The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

I don’t save many magazine articles anymore (I filled up too many file cabinets that way while working as an Utne Reader editor), but I intend to save Jeannine Ouellette’s very fine feature on the death of the American imagination from the November 2007 Rake.

This is the kind of sweeping, thorough thought piece that is much easier for an editor to assign than for a journalist to actually report and write. Ouellette did such a beautiful job of it that by the article’s end I was inspired, despite its somewhat dire assessment of the state of things.

Too bad The Rake couldn’t have included a sidebar about Waldorf education (Ms. Ouellette is a veteran Waldorf teacher), which although no panacea, is at least one strong counter-cultural trend to the soul-deadening typical American education.