Links for July 4

M&Ms, grief, a/c, the midterms, "The Third Man," Javier Marías

Hello, I apologize for the lack of newsletter last week. Things were just too busy. But here on July 4th, the day where we honor America (our beloved, great, messed up country), it is back. Go USA soccer. And thank you to the Boerum Bulletin for the new subscribers.

Links

“Besides, what did science really know about death, or what happens afterward?” This piece from Amanda Petrusich about a specific kind of therapy and the year after her husband suddenly died is good.

This contains sentences like, “A single chocolate M&M takes 12 hours to make.” One hundred people at Mars are working on making M&Ms naturally dyed, which has proven difficult with blue and, surprisingly, brown (this also puts in mind this Daria line).

They don’t have enough a/c in Europe. And there’s a whole theory of how long soccer players need to acclimate to our weather.

Balogun’s comments after getting that red card are very honorably old school and restrained.

In terms of how it’s going for the Mets, meanwhile, here’s Juan Soto describing his relationship with Francisco Lindor: “When you meet a girl, you don’t start kissing her right away.”

This has some interesting stuff about how Democrats have struggled, a bit, with their Senate roster.

In terms of the vibe, beautiful kitchen and beautiful New York City crowd.

Light book commentary

So, in this space, I’ve been quite busy recently. I haven’t read much, but I am going to the beach today. But I wanted to throw out two things in the space of noir, if you will.

A couple weekends ago I caught The Third Man at Film Forum (where it’s still playing this weekend if you don’t want to be in 100-degree heat). Talk about a crisp one-hour-and-forty: deceit, mystery, ill-fated romance, Graham Greene, beautiful shots, striking shadows, crazy interiors from post-WWII Vienna, visions of others that won’t be dislodged.

And in the interest of jump-starting the reading, I had seen mentioned Javier Marías’s final novel, Tomás Nevinson, in an interview with a politician, and was like what the hell, why not? The premise involves a cerebral, retired spy pressed back into service to determine which of three women is a former ETA/IRA terrorist. Much of the book deals with certainty, uncertainty, guilt, how much regret should matter, and who decides what justice means.

There are, as such, some weighty ruminations with relevance to life broadly these days. For instance:

There was, though, another motive behind my decision to return to active service, to accept this mission: the only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and center, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.

I don’t know that I love this book (and feels like one where the ending will dictate how I feel about the whole), but I like it.

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.