Hello, hope you’ve had… an all right week? These weeks aren’t really getting better.
Above, there’s another shot (but on film) of the bike protest featured at the top of last week’s edition of this. I had been in Manhattan getting food and stumbled upon this massive bike protest, which was very well organized.
Links
If you missed this interview with a family (and an eloquent doctor) whose teen sons ended up on ventilators from COVID, it really sneaks up on you.
This Joon Lee feature on high school basketball player Instagram is something — and he really gets at it from all angles, from guys who flamed out to the real deals who wouldn’t be in D-I without it to the insane pressure on LeBron’s son.
(My general, ancient stance is that we need to let most of the teens cook more — be they basketball player, activist or voter of any leaning, celebrity, or otherwise — before they become national concerns as while they should be taking everything seriously, the attention of thousands of people is a challenge, and it’s hard to undo the elevation of those stakes if at some later date said teen doesn’t want that attention anymore. Put the teens back in the oven.)
Very few reporters have spoken to Muslims who’ve been in detention camps in China — my colleagues spoke to 28. The stories are basically like The Trial.
This is sharp on the question of what exactly the GOP believes in the era of Donald Trump. And of the profiles that came out during the RNC and DNC, this one on Don Trump Jr. opens up his area of politics (and his potential appeal to voters) best.
Good, short interview with Amy Sherald, the artist behind the Breonna Taylor cover of Vanity Fair (and Michelle Obama’s portrait), on how she approached that cover.
On the subject of health officials trying to stave off a run on masks and subsequently giving bad advice for months, this quote from Zeynep Tufekci was interesting (within a larger piece about her broader, mostly dark predictions coming true these last few years):
“They didn’t trust us to tell the truth on masks,” she said. “We think of society as this Hobbesian thing, as opposed to the reality where most people are very friendly, most people are prone to solidarity.”
In lighter news, here are which animals you can and cannot ship via the U.S. postal service.
Light book commentary
Happened to read Helen Oyememi’s Gingerbread, which on the sentence level contains some real dazzlers and funny lines that do a great high-brow, low-brow tonal mix. On the broader level, this is a strange book (Gingerbread concerns a three-generational family of women who leave a fairy-tale island and live in a magical-realist London, with a plot that covers quite a lot of ground) — but strange in the non-dark way, which, frankly, you can’t often say. Not a for-everyone book, but if you have a high tolerance for, say, a doll talking casually with regular people this could be a real delight for you (I myself enjoyed).
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.