Links for July 3rd
Britney Spears, bowling balls, the difficulty of being understood on the internet, Colson Whitehead + book roundup
Hello! This is back, with some links. Hope the rest of your June went well.
Links
Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino really put together a gripping and sad look at the history of Britney Spears’ conservatorship.
This is from now a full month ago, but the long Times magazine feature on Kevin Durant really is great — especially these very breezy, lucid descriptions of basketball. And this larger point from KD about his chaotic Twitter presence:
What Durant understands, he explained, is that the people writing to him aren’t actually writing to him. Kevin Durant, to them, is just an abstraction, a guy on the TV, a figment of their imaginations. So what they are doing is projecting onto him the pain or hatred or longing that they actually feel about real things in their own lives. This is why he likes to write back. He wants to show them that he is an actual human, just like them, with his own fears and hatreds and longings. He wants to connect with them on that level. Even the angry ones, he believes, have good hearts. Hatred, he told me, is just another form of passion, and therefore a sign that you’re really alive.
“I can work with that,” he said. “I want to see what’s underneath.”
Along similar lines, Emily VanDerWerff wrote a great piece this week re-examining the brutal fallout last year over a science fiction story that involved trans issues.
In lighter news, Nice Story alert: A Nats fan called the stadium to see about the rain delay and ended up talking to Davey Martinez (the manager).
I learned a whole helluva lot about bowling balls and how they’re made from this piece about people keep trying to recycle them.
Lastly, a good listen! My colleague Megha Rajagopalan who just won the Pulitzer talked with Longform about how she ended up in China for seven years, what it’s like when you meet with Chinese government officials, what it’s like when they kick you out of the country, and all the work she’s done since then.
Light book commentary
So I was at the beach, and read a few books: Colson Whitehead’s great The Intuitionist, a noir about a black female elevator inspector framed for a free-falling elevator in an ever-so-slightly parallel universe mid-century New York, where two schools of elevator inspection reign (empiricism vs. intuition). The plot genuinely keeps you on your toes and the vibe is, I would say, like the opening credits of Batman: The Animated Series. There’s some pretty scalding scenes about racism in this book; you concurrently get a detective story almost, with a philosophical bent, and a good deal of comedic one-liners. Also, this is immaterial to the plot, but the way Anchor Books is publishing Whitehead’s novels in paperback, the book and print is the right size (too many paperbacks are too big).
In new fiction, I read A. Natasha Joukovsky’s The Portrait of a Mirror, which primarily spins on the premise of: Is it worse to be guilty and perceived innocent, or the other way around? Portrait concerns two hyper-affluent, hyper-educated millennial couples, the kind who appear in the New York Times Vows column, in 2015; affairs of the heart and small-world coincidence takes place. This particular book features the only setup of an inside joke derived from work email that I’ve seen pulled off in narrative form (and various text/chat work within a broader realist bent). Very readable and a strong debut novel, though I’d be curious on someone else’s take because the book feels a little torn between sympathy and irony.
Honestly, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show was, I think, just not for me, possibly because I have never been a teenaged boy in a barren town of a few hundred people in the 1950s. That said, some lovely characters and a real vibe. On the upside, the sight of the book cover on the beach prompted my mom to tell me the entire plot of the movie Tender Mercies, which as it turns out is not a Larry McMurtry script (though honestly it sounds like it could have been), which she delivered much in the way Rita Wilson explains the plot of An Affair to Remember in Sleepless In Seattle (minus the crying), and was a highlight of the trip.
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.