Web Reads: Deconstructing the Rebel Yell

Describing a battle cry. What did the Rebel Yell sound like and how do you spell it? This essay explores the mystery of the Yell, the history surrounding the battle at Bull Run, and contemporary reporting of it: “Officer Fitzgerald Ross tells Blackwoods Magazine that the cry is a ‘terrible scream … a real Southern yell, which rang all the way down the [Confederate] line.’ Bell Irvin Wiley takes a recipe approach: ‘It had in it a mixture of fright, pent-up nervousness, exultation, hatred, and a bit of pure deviltry.’”

Do not open, unless I’m dead. When soldiers go to war, they sometimes craft death letters to be opened only if they die. Writer Carol Burke was embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan. She writes about how soldiers and others going to war cope with the idea of impending death.

Pencil pushers. This photographically rich, long-form essay about the General Pencil company shows how the family-owned business has managed to survive for more than a century by cultivating artists rather than school kids.

A myopic spell. Paul Roberts writes, “In everything from relationships to politics to business, the emerging norms and expectations of our self-centered culture are making it steadily harder to behave in thoughtful, civic, social ways.” He argues that for most of human history “our social institutions temper our myopic, narrowly self-serving reflexes … in favor of long-term commitment or investment. But today, these institutional bulwarks are under the same myopic spell as individuals are.” Christians should be thinking about the problems Roberts diagnoses.