☞ First, to the music: Three songs from three new, slightly obscure albums all worth checking out, that I’ve been enjoying depending on the mood, whether dark/melancholic, hard/upbeat, or sleazy/fun.

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I hadn’t done a list here in a while, and I wondered this week what an interesting list might be. I settled on one I already maintained in an app on my laptop: things I find beautiful that I might write about here, but haven’t gotten around to yet.

• Ripe fruit

• Golden hour yellow

• Dusk blue

• Paths that people make across public landscaping that are not the intended paths

Then I got thinking about lists; what good is a list, besides as a tool for organization? People love them, the media loves them, best of the year, etc. Maybe a list is more interesting as an indicator of ourselves: anxieties, memory patches, discrete crumbs of information saved for later. A friend recently hosted a birthday party at a beer garden down the street, and she provided lists ahead of time for things forbidden and things encouraged in conversation. Among the forbidden—

• Artificial intelligence

• Tenure

• Spencer Pratt

• “Male loneliness”

And the encouraged—

• Lust and longing

• Boring strangers and what one can realistically do about them

• Big shorts

• Butts

• Platonic crushes

• What era are you shutting down and what era are you now beginning in your one wild and precious life

Lists are rarely overwhelming; they help with the overwhelming. Read them, use them, crumple them up. Wish lists, tables of contents, lists of connoisseurship. What is a paragraph of descriptive detail but a list without segmentation? I was rereading Kudos this week by Rachel Cusk and this line stood out—

Through the windows you could hear the sounds of footsteps on the cobbles below and the hiss and whirr of bicycles passing in their shoals and drifts; and most of all you could hear the bells that rang unendingly from the town’s many churches, striking not just the hours but the quarter and half hours, so that each segment of time became a seed of silence that then blossomed, filling the air with what almost seemed a kind of self-description.

Lists certainly self-describe, if only to tell us their function, grocery shopping or whatever. But what does it describe about me that in the list on my laptop, there’s a long section for unusual things I love but don’t see coming, that are tactile and singular and surprising—

• Hearing the sound of a screen door slapping closed

• Realizing the structure of a well-turned ending in a book

• Peeling dried glue from your skin

• Listening to a new favorite song for the third time

Deckle edges. Petrichor. Peeling an apple in a single strip. I could go on and on.

According to Wikipedia, the recommendation to write down a prioritized task list each day, then follow it step by step, was the best advice Charles Schwab ever received. And I gotta say it works for me too; lists work for me in so many ways, I could list the ways!

And I guess I just did.

Now I just need to adjust my life such that I could plausibly, honestly write a list that includes “play accordion maybe a little.”

𓀠 Tomorrow’s 3+ things for members:

• Fun new songs and albums, alternately dark, hard, and sleazy

• My favorite app for lists and organization, and a new favorite app for public transportation

• Highlights from the other extraordinary comeback in sports this week, interviews with novelists who don’t use periods, and other hits from a week of digging around online

Join the community for just $6/month and enjoy the Sunday supplements: great books, travel/fashion picks, new music and cool stuff generally.

Subscribe now

❀ Hey, if you’re a writer looking for help—editing, coaching, brainstorm juju—I recommend collaborating with Rachel Knowles.

Rachel has helped me significantly over the years, not to mention lots of other writers: novelists, screenwriters, Substack-ers, the gamut. Whether you’re aspiring or established, everyone needs an editor. More info at her website.

What the what

“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.

Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

For magazine articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.

Disclaimer: if you buy something using a link from here, I may receive a commission.

People have all sorts of things to get them through, and maybe it’s a personalized path for each of us: melatonin, cannabis gummies, reading with a cup of herbal tea when it’s still dark outside.

For me, the game-changer—in addition to not drinking alcohol too late, and occasionally taking melatonin—has been this big-ass eyemask.

It is silly big, silly looking. It’s also comfortable, light on my face, and it does the job. Assuming I don’t go to bed with too much alcohol in my stomach, I’m consistently getting seven or eight hours a night, and I didn’t need to invest in blackout curtains.

Who knew? Probably you, but I did not.

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Early Thursday morning, I listened to people talk about it on a podcast.

All week long, I listened to announcers talk about it on the radio while I worked.

Lunchtime or at night, I read newsletters, caught up on social media, YouTube, I texted with friends who were similarly enthused.

Twice, late afternoons, I even got to go out and do it for a couple hours.

This time of year, between the French Open and Wimbledon, it’s pretty easy as a tennis fan to live a life that’s all sport, all the time. Add on top the new Rafael Nadal series on Netflix—wow, Uncle Toni was rough—and Tuesday night I found myself sitting on the couch, tearing up. Not because of the documentary, it’s only okay, I just felt a smack of gratitude for the whole thing, getting to move through such tangible pleasure all week.

Why the ardor, and what is ardor anyway?

It’s more than like, less than love. Something that can get stirred up. In my case, for tennis, it’s tied to how many ways I’ve found to enjoy it, and how the more ways I’ve layered in, the liking grows.

It’s fandom, too. Though a kind where you actually do the thing, also admire and study the thing, such that when you watch others do the thing magnificently, sublimely, you know enough about what makes their performance magnificent in order to feel yourself into their kinetics, even if you could never reproduce it yourself (much as you try).

Musician friends describe a similar appreciation: practice, admiration, addiction. And I know people who love other sports—basketball, golf—and play on a basic level while also tracking the pro tours closely, who sense a similar compass.

Is it beautiful? I think so. Beauty emerging when a human body does precise, balletic things. Which perhaps makes the act of being in an informed crowd to admire it, to talk about why and how it works, into a special kind of group consciousness. Not just ardor, but shared ardor. Crowd love. Perhaps the same for film nerds who go to the movies together, or Bravo diehards doing Summer House watch parties: a group of bodies pulled along by some moving thing’s gravity.

The French Open wraps up this weekend. At some point between sets, between points, I’ll remember my mother once taking me to hit on a court when I was in sixth grade. The court was on the grounds of my public middle school. We played for half an hour, maybe less. Cracked asphalt, a ratty net, ringed by metal fencing. My mom was the one who previously enrolled me in a couple summer camps, some tennis clinics after school—I’d quit in favor of skateboarding, and I wouldn’t take it up again until my late twenties. But I remember she told me that day, driving home from the court, I’d appreciate tennis someday because “it’s a sport for a lifetime.”

I didn’t know what she meant back then, but now I do.

𓀠 Tomorrow’s 3+ things for members:

• The main reason I can routinely grab eight hours’ solid sleep

• A tennis media diet, plus some offbeat tennis culture

• Shoegazing isn’t just for forty-year-olds anymore

Join the community for just $6/month and enjoy the Sunday supplements: great books, travel/fashion picks, new music and cool stuff generally.

Subscribe now

❀ Hey, if you’re a writer looking for help—editing, coaching, brainstorm juju—I recommend collaborating with Rachel Knowles.

Rachel has helped me significantly over the years, not to mention lots of other writers: novelists, screenwriters, Substack-ers, the gamut. Whether you’re aspiring or established, everyone needs an editor. More info at her website.

What the what

“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.

Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

For magazine articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.

Disclaimer: if you buy something using a link from here, I may receive a commission.

Nathan is a former editor at Rolling Stone and the author of Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East. I asked him for some examples of travel stories he loves, and he was generous enough to share.

I kinda hate travel writing. Such an embarrassing genre, the conceits outdated, the power dynamic so ugly. Which is ironic, because that’s pretty much all I’ve ever written, whether it was from Iraq, Yemen, Russia, or the west side of Los Angeles.

Lately it’s remained extra challenging to muscle my way into offering a good travel writing syllabus. This is the third spring I’ve redesigned the course and I’m still noodling. Here are a few stories that have stood up:

1. “Ticket to the Fair,” David Foster Wallace. The late master, love him or hate, offers some seriously iconic work in this visit to the Illinois State Fair in the mid-1990s. Key line: “The corn was as tall as a tall man.” Come for the insights about humility and almost pornographic descriptions of livestock and cheerleaders, stay for the final section about crowds, among the best ever writing about the Midwest.

2. “I Got High With My Mom at HempCon,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The comic genius whose novels I don’t love has a supernatural ability to render even the smallest adventures super funny, such as this 2010s visit to a weed conference. Key line: “My mother (not her real name) and I get out of the cab at the corner of Kill Me Street and Carjack Avenue.” A visit to a weed thing? Sure. But do it with your Orthodox mother??? Who also happens to have partied with Ginsberg??? Yesss.

3. “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof,” Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. The award-winning masterpiece about a South Carolina church shooting is also a chilling example of yet another kind of bravery in travel writing. Key line: “This black body of mine cannot be furtive. It prevents me from blending in. I cannot observe without being observed.” This piece rocked the world when it came out and remains a sly masterclass in deciding how to behave and how to write about being on location during a very difficult assignment.

The image of the swashbuckling, probably-male, obnoxious adventurer, bravely going somewhere new (where people already live???) and just barely surviving—all for a good and misleadingly insightful tale. It’s over. But what do we replace it with????

Thanks, Nathan. And not in response to his last question there, but if I was shopping for a new travel lit book and I happened to want one about life in Japan, I’d take a strong look at volume two of The New Japan, just out, edited by W. David Marx.

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Tuesday afternoon, I visited a class at UCLA to talk to a dozen-plus undergraduates. The subject was travel writing. Beforehand, the professor and I commiserated over the things we dislike about the genre. When there’s no story, but a lot of homilies. When the conceit is extra contrived. When clichés roll past like cloud cover, nerves sublimated for peak sublime: epiphanies in foreign markets, pithy wisdom from artisans.

“A step back in time…”

“Authentic luxury…”

Remember when Paul Theroux was a household name?

I say all of this as a writer for travel magazines, also as someone who loves to read travel magazines. When I was kid, Tim Cahill’s stories for Outside were some of the first magazine pieces I read that both excited me and made me laugh, made me want to take adventures. If The Atlantic wants to publish 10,000 words on trying to find the best free restaurant bread, I’m in.

Still, a lot of travel writing doesn’t hold up over time. Put a few decades on a piece and what’s true can get outweighed by what’s off, editorialized, racist, all the locals cast for backdrop. Perhaps the most to hope for is the writing style to hold up, and there’s a small picture, postcard-like, of a time gone by. Diaries do well; the Patrick Leigh Fermor books are good for that. Apparently, Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea, not so much.

Maybe it’s why the best travel writing isn’t classified as such. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” by Ariel Levy, for example. The story is about a miscarriage and a marriage shattering—it’s not about what the title suggests. But in a way it also includes the best aspects of travel writing, just on a sorrowful path.

People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself. I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself. And I liked the idea of telling my kid, “When you were inside me, we went to see the edge of the earth.”

Reading it the first time, I remember feeling transported on numerous paths all at once. Harrowing, moving, gripping. There’s adventure, extreme tragedy, transformation. The story isn’t about Mongolia at all; it’s about what happens to Levy amid the setting’s indifference, which feels like one of the truer things travel writing can pinpoint, how a place exposes a person, not the other way around.

“Thanksgiving came and went,” Levy writes. “There were rolling brownouts when everything went dark and still. I lay in my bed and ate Snickers and drank little bottles of whiskey from the minibar while I watched television programs that seemed as strange and bleak as my new life.”

𓀠 Tomorrow’s 3+ things for members:

• Greatest hits from travel writing history, plus a new book for people interested in Japan

• An affordable jacket I picked up recently that’s gotten compliments

• New music and the best from the week online

Join the community for just $6/month and enjoy the Sunday supplements: great books, travel/fashion picks, new music and cool stuff generally.

Subscribe now

❀ Hey, if you’re a writer looking for help—editing, coaching, brainstorm juju—I recommend collaborating with Rachel Knowles.

Rachel has helped me significantly over the years, not to mention lots of other writers: novelists, screenwriters, Substack-ers, the gamut. Whether you’re aspiring or established, everyone needs an editor. More info at her website.

What the what

“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.

Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

For magazine articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.

Disclaimer: if you buy something using a link from here, I may receive a commission.

☞ Is it summer yet? In Los Angeles, it’s gray May, soon to be June gloom, and a vegetable-facing pasta seems like a nice way to pretend the sky is not constantly overcast.

This week I heard about a zucchini carbonara via favorite radio show Good Food and it’s now in the rotation; put the guanciale aside and opt for vegetables. Basically it’s carbonara but with sautéed zucchini instead of pork, ziti instead of bucatini, plus torn mint.

• Giulia Scarpaleggia’s Zucchini Carbonara

Very simple and really good.

☞ Speaking of food…

As a home cook of twenty-plus years, I’ve got a dozen pieces of equipment I feel are essential, that some person told me about and I am grateful—and I’m talking about more than the stuff we all love and need (pots and pans, tongs, a big knife, a small knife, etc).

Note: no expensive chef’s knives here, because I get it, but c’mon; for the home cook, getting a $50 knife sharpened twice a year goes a long way.

For me, the list goes:

1. A Gray Kunz sauce spoon. It’s the Pyrex measuring cup of cutlery? It does everything. Though I also grab wooden spoons at yard sales to replace the old ones I’m always snapping.

2. A Dexter-Russell serrated knife. Super cheap, lasts forever, great for tomatoes, citrus, so many uses.

3. A digital scale. So many uses! Whichever scale you like/have budget for. Same for an instant-read thermometer.

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I don’t think I’ve missed a week here in the years I’ve been writing these meditations, and I don’t intend to start now.

Still, it was a week of unexpected business things, unexpected personal things, also unexpected dental surgery, and my meditative powers escaped me.

However, I read as much as usual and bounced around the web, and I found a bunch of things compelling. So, today, forgive me, while you’re enjoying your morning tea/coffee on this holiday weekend (for Americans), I’m going to point you in other directions, and next week I’ll return to form.

From the week:

Articles

“Brooklyn urban spelunking mystery - what did I find?,” Ask Metafilter

An urban spelunker asks for help figuring out what they found underground in Brooklyn.

Many years ago, my friend lived in the garden/ground level apartment at 150 Columbia Heights, right up against the Brooklyn Promenade in Brooklyn Heights.

The door to enter her apartment shared a small vestibule with a different door that we assumed was just used for maintenance. Being the weirdo I am, I saw it was unlocked and encouraged my friends to check it out with me. It opened into another small room, with another unlocked door. I opened that door and it let to a very narrow, very steep stairway that led very far down. I was hyped. Our small group decided that it would be a great idea to go down those stairs to see what else would be down there. Was it wise? Prob not. Was it a great idea after a few glasses of wine and a lifetime of horror movie tropes? Definitely.

“Hanoi’s humble beer glass and the memory of a nation,” by Parni Ray, The Sunday Long Read

Recounting the origin story of Vietnam’s handmade glass for serving beer.

Every few weeks, HABECO trucks pull up to the Xôi Trì workshops to collect hundreds of beer glasses, packed by the dozen in straw and bundled into tightly wrapped plastic gunny bags. The embossed H at the base of each cốc is more than branding, it marks the glass’s enduring tether to the company. HABECO remains the workshop’s primary client, sustaining a relationship that has tied the city’s beer culture to its small-scale manufacturers for decades.

“A Little Deeper Than Usual: Joan Didion on The Grateful Dead,” by Joan Didion, POW

A dip into Didion’s archives finds her initial impressions of Garcia and co.

“You can take pictures, but Pigpen’s not here. Pigpen is easily our most photogenic member.”

“You know even his mother calls him that now. His mother calls up and asks for Pigpen.”

“He smiles a lot –– he’s really a pixie.”

“We could start a Pigpen comic book, something along the lines of Gasoline Alley.”

“Or a Pigpen and Laird comic strip –– called ‘Bickering In the Basement.’”

“Our managers are perfect examples of hippies that are making good –– they’re sort of part time students at San Fransisco State. They just decided to manage us. They didn’t know anything about managing, of course, nothing at all, but they got into it tooth and nail, learned what games are played, super–great.”

“Empire Loves a Dark Sky” by Mohamad Naleh, Places Journal

Why darkness is a military asset.

Agrarian life, like that still practiced in southern Lebanon, requires careful attention to the ledger of the sky, whose patterns register most clearly at night. 2 Mastery of these nocturnal readings promises a steadier harvest and, by extension, a more secure future. The moon enacts its own language: its phases, its clarity or lack thereof, the halo that sometimes gathers around it — each a signal of rain or its absence. Constellations rise and recede in cycles that guide the timing of irrigation and harvest. Thunder carries meaning in its duration; a long rolling sound signals harsher conditions, a sharp one suggests milder weather. Lightning along known ridgelines indicates whether a storm is nearing or passing, guiding decisions about the safety of livestock. Even distant phenomena, comets and shooting stars, are deciphered according to the directions of their movement, each pointing toward fortune or calamity. The skills required to read the sky in this way are an inheritance shaped by necessity, a means of seeing and hearing the seasons before they arrive.

“The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet,” by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

What’s holding together American conservatives? Reportedly a “masculinism” that is currently approaching “its imperial-overreach phase.”

Masculinism is now approaching its imperial-overreach phase, like the Roman empire that many of its leaders so admire. For some of its most ardent adherents, if someone on the left is doing anything, regardless of their sex, it’s feminized and bad. Meanwhile, when Trump sends out a bitchy Truth Social post about a petty grievance, that is a display of manly vigor. Tucker Carlson’s perfectly buoyant coiffure? Rugged—butch, even. Ben Shapiro’s heartwarming enjoyment of musical theater? In the best tradition of the Vikings or Spartans, probably. This reductive view of the world—women things bad, men things good—is the mirror image of the worst excesses of 2010s Tumblr feminism, when introverted teenage girls posted hashtags like #KillAllMen and drank from mugs that read MALE TEARS.

“Do You Dream?” by Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files

Nick Cave details how he sleeps.

I go to bed around midnight, but before I have time for any blue glow, dwelling on fragments of memory, or lyrical musings, I put on a podcast, which keeps intrusive late-night thinking at bay. This podcast generally amounts to one person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, talking to another person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, about something I know absolutely nothing about, and this triumvirate of stupidity generally lulls me into some approximation of sleep (the first sleep). I wake three hours later. I get up and go downstairs, where I read something soothing for half an hour or so – at the moment, The Owl – a Biography, The House at Pooh Corner or The Art of Bible Translation. Then I go back to bed, podcast-free, for another three hours (the second sleep).

And the poem “Highway 90” by Linda Gregg, from All of It Singing: New and Collected Poems, via Headlights Forever

And some new-to-me weird things:

• A website finds empty movie screenings near where you live.

• Recipes for mixing bottled waters to recreate the water profiles of cities known for coffee, tea, baking, and more.

• A hand-cranked machine types “I hope this email finds you well.”

𓀠 Tomorrow’s 3+ things for members:

• As an experienced home cook, the only chef-y things I consider essential to own and use

• An Italian chef’s recipe for zucchini carbonara

• A new, affordable addition to the skincare regimen

Join the community for just $6/month and enjoy the Sunday supplements: great books, travel/fashion picks, new music and cool stuff generally.

Subscribe now

❀ Hey, if you’re a writer looking for help—editing, coaching, brainstorm juju—I recommend collaborating with Rachel Knowles.

Rachel has helped me significantly over the years, not to mention lots of other writers: novelists, screenwriters, Substack-ers, the gamut. Whether you’re aspiring or established, everyone needs an editor. More info at her website.

What the what

“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.

Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

For magazine articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.

Disclaimer: if you buy something using a link from here, I may receive a commission.

☞ As per usual, the Tournament of Books returns for a summer pop-up, and this year we’re reading short fiction.

We’ll be hosting weekly video chats to discuss the stories. You’ll find more info over here. The reading list, chosen by the ToB community—

• June 16: Brawler by Lauren Groff

• June 30: The News From Dublin by Colm Tóibín

• July 14: My Dear You by Rachel Khong

• July 28: Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich

• Aug. 11: The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki

• Aug. 25: It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez

☞ My favorite tote bag for short- to medium-length travel (seven days or fewer) got me to New York this week, and I was reminded of why I like it: comfortable, sturdy, handsome, unobtrusive. Not waterproof, not festooned with pockets, but still my go-to, even though it’s far from perfect: the “perfect weekend tote” by Alex Mill.

Other bags I like the look of when a Trader Joe’s bag won’t cut it (and no, Klein tool bags are not allowed)—

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Wednesday morning, I took an airplane to New York City.

I hadn’t been on a long flight in a while. For the last three years I’ve gone to an airport at least once a month, this time the experience felt renewed. First off, people are different on a plane. Human rhythms are different. Time feels different, there’s…

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I’ve never worn double-breasted before and I gotta say, I love it. The fabric is hemp linen with a crisp hand, the suit’s a classic fit with a natural shoulder. Thanks, Buck Mason! The perfect thing to wear to my tennis partner Paul’s birthday/midlife-crisis party.

(And though the party’s catering focused on grilled skewers from the San Gabriel Valley, there were bowls of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos everywhere, and I wound up getting Cheeto dust all over the pants.)

I wore the jacket unbuttoned with a beat-up white Oxford. For style heads in the readership, how do you wear double-breasted? Closed or open? Button-down, polo shirt, tee?

Buck Mason, thanks again.

Speaking of which, a shout-out to Paul: he’s a terrific architect and he recently turned an old house in L.A. into an Airbnb you can rent for visits and photoshoots. Here’s the listing, and here’s a write-up about his work from the Los Angeles Times.

☞ Two nonfiction books I’ve been reading: out in paperback last month, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe by Jamieson Webster meditates on Webster’s experiences as an asthmatic, a deep-sea diver, and a palliative therapist during Covid to explore breathing as a fundamental way of interacting with the world.

I’ve enjoyed taking this one slowly and I’m learning a lot. From a review in the Washington Post:

Webster sees her subject everywhere, carefully attuned to all the ways that breath—our various uses of it—fills our everyday lives… If there is a running theme, it is that talking—real talking, the giving of oneself through speech—has a value and a meaning beyond the words themselves.

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Posters advertised drum lessons and guitar lessons. A yard sale, a design sale, a closet clean-out. On several telephone poles were laser-printed 8x11s depicting a personal trainer named “Luv Me,” or his business was named “Luv Me,” either way I was confused.

If the city is a book, it’s being written constantly,…

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Monday evening, I met a friend for a walk. We get together about once a month, usually over a beer. This time, I suggested doing a couple miles to stretch our legs.

We met on a street corner in the late afternoon. Ninety minutes later, we parted at twilight. And during the hour and a half, we may…

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Ideally it’ll be cotton, casually constructed, dark colored. Something that looks better for being a little rumpled, ideally less trendy than the Uniqlo or Séfr options, less costly than the equivalent at Stòffa.

I haven’t tried any of these yet—frankly, I’d prefer to buy vintage if I can find it, maybe some old Ralph Lauren—but here are some domestic candidates on my list.

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—In two 30-minute rides, only one person seemed problematic: a man with ratty hair, disheveled clothing, pants barely holding to his hips. He talked while smiling, eyes glassy. Other passengers kept distance, and the driver kept her eye on him. Still, he didn’t seem to be a danger, his main thing was twitc…

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Therefore, I am grateful for those who pay attention to the fringe and point me to excellent experimental stuff.

My primary guide is Andrew Womack, who recently did a round-up of his favorites of 2026 (so far).

(I also liked a recent memo from Stephan Kunze on why to get into vaporwave.)

Here are my favorites from Womack’s favorites, broken down by genre:

Ambient dub—

Breakbeat dub—

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A couple times a year, I’m lucky to be invited to speak to undergraduate and graduate writing students. Questions are often similar: how do you come up with ideas? How do you schedule your day? What do you do when you get edits you don’t like?

I’m not one for giving advice, but I know certain t…

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☞ For the tennis heads: First off, I recently switched up strings, jumping bandwagon from a full bed of Yonex Poly Tour Pro for Head Lynx Tour 17. It’s a touch stiffer, but doesn’t go dead as fast, and I’ve yet to break the 17 gauge.

Second, the folks at Vuori were kind enough to send me shorts from the new Jack Draper kit, and I really didn’t expect to say this, but these are great. Very light, good liner, good shape, good pockets. I still love my “court shorts” from Boast—and everything New Balance is doing for Tommy Paul looks great—but yes, I am wearing athleisure out there and not feeling weird about it.

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It’s a fragrant time of year, and where I live it’s all star jasmine, peak bloom, rampant in my neighborhood. It literally stopped me this week on a morning jog, also on a night walk with a friend, when the smell was particularly intense.

I generally avoid scent. No perfumes, no scented anything. Fo…

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