Hello. Hope everyone had a delightful week, on the graded curve of our current circumstance.
Links
This piece about LeBron’s competitiveness, discipline, and sheer control over all things (good for quarantine, bad for building long-term successful teams) has a lot of depth, albeit a sad kind.
Three tributes here, of different kinds. You’ve almost definitely read the op-ed from the late John Lewis that ran this week, which can’t be matched for its concision and generosity, but in case you haven’t read that.
These tributes to John Homans, who was a longtime editor at New York magazine and others, are very lovely, and there’s a ton of great stories and lines therein.
And here is, in fact, a great obit (obviously the part about Tom Brady has captured the most attention, but the two-sentence line: “She loved to smoke. She smoked a million cigarettes.” tells you so much in like a delightful way).
If you like gossiping and running the odds on various VP contenders, you will find a lot of good material in this Times story that ran Friday afternoon (perfect gossiping and running the odds time!); sort of to my eye, the story reads as a late-breaking push by some against the probable selection of Kamala Harris. But that’s my gossiping and running the odds take.
If you like The Far Side, or were in the habit of reading the comics page, this New Yorker piece is a. really sharp about why Gary Larson was so funny, and also b. makes some interesting points about why those comics stood out at the time.
Some black barbers in Mississippi have been taking mental health training — really interesting story about that, with also just a lot of little details and quotes about why people like the atmosphere of a place like a barbershop in the story.
Marc Maron talked about the late Lynn Shelton with the Times, and why he’s continued doing his podcast, etc., in the wake of her death. (I am not a listener, and I found it worth reading and quite sad, so for what that’s worth.)
Meanwhile, personal fav Allen Iverson did a quick Q&A here, which includes him saying that Vince Carter is a “top-five dancer” on earth.
Some light book commentary
After reading this Donna Tartt piece on Charles Portis, I ended up reading The Dog of the South, which definitely squarely fits in the “social comedy book that’s actually funny without being incredibly depressing” oeuvre. Portis, best known for True Grit, really is a master of consistent voice, and set ups for little jokes and asides or big set pieces (like an extremely funny one in which two kids accompany the hero), as the protagonist Ray Midge drives through Texas, Mexico, and into Honduras trying to retrieve his Ford Torino that his wife and his wife’s first husband have stolen.
Other entries in this oeuvre include Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (English graduate student has a terrible time of it in the 1950s), Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (American girl has a terrible time of it in 1950s Paris), and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (American girl has a terrible time of it following a guy from Harvard to Hungary in the 2000s). All funny books that don’t make you want to jump out a window. My favorite genre!
(Fair warning: In Dog of the South, two villain characters use racial slurs, but for a book that involves someone taking a road trip in the 1970s through Mexico, Honduras, and Belize, the book is otherwise — to my eye, anyway — largely free from the casual or broader, more paradigmatic racism and sexism that occasionally jumps out at you in books from the era.)
If you’re looking for like a fairly funny but low stakes book: The Dog of the South (or any of the ones above).
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.