T Magazine: Editor’s Letter | Think Big

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 17 November 2013 | 17.35

I had the odd coincidence of reading Lawrence Osborne's piece on Burma — in which he examines the country today alongside the one George Orwell wrote about in his first novel, "Burmese Days" — at the same time my husband happened to be reading Orwell's "1984″ aloud to our children.

Osborne's piece is the kind of travel story I admire most, one in which layers of history, literature, politics and personal observation come together to explain and interpret a place that would otherwise remain obscure. When he describes how "Yangon's old British buildings have the look of Gothic ruins gone astray in a tropical forest that cannot accommodate their scale," I get the kind of understanding more frequently garnered from fiction than nonfiction.

Listening to "1984," my daughter was fascinated by the idea of a noose tightening around language. Newspeak aims to confine vocabulary — substituting ungood for bad — so that opposition can no longer be expressed. She was struck by how the absence of language could limit thought. At the same time, I was struck by the way that Osborne's expansive language was broadening my own thinking.

Here at T, we try to find writers who will expand the way we think on a given topic, be it a country, a person or something percolating in the culture, like the lifestyle one-upmanship so prevalent on Instagram. In our Sign of the Times column, Sarah Nicole Prickett describes the phenomenon of insecurity that comes from trawling through other people's Instagram feeds, looking at the not-entirely-real snapshots other people post. Zeke Turner offers a new way to look at Transylvania — as a place that has become a local incubator for so many international art stars. Jeff Gordinier examines why busy, successful urban women might want to head out West, saddle up, hunt and even gut wild game. And Kurt Andersen discovers what his fellow Nebraskan, the director Alexander Payne, finds so irresistible about their home state — so much so that he has chosen to live and work between there and Los Angeles.

No matter where the journey takes us, T tries to broaden how we see things and to make sense of the cultural moment we live in. If we manage to do that and to entertain you as you make your way through these pages, count us as happy editors.


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