Esther Bergdahl
Freelance journalist and editor, Brooklyn, New York
Why do we make things?
Things I'm Verbing
Why are we hiding from the memory of World War I?
Why is the Great War missing from American movie theaters? The void stems in part from how the U.S. preserved the war in contemporaneous media. But a greater part, perhaps, has to do with how the conflict reflects on the U.S. as a nation.
"Why Do So Few Hollywood Movies Take Place During WWI?"
Artists would be doing Americans a service by telling these stories again. Ernest Hemingway called those who came of age during the Great War "the Lost Generation"—not because they have been forgotten, but because they felt adrift after the social, spiritual, and historical rupture they'd endured. Today, for every brilliant leap forward in technology, a new and brutal development seems to announce itself. In the hands of groups like the Islamic State, media itself has been made a weapon of terror; innovation, as it did during WWI, harms as much as it helps. In the 1920s, the Lost Generation sought relief in decadence and meaning in fascism; they also tried to recapture in art the humanity that failed them during the war. We're both the inheritors of this period and, perhaps, the prologue to a similar cultural moment. One hundred years later, we might see our way clearly to alternatives the more we sit with our relevant past.
Pacific Standard, June 27, 2017
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Where to Read Me
Chicago RedEye
Screwball Heroine
Things I'm Verbing: Flora, fallout and floating birds
Things I'm Verbing: Bad conspiracies, bad monopolies and good sleep
Things I'm Verbing: Elephant seals, kidney pools and new words for a weird future
Things I'm Verbing: Lady Lindy, the Queen of Diamonds and your next Angelica Schuyler
Things I'm Verbing: Chicago Dyke March Versus Antisemitism Edition
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