Ok, welcome back. Hope your week went as well as it could given the circumstances of an indefinite pandemic.
I’ve switched this format up a bit for the true ease of link viewing (headline with link, commentary). We’ve got sports, books, TikTok, Joe Biden.
The links
How the NBA picked the barbers for the bubble (ESPN)
This features someone shouting, “They picked me to be a part of the NBA bubble!” and a room full of barbers and a man with shaving cream on his face cheering.
These Two Last Suppers Are My Quarantine Obsession (Jerry Saltz)
Jerry Saltz has been revisiting Renaissance paintings during the pandemic (also a painting of someone weeping, and a big one in which everyone dies), and they’re fascinating histories, with delightful and somehow grounding commentary.
Who’s Afraid of Joe Biden? (Dave Weigel)
Key point in here about how little conservative publishing there is against Biden relative to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama at this point in their respective campaigns (a theme Adam Serwer has written about tangentially, as it relates to Trump himself). As David Freddoso points out in Weigel’s newsletter, though: “If your goal is to generate interest and sell books, you're probably better off this time writing about Trump.”
Frog and Toad and Me (Phillip Maciak, Slate)
This is a bunch of children’s book authors on the merits of the Frog and Toad series, which surprisingly only spans four books!
The Lockdown Lessons Of Crime & Punishment (David Denby)
Great read if you’ve read Crime & Punishment! Denby is auditing a class at Columbia, and in this, works through the premonition at the end of the novel (which I’d forgotten about) about a pandemic and everyone losing their heads.
The New York Times on the sheep populating this island in Maine
This is from a while ago but the photos in this are amazing; it looks like some kind of film. There’s also a lamb in a bucket.
A bunch of data on who’s moved during the pandemic (Pew)
Pew’s got the statistics — it’s unsurprisingly mostly young people, but some other interesting stuff about what probably will be a long legacy of this period.
These Black Influencers Saw Their Followings Explode After The Black Lives Matter Protests. Now They Want To See Lasting Change.
Really interesting from one of my colleagues, Stephanie McNeal, talking with three black influencers on dealing with a massive influx of followers.
Would You Like to Come Over for Dinner … in 10 Years? (Sarah Miller)
Sarah Miller’s always great and this is about entertaining, but also features this paragraph:
I was very anxious about the coronavirus at the time. I was probably in the midst of reading an 1,800-word article about how some doctors thought you could get coronavirus from passing someone on the freeway if your window was down and so was theirs and you sucked in a breath of surprise at the same time they coughed if you were driving between three and five miles per hour faster than them, or maybe I was reading the article that came out the next day refuting this claim but saying maybe don’t do it anyway, just to be safe.
Conservative Teens On TikTok Are Going Through Some Growing Pains (Scaachi Koul)
You can’t beat this, like, world weary quote: “The political community on TikTok is just so toxic. I want to get away from that.”
Some light book commentary
Going extremely light here: Master of the Senate is no The Power Broker.
Less light: Was recently in a discussion about summer reading and mentioned that the last year or so I’ve ended up reading four Haruki Marukami books — Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the short-story collection Men Without Women, and, most recently, Kafka On The Shore. It’s a real romance (with deeply weird, depressing books).
But because I’ve been thinking about it again: The titular story of Men Without Women a. is extremely strange, b. has one of the more structurally interesting things I’ve ever seen in a story. The story itself is very simple: A man receives a phone call in the middle of the night that his ex-girlfriend has died, and he considers their relationship.
The story’s execution, however, is complex. The example I relate to people about this story works like this: There’s a reference, in a list of other mundane tasks, to checking air pressure in tires as one of the distractions of regular life that keeps you from watching over someone.
Then, in the next paragraph:
After she left, no one knows how wretched I felt, how deep the abyss. How could they? I can barely recall myself. How much did I suffer? How much pain did I go through? I wish there was machine that could accurately measure sadness, and display it in numbers that you could record. And it would be great if that machine you could fit in the palm of your hand. I think about this every time I measure the air in my tires.
Then, pages later, the air-pressure gauge comes back around again in a slightly different context! And it’s not just this one element of the air-pressure gauge, but perhaps eight or 10 that loop back around and weave together with slight modifications. It’s like an elaborate double-dutch jump rope structure.
I’d be interested to understand how it works in the original Japanese vs. the translation, given how seamlessly the different elements move in English. But I’m obsessed with the way it works, and how it almost shifts underneath you as you read.
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.