Good afternoon. I am writing this letter from bed, something I never do. I was drawn back to my linen cocoon by the way the sun is whitewashing the walls encompassing it; the room, awash in its illumination, feels almost as if I’m sitting on the sun itself. The sky is so blue it’s nearly disappeared, and when I look out the windows it hurts my eyes a little. It’s so hot that stepping outside this morning left me breathless, the heavy weight of the air resting on my lungs—the kind of heat that makes me not want to leave my home, but burrow into the brightness of the day from inside. I’ll venture back outside for longer than it takes to walk my dog once the sun begins to lull herself to sleep, when it’s time to get in the car and drive up a series of hills, where at the end, we will perch atop a mountain, surrounded by thousands of others, to watch Khruangbin perform live before our divine eyes.
Sorry this is coming to you later in the day—I had a busy week, my brain is full of fog, last night was long and fun, but today I’m feeling a little blurred around the edges. Here’s a song for you.
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Too Many Tabs Open
‘It’s evil’: Breast ironing leaves long-term scars for women in Nigeria
As California salmon population plummets, monster wildfire threatens spawning habitat
Posing as ‘Alicia,’ This Man Scammed Hundreds Online. He Was Also a Victim.
‘Hobbit’ humans on remote island even smaller than first thought
Famed Zion National Park condor died of lead poisoning just before fifth birthday
How the ‘Slamming Door’ Sound Became Embedded in Hip-Hop History
Did You See This
I am not a parent, but I do have a dog and a desire to meander. The multiple walks my husband and I take her on every day have formed a connective tissue so rich and salubrious between ourselves and our neighborhood that I know I will feel a palpable sense of loss whenever we move. Two moms in Bristol, England—Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson—in 2009 closed their street to traffic for two hours so their children could play safely and freely, and that one afternoon has since blossomed into an international phenomenon. The simple act of playfulness stretches a sense of community, or at least familiarity, across not only kids but adults too. Rose and Ferguson’s initiative to foster connection between themselves and their neighbors is an impressive reminder of what we are all missing—the easy, languid socialization that unstructured spaces imbue within us. To play in a park or walk through your neighborhood fosters a casual air, loosens the rigid scheduling of weeks in advance for dinner dates with people you already know, and instead leaves room for inviting someone you pass all the time but do not know by name over for a drink, here and now.
One of my best friends sent me a Vanity Fair story from 2021 about Larry McMurtry—author of Lonesome Dove, the western epic a few of us are reading this summer—and his friendship with journalist Maureen Orth, who wrote the piece and to whom Lonesome Dove was dedicated. I was immediately captivated by the way McMurtry’s spirit loomed over her recollection of their relationship. I was also warmed by the kinship I felt while reading it, which awakened within me the realization that I have male friends in my life who make me feel as witnessed, cared for, and safe as McMurtry did for Orth. “If I thought a love affair would give me six months of intense pleasure but that this woman I had a real affinity for would not be in my life 10 years from now,” McMurtry once told Orth, “I would walk around the love affair if there was one to be walked around. I would go for the long-term friendship.”
I’m sad that the Lonesome Dove Inn is no longer in operation and that McMurtry’s epochal bookstore, Booked Up, is now online only but I still want desperately to visit his hometown of Archer City, Texas, with the friend who shared the story with me and the others I mention alongside her. Maybe we’ll tour the places that populate the world of Lonesome Dove, stop in Waco to glimpse McMurtry’s expansive book collection, and visit the antique show in Round Top, just to round it all out.
I think, depending on the communities you’re adjacent to or the company you keep, you’ll notice that some people have almost zealously forgotten that weight-loss efforts, restrictive diets, and even orthorexia long preceded the existence of Ozempic. I’m not saying that some influencers don’t have the help of, say, Eli Lilly’s Zepbound on their side, but let’s be real: an already underweight influencer dropping 10 pounds during this current ultra-skinny revival is probably just skipping meals, overworking their body, and ripping Zyns, not injecting themselves with weight-loss drugs that are known to produce unfavorable side effects, from chronic lethargy to gastric issues—the antipode to the unflappably vigorous, glowing, and seductive stamina required of the average influencer whose job it is to be almost constantly producing content. This week, Bloomberg published a story about the Ozempic “boom” occupying the minds and lives of many residents in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which sheds some light on the actual people being marketed to, and maybe even preyed upon, by Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind Ozempic and Wegovy.
The animals we choose to share our lives with—some would call them pets—become, to some degree, the keepers of our personal histories. They’re there during our hardest and happiest moments; together we create a shared language and communicate in a way that only a few people on earth understand—what is spoken between human and animal (animal and animal, really). When the part of the story you’re writing together begins to touch the territory of maturation, sickness, or loss, it starts to unravel you—suddenly, the sound of a paw pitter-pattering across the room takes on a sort of church bell resonance; the cat that can no longer hop onto the counter becomes a calendar that you wish would stop counting down the days; the rabbit that now accepts being held after years of wanting to hop around the house on their own can inspire a torrential downpour of tears; the fish that no longer grazes the surface of the water to meet your fingers is just as gut-wrenching as the horse whose muzzle has gone white with age. Saying goodbye comes with emotional turmoil and careful preparations, but it also opens avenues for more quiet moments—stowing a little deeper those irreplaceable connections you’ve formed with your cat, dog, bunny, horse, snake, bearded dragon, cow, or whoever it is that moves through the world by your side. Sloane Crosley’s story of having to put her 21-year-old cat to sleep is touching, humorous, and as human as it is animal.
Alan Cowell’s nostalgic account of using carrier pigeons—their challenges, quirks, and unanticipated loyalty to one another—to send political messages during the 1980s in Zimbabwe is curious, amusing, and a sweet treat of a read for anyone who supports the profoundly misunderstood pigeon.
I hope that friendship breakups become something we are increasingly willing to recognize as affecting and distressing as losing touch with any other person important to us in life, especially as so much of modern entertainment is grounded in the parasocial draw of being made to feel part of other people’s platonic relationships.
A few years ago, there was something of a friendship breakup epidemic within my social world, where several friends and I found ourselves enduring the loss of the women we were closest to in our personal lives. Historically, I am someone who burrows inward when anguished, so speaking openly and reaching out to a small group of women about my friendship breakup was as incongruous to my typical disposition as moving through my days without some sort of constant contact with my closest friend. I’m really glad I did this though, because it reminded me that the disarray I was feeling wasn’t novel, that platonic heartbreak is as universal as its romantic counterpart, and that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with me for feeling heartbroken. By sharing my own sorrow, nearly everyone I communicated with shed light on their own. By coming together, we found ourselves better able to build bridges away from the grief we once felt so alone in. As we licked our wounds, we commiserated over how the grief of losing a best friend was, for many, more agonizing than any romantic breakup they’d experienced. We also recognized the crucial support we offered one another, and how that was where the novelty of the experience lay. This wasn’t the first time a best friend and I parted ways (though I certainly hope it’s the last), but it still hurt me deeply. It was, however, the first time I felt truly witnessed, supported, and connected to something that was not some callous central to who I am as a person but instead just happens to all of us at some—or several—points in our lives. I am no longer heartbroken; I haven’t circled the drain of our parting in years and now feel a sort of far-flung, detached magnanimity for someone who was an old friend. We’d shared years of intimacy, and while the fracturing of our friendship undid all of that, the grace and compassion shared with me by others allowed me to rise above my heartache and deepen other friendships.
I didn’t know sea urchin larvae could be prescribed antibiotics, did you? In Tampa Bay, Florida, scientists and researchers at the University of Florida and The Florida Aquarium make up a small but mighty team raising lab-grown long-spined sea urchins (Diadema antillarum)—a vital part of maintaining coral ecosystems—to help restore Caribbean coral reefs, which are severely threatened by algae overgrowth due to drastic declines in urchin populations since a disease in the 1980s eradicated 97% of Diadema urchins “across the Caribbean and as far north as Bermuda. A later outbreak caused by a single-celled organism known as a ciliate further decimated urchins.”
In the summer of 1978, striving to break away from conventional norms, Susanna Crossman’s single mother loaded her children into her car, moved them away from the only life they’d ever known, and into an old “fairy castle” of a mansion with more than 40 other people. “Units” were born from the communal space: the kids were The Kids, and the adults were The Adults. The utopian ideals that developed in passing began to act as a new flavor of hierarchical strictures; liberation was swaddled in expectation, community was bound to political adherence, and the promised richness of freedom was mostly neglectful and dangerous. As Crossman aged out of the communal living space and grew into her own person, she began to understand that withdrawing from society was another form of running away and that the social influences being shied away from remained largely intact regardless of who was doing yoga naked or how many showers the children were allowed to forsake. This excerpt from Crossman’s memoir was so good that I just may have to order a copy from across the pond.
New on the Shelf
Giulia Bencivenga’s poetry collection Comorbidity or the Reckoning, published by Dirt Child, a small press based out of Los Angeles and New York City, was released on the 4th, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. “Surreal and perilous, Comorbidity speaks before and beyond the grave, balancing the weight of the material and the spectral. “A victory for melancholy,” Comorbidity is the definitive companion for the opening of the seven seals.”
Last month, a tweet that made its way across my Twitter feed brought to my attention writer Hannah Williams’s 2022 New Yorker essay about Elaine Kraf, a writer whose work has mostly been forgotten by time (though it is steadily picking up steam today), and whose last book, The Princess of 72nd Street, is “that rare thing: a true underappreciated classic.” Williams also wrote about how Kraf’s novels “feature a beautiful, isolated female protagonist of delicate sanity who is surrounded by untrustworthy men,” her determination to see her own work through, and how she looked back on The Princess with a sense of doubt, as well as, sadly, her death in 2013. This week, Random House published a reissue of Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street, featuring an introduction by Melissa Broder. “Ellen has two lives. A single artist living alone on New York's Upper West Side in the 1970s, she periodically descends into episodes of what she calls “radiances." While under the influence of the radiance, she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street becomes the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a colorful, glorious, and liberating experience for Ellen, who, despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda, and by the freedom it gives her.”
Hum, Helen Phillips’s new speculative fiction novel was published this week by Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books. During a conversation Phillips had with Jane Ciabattari over at Literary Hub, they discussed at length one of the many waves that disrupt the surface of the protagonist’s story: undergoing surgery that is meant to “obliterate her facial recognition identity,” which piqued my curiosity and made me want to pick this one up before the year’s end. "An indelible family portrait and a narrative tour de force, Hum generates almost unbearable tension and unease from start to end. Stunning, strangely beautiful, and written from a place of deep compassion but also a clear and analytical eye. Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future. I loved it.” — Jeff VanderMeer
Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels, new from Ellen Ruppel Shell and published by Abrams Press, is an account of the mysterious history of eels and how they are “something beyond words, perhaps beyond memory,” but are actually more than that too. "Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea and back, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America's first commercial eel "family farm," which just might upend the international market and save a state. This is an enthralling, globe-spanning look at an animal that you may never come to love, but which will never fail to astonish you, a miraculous creature that tells more about us than we can ever know about it.”
Adèle Rosenfeld’s Jellyfish Have No Ears, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman and published by Graywolf Press, is the story of Louise, a woman who was born partially deaf. When an audiology test confirms that she has lost almost all of what was left of her hearing, she must contend with whether to get cochlear implants or continue moving through the world in the way that is most familiar to her. "Every mishearing spawns a fiction: the hearer invents words, ideas, and stories to fill in the breaks in communication. Adèle Rosenfeld's brilliant novel rigorously pursues the literary potential of this idea, as her narrator navigates an alternately painful, playful, and hallucinatory linguistic universe that unspools from the growing gaps in her hearing. Jeffrey Zuckerman's marvelous translation of Jellyfish Have No Ears is a complex, funny, and deeply valuable chronicle of 'someone uprooted from language' as she wrestles with the alienation, ambiguity, denial, and possibility that emerge from her new states of being." —Andrew Leland
Bonus book on the shelf!
Last week brought us two new books with “horse” in the title, one of them being about the history of horses in relation to the world—another, also about the history of horses in relation to the world, has landed on bookshelves this week: William T. Taylor’s Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, published by University of California Press. “From the Rockies to the Himalayas, the bond between horses and humans has spanned across time and civilizations. In this archaeological journey, William T. Taylor explores how momentous events in the story of humans and horses helped create the world we live in today. Tracing the horse's origins and spread from the western Eurasian steppes to the invention of horse-drawn transportation and the explosive shift to mounted riding, Taylor offers a revolutionary new account of how horses altered the course of human history.” As a horse girl, this amuses me.
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The Graze
This week’s The Graze is five songs that have taken up residence in my headphones.
How turbid and unpredictable and winded and sentimental Angel Of My Dreams by JADE is makes the wings hidden in my shoulders lift me off the ground and to another plane of existence. It is the perfect pop song for me, and the S.A.D. (Slow, Angelic, Dramatic) live version (just as a heads-up: there are some flashing lights in the music video, for anyone with photosensitivity issues) is just as good.
A Gwen Stefani ear worm crept into my head a few weeks ago, but it’s What You Waiting For? that I keep visiting and revisiting, as if I didn’t first hear the song in 2004 (oh my god) or even just, like, ten minutes ago. It is a whirlwind of metaphors.
Reality Surf by bladee has been washing over me like ocean waves.
A significant departure from the last three songs, the lugubrious cry of the guitar, the drifting sea of lyrics, and the wistful atmosphere of Led Zeppelin’s Going to California effortlessly encapsulates the feeling of these breathlessly hot, waning summer days in Los Angeles.
I always hesitate to say that something is my favorite because, if life is anything, it is shifting, but Half Waif falls at the center of whatever that category would look like for me. I love her music so much that I once emailed her, and she replied so thoughtfully and brilliantly that, overcome with surprise, I never managed to move past my astonishment to generate a response (oops). Figurine, Half Waif’s lead single from her upcoming album See You at the Maypole, is already doing some heavy autumnal lifting for me.
Sour Reflections
A few things I enjoyed this week: hosting a small barbecue to get to know some of our new neighbors better and making lavender honey and rose vinegar cucumber salad, roasted zucchini medley sprinkled in grated parmesan and drizzled with garden heat, cowboy caviar with cracked pepper on corn tortilla chips, brown butter potato salad, and because everyone has been into the nostalgia desserts I’ve been whipping up recently, marble Rice Krispies treats for the soul; my husband’s grilled sucuk and hotdogs; multiple friends bringing multiple pies (milk and cookies, nectarine and peach, banana cream). Some really good cherry tomatoes. Old friends and new friends playing I Spy in my living room but replacing “my little eye” with “my divine eyes.” Having a conversation on the phone with a friend that was so delectable it dropped me out of my head and into my heart; that same friend setting me up on a friend date with her other friend. Feeling marginally better than I did last week, which isn’t much but amounts to a lot. Getting into the herbalism school of my dreams. Summer closing its eyes a little more every day. Looking at photos of my mom’s and my husband’s mom’s and my friend’s mom’s gardens; the little bunnies that live in my friend’s mom’s garden, and the spider she rescued. Saving an injured and weakened swallowtail from off the sidewalk with a 5-year-old little girl whose family stopped to help me. I’ll preemptively add the show I’m seeing tonight to this list, and the walk to grab a bite to eat afterwards, because I know I’ll love that too.
I always always enjoy barn sour but this one felt especially sweet and tender <3 I can’t wait to read Forever less of beauty in The bitter southerner this week especially, but everything else too, as I rest and recover from my sickly weekend. Thank you for all that you share!
I was looking forward to your post all day 💞🙈 Your poetic words touched my heart as always. 🪄🏇 The portion about friendship breakups especially resonated with me, as the topic has been on my mind more than usual. There really is something so beautiful about picking up the pieces from something so heart-wrenching and putting them back together into something better with people you connect with on a much deeper level 🤍📇🩹