Good morning. Hope your week went as smoothly as possible. Fewer links this week, as I have been working on a piece and can only take the news so much.
Links
Can’t, however, get enough stories about the school opening logistics and debate, and this is a great reported essay at Slate, about, specifically, whether the writer should send her daughter back to kindergarten.
Meanwhile, some health experts arguing that if any public school system reopens, it should be New York City’s, which is sort of interesting, though ventilation concerns are also articulated therein.
On the subject of New York, this piece has amazing photos from the first five months of the pandemic.
On the subject of Maureen Dowd and male-female tickets (her column today weirdly skipped over Clinton-Kaine, but whatever), her 1984 piece on the Mondale-Ferraro ticket is an all-time classic newspaper story.
This piece is both interesting about the logistics of getting something into the NBA bubble and is just funny about all the wine that is being shipped to Disney.
This is a good interview with novelist Emma Straub about running an indie bookstore during the pandemic:
There’s a lot that can happen remotely—our events and marketing folks, for example—but the actual work of getting books into people’s hands requires bodies, whether in our store, or in warehouses, and I feel deeply aware of all the labor that all of us take for granted when we order something on the internet. I will never, ever take it for granted again.
Those last two links both actually came from Jessica Morgan’s weekly link roundup at Go Fug Yourself, which I’ve been reading regularly since 2006, and not that this is material to the present, but is partly the reason I am in media at all, because I found it so funny and entertaining then. Anyway, during this current time, they’ve been particularly warm and fun, revisiting premiers from the ‘90s and early ‘00s, including little throwaway lines like this that never fail to delight me: “I forgot they dated; I also forgot that he was a mere two years out from marrying Geena Davis. Love is always around the corner, friends!”
Light book commentary
No book commentary this week, except to say if… if you’re in the market for a book about the Statue of Liberty’s construction — which you almost certainly aren’t — I enjoyed this one.
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.