*The Week in 15 Selections*
Only the most recent email is available to non-subscribers. Subscribing is free!
Last week was a bad week to be me! I got a terrible ear infection and my idiot baseball team lost and I was the kind of grumpy that comes from inside even though the weather was really good. Then, on top of that, the Taylor Swift album was bad and the antibiotics made my tummy hurt. Real Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad WEEK hours over here.
Anyway, I have tickets to the game tonight, so it’s possible that this week could be radically redeemed or radically damned. Schrodinger’s week.
Here are the selections!
Tom Scocca articulated something that has been bothering me in sports and politics for a long time: the idea that to criticize the people you vote for you, you have to know how to help them do their jobs.
"Pundits nowadays all think they're really political strategists, and fans think they're all general managers, but they aren't, and they don't need to be. It's fine to judge leaders and institutions by their results."
I’m going to my first playoff game of the year tonight, which hopefully will not be my last of the year. As a girl with only one functioning ear, I recommend Mack’s wax earplugs for all your loud events. You can get them at CVS.
I’m mad to have learned about Jane Dashley’s work a week after she dropped a new collection of paintings that sold out instantly, but look at how gorgeous this one is:
I love that The Cut added Nicole Richie to their article about how super readers get their reading done.”I feel connected to my book by holding it, flipping through it, bending it.” SAME NICOLE.
I didn’t know much about the history of The Best American Poetry collection, but now that I do I have a LOT of negative feelings. Great article by Nick Sturm.
I am not often impressed by acting but how the hell did this woman get the drunk eyes so good.
“Every year from here on out — at least for the foreseeable future — colleges will face a smaller and smaller pool of prospective students and companies will see a drop-off in the number of potential workers.”
Certainly illegal and not good that the treasury is planning to mint a dollar with the president’s face on it.
I still get The Paris Review in print, and I liked this short poem by Katie Peterson.
CBS bought Bari Weiss’s garbage website for billionaire and genocide-apologists. I cannot recommend my co-worker Patrick’s article about it enough.
Look at this gorgeous house in East Falls, Philly! I LOVE IT.
Taylor Swift’s newest album is the greatest argument for logging the hell off I’ve ever heard. I’m supposed to be writing about this, but I’m not done yet.
I thought B.D. McClay on the male loneliness epidemic and what trad means for men was quite good:
“For the man, the price of a trad life is increased responsibility and decreased freedom of choice. If these guys get what they want, they figure this out pretty quickly—unless they are influencers, in which case they’ll probably sell the image.”
*******
This week I contributed to our MLB playoff preview, did my bake (back-to school week???), and wrote about a camera shattering.