Hello. Yet another thrilling week here in the ol’ US of A.
In the event you missed it, I published a piece, on the subject of the pandemic, this year, and America. It also features photos, including the one above, by me. This ended up taking up a bit of the week, so there are fewer links, but they’re surely good ones.
Links
Why didn’t Ruth Bader Ginsburg retire when Democrats held the White House and Senate? Emily Bazelon has some interesting reporting about that here; she also advances an argument about Ginsburg wanting to be a liberal majority’s senior justice.
Why are kids less susceptible to the coronavirus? This smaller study is interesting on that.
Likewise, the Times has also published some interesting stories about the different vaccines in trials, how that works, and their relative merits — like the Johnson & Johnson one, which apparently would only be one dose and not require freezing.
Rare good news about voting here, on the subject of how you can track your ballot in most states should you mail it. One thing we were recently talking about in a work context is, you know, but for the last 20 years, centuries and centuries of mail got sent and delivered without recipient having much automatic way to track its arrival — something we’ve rapidly become unaccustomed to, particularly post-iPhone.
It’s actually really hard to tell what’s going on in any given state at any given moment in relation to the 2020 election. One of my colleagues, a Minnesota native, went to Minnesota to cover how the suburbs were interpreting Trump’s law and order push — instead, by the time she got there, people were no longer saying that Minnesota was a battleground, then Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death was announced during a Trump rally. Practically nobody she talked to about that (interesting interviews in there) knew what to think. This is a great read about how people try to make sense of any election — especially this one.
If you like Sharon Van Etten (who released a great B-side from Are We There this week!), this is thoughtful about her first full album, Epic.
This is a sharp piece about Jeff Zucker and how he helped create through reality TV and CNN the Trump presidency, and the way viewers can turn on the medium.
Light book commentary
Circling back on the presence of Napoleon in War and Peace: One thing that’s interesting to me about the way the Great Novels of the 19th century get packaged and sold is they tend to pitch a single plot for the reader. Specifically: Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. Both really have two main characters (Lydgate and Dorothea in the former, and Anna and Levin in the latter) and sprawling plots that take up many major secondary characters for serious stretches of the plot, in addition to the long slog through, respectively, English medical reforms of the 1830s and Russian land reforms of the 1870s. The big, emotional peak of Middlemarch actually rests in a major character’s subtle absence from about 100 pages, and their earnest, triumphant return to the action. But those novels often seem described as being more singularly about female protagonists — maybe because that’s easier to contemplate for the prospective reader. (Anna Karenina is also obviously called Anna Karenina, which is probably a big part of it, but the book is also paired pretty frequently with Madame Bovary as realist works that take the fallen woman as a complicated figure, except the latter is really exclusively about the titular — and awful — Madame Bovary, where Anna Karenina is so much more, including about the central character.)
Anyway, the point is: I had no real idea what those books would be about when I read them, and other than a loose bet that War and Peace would contain both war and peace, I had zero idea what that book would be about either. (Answer: the Napoleonic wars.) But even if I had known, I would not have guessed so much of it would be devoted to Tolstoy roasting Napoleon 45 years after he died.
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.