Weekly Digest, June 13 2021

Right on schedule this week, the marine layer left this week.  In May and early June, coastal Southern California is sheltered from the sun in a soothing and reliable fog.  “June gloom” lifted on Thursday, and the heat is on.  It is a joy for my beach-loving children, but I am always a little grimmer when the temperature climbs too high.

I’ve traveled widely, but lived my entire life within 30 miles of the Pacific Ocean.  A Monterey Peninsula native, I grew up in a climate where the thermometer rarely fell below 40 or climbed above 80 -- and I don’t suppose I have what it takes to survive Texas summers or Nebraska winters at this point.

What You Might Have Missed on the ‘Stack:

I wrote about former Rep. Katie Hill, revenge porn, and the “public interest exemption” to releasing compromising private photos.   

I looked at my own history with sports, and the distinction between loving a game in its own right and loving the game because it bonds you with others.

In a subscriber-only post, I wrote about Yashar Ali, the celebrated Twitter journalist – and about both my jealousy of his astonishing success, and empathy with his more recent fall.

I wrote about my mentees at Pasadena City College – and the way in which third parties often are the ones to pay the highest price when a professor-student affair becomes public.

Also only for subscribers, I wrote about the phenomenon of forgetting – and how forgetting the pain we caused others often is what compounds the harm we do.

What I’m Reading:

1. An absolutely terrific (and brief!) manifesto for education reform in Persuasion this week.  Greg Lukianoff offers ten essential principles for teaching the next generation, and I commend it to parents and teachers alike.  This sentence should make some of us fist-pump the air:

Our collective knowledge is incomplete, no ideology has a monopoly on truth, and to tell young people otherwise leaves them ill-equipped to live in a society in which questions are always open, debates are always to be had, and new discoveries are always to be made.

2. My old Jezebel colleague Tracy Clark-Flory has published a memoir of a sexual awakening – and how difficult it is to distinguish between wanting, and wanting to be wanted.  It’s as good a meditation on desire and its contradictions (one of my favorite subjects) that I’ve read in years.

3. Blake Bailey has been much in the news for his authorized biography of Phillip Roth – and the painful revelation that he abused a number of his former students.  Rightly or wrongly, that made me want to read Bailey’s 2014 memoir. Ostensibly about his relationship with his mentally ill brother, it’s also a window into a life that is both exceedingly well-observed and deliberately opaque.  The highlighted passage made me shudder in recognition.

I always suspected the fall was coming, and I finally had to force it. Bailey has done the same.

4. This old Wislawa Szymborska poem is a good reminder:

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

What I’m Listening To:

Stephanie Erin Wittmer is a new country discovery, and “The Difference” is old-school heartache at its most satisfying.

Zolita is the daughter of a subscriber (that’s all I can say), and a monumental talent in her own right.  Her new single is raw, candid, and catchy, and it’s been on repeat more than once this week.