’s Maps of Time when I came across the link. The webpage even has an off-the-wall design that evokes Willard's unconventional mapping techniques. Susan Schulten doesn't pull any punches with this piece, praising Willard's feminist influence while revealing her role in whitewashing America's history books.
I’d love to hear what you thought about these stories. You can reply directly to this email.
The next Not Dead Yet will come in three weeks’ time. Until then, why not forward this email to a friend who’d appreciate it?
Cheers,
Sam