This week I learned that "walking pneumonia" is a real diagnosis that you can get at an urgent care facility! I'm actually not sure if it's the correct diagnosis for what I have (or if it is less a formal viral/bacterial infection type and more just a shorthand for "hella sick but not as sick as you could be"), but I can say whatever I've got is a pretty shitty thing to have in the summer. Apologies if the selections this week have been diluted as a result.
The words they used were strange, odd souvenirs, tiny fragments that had been chipped off an alien business meteorite.
Apex Hides the Hurt, Colson Whitehead
Submitted by Ranjit.
No one but you could make rainbows sound violent.
Micaela Durand to Tamara Faith Berger in The Whitney Review of New Writing
Whitney Mallett's new biannual magazine is top-notch. The interview with Brontez Purnell is terrific and all of the reviews reminded me why criticism is such a valuable genre even as it seems like everyone can voice a take these days. The line that made rainbows sound violent, incidentally, was "The rainbow pierced my coffee cup."
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.
"Supreme Court, consider justice sponsorship!", Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post
Submitted by Paul. Was funnier when he sent it earlier in the week, I think.
This late in the world's story, everything was marketing.
Bewilderment, Richard Powers
Bewilderment is not as complex a construction as The Overstory, and the ending is both brutal and a little annoyingly telegraphed. Some reviews seemed unable to stomach the Sad Dad-ness of the novel, which is understandable, but the fact it ends in tragedy is also a bit more honest than Powers offering some hopeful path forward for his characters and, by extension, humanity. There were more poetic sentences in the novel (Powers really is extraordinary at nature writing) but this one stuck with me.
On the other hand, as a resident of Earth and a father, I’m concerned and surprised to see that pumping groundwater is another source of sea-level rise.
"We've pumped so much groundwater that we've nudged the earth's spin", blog of the American Geophysical Union
This is a quote from Ki-Weon Seo, one of the scientists who worked on the paper discussed in this article. The opening is strong, and "concerned and surprised" is a remarkable understatement. Bewilderment is mostly about a widowed scientist dad trying to raise a son who is acutely aware of the environmental catastrophe of humanity, and I thought about the intimacy of that novel's framing when I read this blog post. Something about the "on the other hand", the recognition that one's job as a scientist is to publish and make notable contributions but so much of doing environmental science is saying again and again that we're really doing it wrong while power prevaricates and postpones taking meaningful action. What I'm saying is I guess it's good I'm probably never having kids because even without them this stuff feels really overwhelming to me.
But what they have to say is consistently just dressing for the salad of hegemony.
An apparently deleted tweet (author redacted because they deleted it)
When I see good stuff I want to include in this newsletter during the week I'll sometimes just copy-paste the sentence and a url into a text file to format on Sunday. I think this was posted Tuesday? But it's gone now. It was in the context of a thread about pundits, which might be evident. The salad of hegemony is whatever kind of salad a woman in a stock photo eats alone while smiling and laughing, I think.
I met the author of this deleted tweet at a friend's birthday party once several years ago and haven't seen them since but am consistently delighted to hear their thoughts on things or see what they're working on. If this kind of sentence is stuff they think merits deletion, imagine what they're like at the top of their game. I hope that I don't lose track of their work amidst the total implosion of twitter. (Also: it's weird to be too sick to be that attentive to social media the weekend that it seems like things are really collapsing.)
If we do go up in flames, we’ll resemble an Instagram slime video.
"Archiving the 20Teens with Ayesha A. Siddiqi", Ssense
I think Ayesha reposted this older piece which brought me back to it. She has such a precise and elegant writing style. Some other bangers from this essay: