Hello, hope you’ve had a good week all things considered.
So here’s the deal, and normally this preamble will not be so long: If we’re unacquainted from the internet, I write and edit stuff mostly about campaign politics, but occasionally other weird topics, like time.
In the process, I read a lot — about politics, music, baseball, tech, America, and whatever else happens to seem like it could be interesting (including a lot of novels). But I also enjoy making a reading recommendation. At the end of every year, I put a bunch of links in a giant Twitter thread with the goal of providing you with at least one (1) thing you really enjoy and want to read.
Currently, I happen to be furloughed one day a week, and am… kicking around at home most of the time anyway, so I thought I would bring the end-of-the-year links more to an end-of-the-week situation.
Therefore: this newsletter. I’m not talking about like a ton of links. Just a handful every week. With, occasionally, a little extra commentary (such as this week) on a book I am reading or have recently read.
It is the summer, after all, and the summer is for reading. We have to get — this was the prize in elementary school for reading a certain number of books — our summer-reading painters’ caps.
Links
Check out this piece from The Athletic (subscription) on Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Paul Goldschmidt, etc., playing secret baseball games in Florida.
You probably saw this, but this NPR story on how the YMCA and New York City have taken care of health workers’ kids without major outbreaks is really interesting. As an aside: You could imagine either the New Deal or the more ‘00s public-private approach where we’d be spending billions to convert like gyms and offices into temporary schools.
Demos from boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker) online and on sale today. Should there ever be tours… again, they are great individually and together.
Was reading the Times’ obit of Carl Reiner, in which they linked to this joint Mel Brooks–Reiner interview from 2009, which is a real delight.
This piece on Reiner is also good, and gets into what must have been an incredibly difficult creative experience but a formative one for his career — getting passed to over to play himself.
This is from a while back, but if you haven’t read the old people issue (literally) of New York, you really can’t go wrong, but there’s a great (but extremely grim) story of a woman surviving the Holocaust; one of a 100-year-old player in the West Village; and plenty more.
Likewise from a while back, in case you missed, there’s this great almost short-story essay of a piece in the Times about black New Yorker kids visiting their family members in the South, featuring stellar photos from Andre D. Wagner.
The Athletic also had a great anonymous survey of NBA GMs on the things they’re worried about with the coming season. (As one non-GM says therein, “I think it’s a good plan; it’s reasonable. (You’re) trying to balance the needs of — this is a big business that employs a lot of people, and we can’t be on indefinite lockdown forever. (But) it’s not a completely safe plan, and I don’t know that there is a completely safe plan.”)
For cool stuff to look at:
Lot of people with cool style holding plants in line at this plant store on a Saturday afternoon here (and little interviews).
Here’s a full-blown kitchen renovation before/after in a very old house.
Light book commentary
Preface: I am aware that this is the height of extra. But since I didn’t have to lug the book around anywhere and a physical copy was already here, I’ve now read The Power Broker — Robert A. Caro’s breakdown of how Robert Moses amassed atomic power in New York City and built things in his image. A total banger!
Much like a 19th century novel, there’s a level of “you gotta want it,” and corresponding “how much do you want it” chapters about, say, the inner-workings of a mid-tier municipal committee that last met in 1934. But once you clear that threshold, you move from “do I really need to know this much about a park on Long Island” to “goddamn are they really going to run that highway through that park??” to “how did anyone ever stop him????” If you’re considering actually reading it, though, at this juncture, two elements very relevant to this moment.
a) Moses built these beautiful beaches on Long Island — but made all the overpasses 12-feet high, such that buses could not pass under them, more or less reserving these beaches for New York City’s upper-middle-class car owners of the day. Middle-class and wealthy white people got playgrounds; nonwhite people of all classes and poor white people did not. A little of the phrasing on this front is dated (“slum” really sounds weird to the 2020 ear) but you can really see both deliberate and accidental structural inequality get built into a city through this book.
b) Occasionally, things can seem a little “back in the day, when we built projects and got things done” vis a vis the New Deal or space program or whatever. Nobody could recreate the power structure that Moses put together. He wrote many of the laws that gave him power, and he concurrently held state, local, and public authority jobs, while overseeing a constant, self-perpetuating tax revenue stream that allowed him to finance future projects (amassing loads of debt) — all during an unusually formative period of American infrastructure (when the car became the default mode of transportation and the suburbs got built). On the one hand, this kind of vision and consolidation maybe are the prerequisites to really build on a big scale. On the the other hand, it was totally nuts, and ended up being exclusively one person’s vision for decades that built the underlying structure of the city — and see: point a.
c) Off-topic, and not relevant to today, one thing Robert Moses was right about: hors d'oeuvres, which he wrote — unfortuantely, in a nasty letter — should be “a few appetizing things, not a pastry competition to be judged by Pretzel Varnishers Union Number 3.”
A note on all this
So the general deal with this newsletter is a. if I don’t like it, or b. you don’t like it, or c. we both don’t like it, I will stop. Nobody needs this. The goal 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.