Dogs Will Fix Our Broken Democracy

We need more reasons and prods to step outside of our narrowest selves.

...The more parks, the better, though let’s be careful not to concentrate them in relatively affluent neighborhoods. And let’s throw public libraries into the mix. I’m elated to read about renewed attention to them and the reimagining of them as community centers that can draw heterogeneous crowds with a mix of needs. We need more vigorous pushes in this direction, as the sociologist Eric Klinenberg discussed in his recent book “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.” They’re one road out of a tribalism that’s tearing us apart.

And we need dogs, or at least we’re better off with them. They yank us outside of our narrowest selves. They force us to engage. In a perfect world, we’d do that on our own, but in this one, Regan plants herself squarely in front of a Central Park sprinkler, opens her jaws wide, treats the spray as an unusually emphatic water fountain and attracts an eclectic cluster of admirers who then fall easily into chitchat — about the cooling weather, the blooming skyline, new movies, old routines — that probably wouldn’t happen otherwise. We walk away feeling a little less isolated, a little less disconnected. I know I do. Frank Bruni, nyt
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Also in the Sunday New York Times:

Some guy in Murfreesboro setting the record straight about the author of The Jungle Book and William James...

For the record, William James was NOT a Kipling-esque "white-man's-burden" imperial racist. https://t.co/EzpOTEPQX4

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 1, 2019