John Berger spent a meaningful portion of his life thinking, with precision and care, about how to look at the world—an effort he detailed in numerous essays and books, among them Ways of Seeing and About Looking. “Reading them, you often feel you’re standing next to him in the museum or even looking through his eyes at a painting or a sculpture,” writes A.O. Scott. “You pay attention to his attention.” Scott, an attentive reader himself, brings Berger’s lifelong project into our famously distractable era; his consideration of Berger is a primer for observation and study, a gentle nudge to focus, lest we lose sight of something essential.
Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.” That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.
Thousands of small, often obsolete dams are blocking fish migrations across the United States. In this piece, Ben Goldfarb explores the growing movement to remove these barriers—despite political, economic, and emotional obstacles. He asks, “Can government agencies and conservation groups pick up the pace of dam removal while fish are still around to benefit?”
The Eastern Seaboard’s most enthusiastic purger of dams has long been Plymouth, Massachusetts, and one weekend I visited during its Herring Festival, a celebration of the resurgent alewife population that annually runs up Town Brook, the stream at Plymouth’s heart. The day was cool and damp, and I followed a posse of dads in Red Sox sweatshirts and kids in rainboots up the path that paralleled the creek. Someone had chalked “LOOK FISH” on the asphalt, and I glanced streamward to find alewives holding in small pods, weaving around each other in their effortless way.
Earlier this year, during an appearance on Kareem Rahma’s popular Subway Takes show, Jasper Craven explained line-crossing ceremonies, in which sailors celebrate first crossings of the equator. In US naval history, line-crossing ceremonies have at times involved violent hazing. But they have also involved pageantry, ritualistic performances of masculinity and femininity that tip over into drag. “Young men want love, support, community,” Craven said. “The military provides a permission structure to show love, often in very pure ways.”
It’s a characteristic insight from Craven, a freelance reporter who has made a singular beat from the intersection of masculinity and the American military. In his magazine features, Craven has scrutinized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s opposition to women in the armed forces via Hegseth’s undergraduate fits over The Vagina Monologues, and profiled Bernarr McFadden, a bodybuilder and publisher who oversaw two military schools “to impose his love of physical strength onto American children, the War Department, and the world.” Craven’s recent book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t, follows some of our most insidious models of masculinity back to the military education programs that have shaped them for centuries.
Craven is a dynamic counterexample to the men he writes about, less interested in bulking up the boundaries of his identity than testing their limits. For a memorable Harper’s feature, he spent six months undercover as an employee of the world’s largest private-security firm. (During his first shift, a supervisor criticized Craven for his non-detachable necktie, which could be used to strangle him.) He is at once stridently critical and deeply compassionate. (He is also, as you’ll learn, deeply and truly funny.)
“There are myriad other ways to prove your manhood, and they’re not simply being emotionally vulnerable or non-violent,” Craven told an interviewer earlier this year. “You can actually fight for things: fight for peace, be a little risky, be a little reckless, break the law, put your body on the line. If it’s around a morally sound mission, that can feel incredibly validating.” I don’t take a lot of heart from the men Craven writes about, but I take some heart from his work.
—Brendan Fitzgerald
Where did you grow up?
Peacham, Vermont.
What places feel like home?
The sluiceway at Gull Pond in Wellfleet, Massachusetts; Tom’s Diner in Brooklyn, New York; The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
My folks, both filmmakers, shielded me from television and other mainstream entertainment as a child. Much as I resented their restrictions at the time, they forced me to troubleshoot my taste through the physical media available in our home, a beautiful process of discovery tinged by family lineage that I wish was still widely practiced. Nothing got me more excited than the films of Charlie Chaplin. I’ve consumed all his films, and The Great Dictator is my favorite. It is what much of my journalism aspires to be: narratively compelling, funny, and unflinching.
What is your favorite time of day?
I’ll take any time on the weekend. On workdays: I like the mornings for research and making calls, and evenings for writing. To me, the midafternoon is almost always a slog.
What are you really good at?
Guessing what time it is without a watch.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
I love Cold War ephemera. My two favorite gifts are a vintage poster of Dr. Strangelove and a Vietnam-era Snoopy Zippo.
Describe your favorite meal.
Negroni and a cheeseburger at Long Island Bar.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
Sound. Ideally jazz or a film score. I wrote my book about military masculinity mostly to the work of Bill Evans, Pharaoh Sanders, and the soundtracks from Jackie, Do the Right Thing, One Battle After Another, and Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War.
Where do you do your best thinking?
On bike rides.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
Hauling a golden gorilla statute across America for a crypto concern during COVID.
Where do you like to read?
New York City’s Prospect Park, my clawfoot tub, the bed.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
Disney Adult YouTube vlogs. Still haven’t emerged.
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
Probably my Harper’s dispatch on my six months undercover as a security guard.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Watching a movie or schvitzing at The Wall Street Bath & Spa.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Right now, Don DeLillo.
What words do you overuse?
Tenacious. Hyperaggressive. Amped.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
90 Day Fiancé.
What superpower would you like to have?
Like any good reporter, I’m very nosey, so probably superhuman eavesdropping. Lost about 20 percent of hearing in my right ear when a speaker blew out at a college party. Would love that back, and then some.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
I’ve got the curiosity of a cat, but I often don’t land on my feet.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
I’ll either go on a bike ride or veg out on YouTube. The duality of man.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
A hanging chad ballot. The EV Hummer. Some Trump steaks. An AR-15. My medical bills after I fell off my bike.
What does your writing space look like?
I am someone who writes anywhere and everywhere. Amtrak. Delta. Starbucks. My bed. The Wertheim Room at the New York Public Library has been the best of them all.
Jasper Craven is a freelance reporter covering men and the military for outlets including Harper’s, The New Yorker, New York, Wired, The Baffler, and The New York Times. He’s also the author of a new book for Simon & Schuster about the military’s influence on masculinity, entitled God Forgives, Brothers Don’t.
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