We are what we eat

Ansel Adams fills us with wonder. So does Hamilton, Dr. Seuss and Toni Morrison. Rachel, Tucker, Maureen and Rush fill us with something else. What are you heaping on your plate these days?

For some time now, it’s been an agreed upon fact that if you can afford to make fruits and vegetables part of your daily diet, you should. Expensive, perishable and not as fun as pizza but nonetheless, we eat them if we can because they help keep our insides running smoothly. What may have been easier to ignore is that what we put in front of our eyes and into our ears changes our insides too.

As anyone who has ever cried reading a book or danced to music can attest, we can be made to feel anything. From vitriol to boredom to tear-jerking compassion, we choose our emotional state when we choose our media. Will we gorge on delicious righteousness, soothe ourselves with carby platitudes or fill our plate from less unappetizing salad bar of nuance and agonizing complexity?

There’s nothing terribly fun about facing the world as it is. It takes a certain kind of intellectual stamina to go looking for different versions of the story, where you will undoubtedly discover you are at least a little wrong, somewhat misinformed, biased, out of date or stuck in partisan thinking.

But of course we are. We’re just people, people emerging from idiosyncratic childhoods run by slightly older people coming out…