Flashing Palely in the Margins
Summer vacation
We are planning a summer vacation. The big plans—flights, accommodation, transport—have been sorted out. What’s left is the smaller things: activities and meals, mostly.
Trip planning is difficult. I know some people find joy in making the plans for upcoming travel; I am not one of them. Still, we plan. We plan because we want to have memorable experiences, to build memories that will last for years, moments that will leave indelible marks on our lives.
Growing up, we didn’t go on many vacations—things were a bit tight, financially, back then—and when we did, it would mostly involve a road trip to a rental cabin or motel somewhere not far away. Despite not doing much, or having big plans, we still forged memories of fun times with family on the road.
I loved this piece in Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter about family summer vacations; mostly, I enjoyed reading the snippets of remembrances from her readers. Vacations back then seem very different from the one we are planning now, but I know the result will be the same: we will relish being together as a family, having adventures, exploring the world around us.
A poem
Intimacy
Maria Ferguson
When I think about it, tucking the label
back into my husband’s shirt
is not that different from eating him
to survive on a desert island.
The musk of cologne as I go
straight for the neck. He doesn’t flinch,
doesn’t question why my hands
are coming towards him.
He’s felt my skin on his skin
so many times before. Our little
tap on the back that says,
I’ve got you. It’s alright.
Some links
An astute observation about the status of colleges and universities in today’s world, in an excellent piece that explores what has gone wrong with higher education and how we can potentially fix it:
The problem is that we have jammed our society’s education and research institutions together with its credentialing systems. And the former is crumbling under the weight of the latter.
A startling fact: “Around 40 million acres of lawn, an area almost as large as the state of Georgia, carpets the United States. Lawn grass occupies more area than corn.” I’ve thought about what we could do to our front lawn to make it more interesting and easier to maintain, but in the spirit of keeping with the rest of the neighborhood, our front lawn remains.
I won’t lie: I’m a sucker for a good fried chicken sandwich and will indulge at Popeye’s from time to time, but I hadn’t realized that the sandwich is having a cultural moment and is even starting to challenge the ascendancy of the burger as our favorite handheld.
Apparently, eating certain kinds of foods—many of them my favorite foods—can mark you as gay—or even turn you gay—according to some ridiculous parts of the manosphere. Jaya Saxena has a great piece on this whole phenomenon in Eater.
After the popularity of last years Conclave film and the buzz around this years Papal conclave, I guess it’s not surprise that conclave LARPs—many of which have been going on for years—are getting their recognition now too.
Are you more likely to die on your birthday? The Pudding breaks it down with stats and data.
The origins of the pork taboo—particularly interesting to me as I grew up in a no-pork household.
A long article about text formatting and Markdown and the movement away from complex formatting tools to a focus on text. Perhaps a bit nerdy, but fascinating to me, as I’ve long been interested in how we write, present, and manipulate text.
We didn’t have many school spirit days—where you’re encouraged to dress up in a certain way—growing up, but I’m noticing a lot of them now that our daughter is in school. I hadn’t previously thought about the toll spirit days places on parents, but I’m sure I’ll feel that toll more acutely as Zoya grows up.
You don’t have to believe in God to find hope in Pope Leo XIV:
We are not a people who currently know what to do with hope. Look around. Hope has been demoted from virtue to luxury item. It’s something we talk about with nostalgia or suspicion, something evoked in marketing slogans but rarely felt in our guts. War simmers and flares. Like, everywhere. The planet burns and floods with mounting indifference. Politicians parade hollow ideologies dressed up as solutions. The algorithm feeds us despair in increasingly addictive doses. In this context, the idea of a single person–even a pontiff–reigniting some shared spark of optimism feels quaint, even naïve.
“The current right wing endeavor is mass civic, social, scientific and intellectual decline, enforced on a federal—if they had their way, global—scale.“ I’ve been thinking about this “obliteration of the past, denial of future” trend a lot since our recent Canadian election (and of course, in light of everything going on) and it saddens me how much of this is fueled by people refusing to believe in the benefits of social progress.
An interesting take on how the architecture of our houses has made us lose our sense of community. One of the things that I wish our house had was a big front porch—and of course, not having a busy, car-traffic-laden street running in front of it—so that I could spend more time enjoying the comings and goings of the neighborhood.
This statement, astutely remarked by a tween in Brooklyn, is what the bike lane argument around the world comes down to:
The argument over bike lanes becomes a kind of stand-in — a way to complain about change, to push back against how the city is evolving. It’s less about safety and more about the feeling that something familiar is slipping away.
A gorgeously devastating piece by Hanif Abdurraqib, one of the best writers out there right now: In Defense of Despair.
A quotation to remember, from Oliver Burkeman, as noted by Mandy Brown: “Aliveness is so central to meaningful human experience that there’ll always be a market for those who can cultivate it, embed it in what they create, foster it in institutions and organizations, and bring people together to experience it.”
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