celltheory

Articles.
herstrionics subsack
- I am not a huge sci fi fan (to quote Catherine Cohen, there’s enough stuff here), but this was ok.
- The “point” of this newsletter is to provide updates on my Thoughts and Feelings in a manner more conductive to my brain waves than Instagram.
- but I thought this piece by Eleanor Lucie, quoting Alice Garnett, was so poignant: “[W]ith men, she is ‘an object to behold, to covet—I can be their Manic Pixie Dream Girl, their muse, their trad-wife…I fear the parity of a lesbian relationship, having my intelligence and complexity matched by another woman.’ With a woman I’d have no script to fall back on, no version of me other than the real one, and I wasn’t sure anyone, of any gender, would like her very much.”

becca rothfeld
- I’ve been reading a lot of Elias Canetti lately, and I can imagine him saying something like: allowing others to prepare food for you is the most primal way of signaling that you trust them with your life. (He says some similar things, but he does not say exactly this.) It’s pleasant, actually, to trust other people with your life. The alternative—preparing all your food yourself—is pathologically anti-social. While I made my sad, stupid little meals, I thought of Gödel, who believed everyone was out to poison him and eventually starved to death.

strength training examined article
- My weight-lifting habit, as her writing explained, was an illustration of the difference between exercise and training. Exercise uses energy, burns calories, perhaps maintains a certain level of fitness. Training aims at definite improvement. “The difference between a workout and training,” she writes, “is a smart, predictable increase of intensity.” In other words, you increase weights every time you lift, at least at the beginning.
- Exercise historian Shelly McKenzie, for example, sees a turn toward “self-centered” forms of exercise during the post-World War I era, as Americans sought to develop “personality” rather than “character.”
- Exercise is a way to react—continuously, generation after generation—to the fact that our society is both complex and leisured enough that many workers can sit down all day, a fact for which we have never forgiven ourselves.
- But, perversely, I sought this pain. I didn’t _enjoy_ it, as a masochist would, but I thought that it was the proper goal of my running, or at least the only goal under my control. I could train and train and still not be as fast as someone with better genetics. But there was nothing stopping me from working harder, and suffering more, than my rivals. Such suffering would perhaps be good for my character, as well as my relationship with a stern and rather unimpressible Baptist God. If I were to join the army after high school, and get caught by the enemy and subjected to torture, cross-country might make me strong enough to withhold information, even when they went for my fingernails. Cross-country could make me something better than successful—it could make me _worthy_ of success.
- It’s not that weight training can’t lead to the sort of demented self-punishment that running so long tempted me to. Some lifters absolutely take a similarly maximalist approach. It’s just that their attempts do not work. Runners can, for a few days or even weeks, lie to themselves about how exhausted they are, or tell themselves that the point of their activity is, in part, learning to ignore fatigue and pain. A weight lifter won’t make it through the next session. If I try to do a set of heavy dead lifts before my body has recovered, I will simply fail. This means that the bodily adaptation to this new weight—or new number of repetitions—that I am doing all this work in order to provoke _won’t happen_. Rest, food and water are mandatory. You have to quit when you’re done.
- Weakness and strength are systole and diastole, to borrow one of Emerson’s favorite metaphors.
- More: we build strength only by confronting, in every workout, the outer limits of our strength as it currently exists, limits that we know we won’t be able to move outward forever. To know, with certainty, that I can deadlift a certain amount five times, and no more, is also to know that I cannot deadlift an infinite number of larger amounts. I’ll make my incremental progress for a while, but I won’t conquer infinity by steps. Eventually we add our last plate; someday we do our last rep. We age, and become curvy again like the younger self we may still be fleeing, or we waste and therefore grow weak as he was. Accepting this is, in a way, our last test of strength.

all things too small review
- I don’t think the conservative argument tends to be that desire is bad, though it can be, but that it can make incompatible demands. We desire short-term freedom and long-term fulfillment, and while there is no necessary contradiction here, there can be one. People end up wishing, for example, that they had entered a room after the door has closed.

all things too small review 2
- Even when I was unconvinced by them, the vivacious confidence of Rothfeld’s arguments forced me to clarify my own thoughts. And when she swept me along, she showed me new insights into psychology and mysticism, her strongest suits.
- Of course, fidelity (including to, for instance, a vow of celibacy) also cracks us open like an egg. Fidelity transforms us not solely in the moment of encounter but in all the moments yet to come. Pledging to share life with someone else closes off some possibilities for transformation, but it opens possibilities for deeper change, as we become the person we chose to be; and greater rapture, as our souls grow to meet our bodies’ capacity to unite and shelter and bear weight. Being known will always transform you more than preserving inviolate your protective anonymity. Moreover, worldviews that offer alternative paths to rapture and transformation—particularly when those paths are available equally to the asexual, the unchosen, and those who simply feel a different call—are more free, more equal, and more merciful than a worldview in which sex is the privileged site of transformation.
- What might have been solitude becomes loneliness when you know for whom you are waiting.
- Beauty, heaven, love are the ultimate cakes we want to eat and also have.

molly brodak newsletter archive
- And as much as STEM profs pretend writing doesn’t matter in their classes, doesn’t need to be taught in their classes, until direct brain-to-brain transfer comes along, writing still stands as the best way to prove you know something. So they begrudgingly assign writing without teaching it, thereby devaluing it as a learned skill.
- There’s invention, research, collaboration, drafting, revision, revision, revision. And there is not only the identification of these steps, but there are moments in the classroom when I teach how to actually do each one of them. _Here’s how to revise._ It’s not just peer review. It’s not just go home and do it. It’s a d i s c r e t e  t a s k. Writing is not a magic slot machine into which the Coin of Brilliance is passed and A+ Paper spits out. It’s can’t be faked, it can’t be crammed-for, it isn’t a gift you either have or you don’t.
- “Anger isn’t…what _emotional_ means though,” one said. Ah-ha, I thought, now we are here. Now we have come to the place of splitting up emotions and gendering them. This, I think—besides the obvious factor of men generally being taught to subduct, to repress rather than express feeling—is why men think they are less emotional than women
- The truth is, of course, there is no master of the universe. The universe is for _joining_, not mastering. The old masculine narrative is a relic, useful to study, not to absorb.
- At home when I am working, writing, studying, reading, learning, whatever, I sit in bed (and no, I have no problem also sleeping in that same bed later, as some do; I am great at sleeping). I concentrate better when I am comfortable.
- One thing I have learned as a teacher in the last year or so is that the question _why_ is sometimes the worst question. I mean worst like it produces the least fruitful results. Usually people _don’t know why_ anything if you ask them.
- Digression: true art assholes, if we’re talking about All of History, have drawn an arbitrary line between decoration and art, and this is why major fine art museums are stocked mostly with paintings, drawings and photos and not dimensional objects, although art snobs do not like to admit paintings are just decorated canvases or panels. In other words: _is it a useful object? Is it a tea kettle or quilt or comb? Then it’s not high art. I don’t care what you do to it, or how it was made._ It is _merely_ a decorated object. In other other words: Art need be functionally useless. Perhaps the soul just can’t concentrate on ecstasy if  the object has some other function besides ecstasy-inducing.

Sarah Schulman Interview
- I’m primarily a novelist. I think the novelist’s job is to show how people experience their own lives, how people understand their own lives, and how they feel about their own lives – not how I think they should feel about it, or how I wish they would feel about it, but how they actually do. And when you take that perspective, every single person has contradictions. And we’re suffering from the denial of the fact that every person has contradictions. There’s a demand for perfection that is impossible right now, that cripples people. So I’m just sticking to that – that belief, those values, that people who are highly flawed, who lie, who aggrandise themselves, they can change the world. You don’t have to be a hero to change the world, you could be a person. And I think that’s important information.
- Sure. But part of the problem of lesbian fiction is that, when you read fiction, you have to identify with the protagonist. And people don’t like lesbians, and they don’t want to identify with the protagonist.

Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist: ‘If you trust the mathematics, we are immortal’
- Is there anything after death? What is the meaning of life? Are we just a bag of atoms? The scientist Sabine Hossenfelder, born in Frankfurt (Germany) 48 years ago, is convinced that if there is a branch of science capable of finding answers to humanity’s existential questions, it is physics.
- No. But I do believe that human consciousness – and complexity in general – is more closely intertwined with the universe in its entirety than we currently appreciate. That is, while I do not sign up to any recognized religion, I too have beliefs that are not based on evidence.
- If you trust the mathematics, yes. But it is not an immortality in the sense that after death you will wake up sitting in hell or heaven, both of which – let’s be honest – are very earthly ideas. It is more that, since the information about you cannot be destroyed, it is in principle possible that a higher being someday, somehow re-assembles you and brings you back to life. And since you would have no memory of the time passing in between – which could be 10¹⁰⁰ billion years! – you would just find yourself in the very far future.
- Yes. Think of death as a drop of ink that falls into the ocean. You are the drop, the ocean is the universe. That what made up the drop (you) will spread in the ocean (universe) and become unrecognizable. But it never disappears.

Rachel O'Connoll FT Article
- I enjoy some of this. I like talking nonsense with my friends. But I’d started to question how deliberate much of it was. I’d find myself posting a picture of a book I was reading and think, why do I need an audience to read? I began to wonder if, in the cycle of curating, recording and publicising our lives on social media, the things we do that are not seen and affirmed by people online feel somehow less “real”.
- So everywhere you look it is Brat summers or trad wives, cottage-core or bloke-core, high-functioning anxiety, parentified children or whatever happens to be the latest term for pathologising your life experience. Everything is flattened, simplified. I worried that being immersed in it was making me think this way too.
- Over the weekend, one of the instructors spoke about trying to be more conscious of the labels we put on our experiences and interactions. It struck me that a similar fatigue with the overload of digital communication is probably what draws a lot of people to try a silent retreat. We were all the type of person who is fed up with “types of people”.
- I came to understand the task not as emptying your head of thoughts, but rather resisting the tendency to narrate things to yourself in words. I noticed that this interior monologuing would lead me along familiar, superficial trains of thought, to recent memories associated with certain feelings, say, and soon enough back to mundane anxieties.
- Other people’s perceptions of you, real or imagined, don’t have to influence how you see yourself. Social media is designed to erase this perspective. Much of the anxiety it fosters comes from forcing you to see yourself, constantly, as relative to others.

against narrative by rayne fisher-quann
- That you can love someone like that and then somehow stop, for reasons that neither of you can understand or control, leaving the once-precious viscera of your relationship somewhere where no one can access it again — this is a kind of tragedy both banal and unbearable, a type of murder experienced by everyone, everywhere, all the time. The more debasing the experience, the more desperately we reach for shreds of meaning; the story is an attempt to establish control that is abandoned in the process of loving.
- But, if love has taught us anything, it’s that **there are things known to the body that cannot be grasped by the mind.** The things I’ve felt, I realize, don’t belong to my rational self any more than anything else does. To think that you ought to understand something just because you lived it — that you are owed an explanation for your feelings just because you happen to be the one who felt them — strikes me as a supremely naive kind of power play; the little dog that thinks it’s a big dog, or the toddler that acts like a dictator because it senses, perhaps, exactly how beholden it is to the whims of people and systems much bigger and more powerful than itself.
- One of the most potent surprises is how my relationship with David didn’t end when we stopped being with each other, or even when I fell in love with someone else. I still think about him nearly every day. I still feel the vibrations of forces that I can’t understand — forces, like love and grief and pain, that sit somewhere beyond the limits of language — and these aren’t just memories of feelings but new ones, always new. Our relationship exists, still, somewhere. This, like everything else, is very painful, and accepting it has brought me a kind of liberation that I didn’t think was possible.

193: Parenthood's PR problem by Haley Nahman
- This conversation is supposedly about parents, but mostly it’s about mothers. When I became one myself last year, and transitioned from the one judging motherhood commentary to the one potentially being judged, I became more interested in the chasm between these two groups. I assume this is mostly because my own prior impressions of parenthood are still fresh in my mind, which means I’m reminded all the time of how wrong I was about so many things, like how your life changes when you have a kid, or why people behave or talk about it in the ways they do. Awareness of this disconnect has made me twitchy and paranoid, always wondering what people are now getting wrong about _me._ This follows a karmic logic: The judgmental become the self-conscious. Now I’m paying my dues.
- She’s been adorable and fun too, but mostly I’ve been focused on the hard moments, overthinking the impression she’s leaving on friends—whom I want to love being around her, and who are considering parenthood themselves.

The Hero's Journey by Andrea Petkovic
- “I thought winning a Grand Slam would change my life forever. It didn’t.”
- But Domi’s quote hits even harder because winning a major title was the one thing I hadn’t accomplished. Somewhere in the back of my mind, there was always the question of what if? What if I _had_ won the US Open, maybe it _would have_ changed something? Thiem’s quote was reposted by Coco Gauff. It clearly hit a note.
- It’s easy for outsiders to romanticise being a tennis player. But the same is true for tennis players themselves. They romanticise it just as much. It’s a classic hero’s tale.
- Being a tennis player becomes a narrative. Every loss brings you down a bit lower but only in order for you to rise higher than ever before. That’s why most athletes’ biographies leave a stale taste in my mouth. When I was a child I couldn’t get enough of them. As an adult, knowing life a bit better, they read false and trite. A life doesn’t end with a title at the US Open. A movie ends there, a book, but not life. It continues on and you have to wake up the next day and fill 12 hours of emptiness with meaning whether you have a big title or not. The 12 to 16 waking hours are always there. Until they aren’t anymore. And when that moment comes, you can only hope that you have a life well-lived to look back on. What that means in detail is up to you.
- Ambition can become a bottomless pit.

You're Nothing But a Number to me by Andrea Petkovic
- The Monday when I woke up as the 9th best tennis player in the world in 2011 was a sunny one. I remember that I ate strawberries for breakfast and two eggs over-easy on toast. It was a time before I needed coffee in the morning to wake myself up, full of vitality for vitality’s sake. I was sitting on my phone, refreshing the WTA website which was crashing over and over again, waiting impatiently for the proof that I, in fact, had accomplished the goal of being one of the ten best tennis players in the world.
- When the crashing of the website subsided and I saw the 9 next to my name I felt elation for the length of exactly five seconds. Then, everything returned right back to normal. For the next week or so, I could artificially evoke the euphoria I had felt when i had seen the new Monday morning ranking by secretly loading the same website over and over again. After a week, the elation was gone, the euphoria had disappeared. In its stead nestled the ugly face of ambition. 9 was great and fine but all I could see were the 8 other women in front of me. I was sure that if could somehow tackle them (metaphorically speaking, I’m not Tonya Harding) the elation would linger, the euphoria would stay.
- In my experience, growing as a human will always reflect well on your game but growing as a tennis player will not necessarily have the same result for the human being. Sometimes the contrary happens. It’s just two different departments of work, like marketing and accounting. But I had mingled them all together and could not fathom the disappointment that awaited me in the next room.
- I thought the 8 in front of me were the problem when in reality the ones behind me were the real issue at hand. They were the ones who wouldn’t let me sleep at night. Defending something can take a lot more energy out of you than attacking.

'I'm Too Lazy and Mediocre to Deserve the Life I Want!' Ask-Polly by Heather Havrilesky
- From Brothers K:
- “Young man, do not forget to pray. Each time you pray, if you do so sincerely, there will be the flash of a new feeling in it, and a new thought as well, one you did not know before, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is education.”
- Dostoyevsky suffered a lot in his lifetime, and it turned him into someone who knew how to pray, how to work hard, how to believe, how to spread his wisdom and even his love with his words. I always thought of Dostoyevsky as this bleak, broken Russian dude who hated everything and everyone. I read _Crime and Punishment_ when I was young and I didn’t feel that it had anything to offer me. I refused the gift. I ignored the river. I turned my back on the connection there. I wasn’t ready yet.
- But when you believe in this perfect world — not in God, necessarily, but in the crushing beauty of every tiny leaf, every little shimmer of sunshine on water, every faint breeze drifting through the air — you connect with your capacity for love, with your uncanny ability to form new connections and discover new ideas, with your unbelievable strength and resilience in the face of suffering.
- You need to feel good. That’s all. In order to feel good, you need to try.
- So this is my advice to you: Do anything. Just try. Failure isn’t important. It doesn’t even matter exactly what you do. The more you do, the better you’ll feel. The better you feel, the more you’ll try. Happiness is just about TRYING.

Women: A Novella, Interview by Maddy Court
- Ha, imagine getting your copy of _Women_ back and finding annotations in it from ANOTHER GIRL. Devastating.
- Well now I’m thinking about genre and genre fluidity re: the relationship at the center of _Women_. Finn and the narrator are constantly emailing and writing to each other, but they’re not actually communicating in an honest, effective way. It’s like they’re collaborating on a fantasy or epistolary novel, but they--or at least the narrator--want to believe that it’s non-fiction. To me, this disconnect is what makes reading _Women_ such a forget-to-breathe, clench-your-butt experience.
- Almost like they are living a double life together. And life takes place only by email and when they’re in bed together.
- What do you think it is about email and doomed lesbian affairs? I think it’s bigger than just the time period. Email is the most languid form of digital communication, so it’s easier to build a fantasy and wax poetic about stupid shit? It’s also a lot easier to conceal emails if one of you is cheating or in the middle of a gnarly breakup. It’s something you can do from work, assuming your job entails writing emails.
- Blocking is my present day favorite form of intimacy. I’ve had a situationship off and on for a year and blocking and unblocking is one of our forms of communication. It’s funny because I write about Goodreads blocking in _Women_, and this past summer once I found myself dating women again, blocking returned.
- Wait, you block each other in a flirty way? Please say more about this. For me, blocking carries a lot of finality and even anger.
- Blocking your ex on Goodreads is really funny, though—kind of like running them over in a clown car.
- Do you think it’s actually possible for lesbians to break up? I just read _**[Perfume and Pain](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Perfume-and-Pain/Anna-Dorn/9781668047170)**_ **[by Anna Dorn](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Perfume-and-Pain/Anna-Dorn/9781668047170)** and based on that and my own life, I’m convinced they can’t.
- I do think lesbians can break up, I’ve seen it happen, and the truth is that they’re so, so much happier six months to a year later. It’s about bearing that initial discomfort and learning to be alone, which is really difficult for a lot of lesbians. Why? So many reasons, including but not limited to attachment issues, self-esteem, the high cost of living, dyke scarcity, etc, etc, on and on.

Leaked Training Shows How Doctors in New York’s Biggest Hospital System Are Using AI
- The leaked presentation shows that hospitals are increasingly using AI and LLMs to streamlining administrative tasks, and shows that some are experimenting with or at least considering how LLMs would be used in clinical settings or in interactions with patients.
- Throughout the presentation, the presenters suggested Northwell employees use AI Hub for things like questions about hospital policies and writing job descriptions or editing writing. At one point she said “people have been using this for clinical chart summaries.” She acknowledged that LLMs are often wrong. “That, as this community knows, is sort of the thing with gen AI. You can't take it at face value out of the box for whatever it is,” Kaul said. “You always have to keep reading it and reviewing any of the outputs, and you have to keep iterating on it until you get the kind of output quality that you're looking for if you want to use it for a very specific purpose. And so we'll always keep reinforcing, take it as a draft, review it, and you are accountable for whatever you use.”
- At one point in the demo, a radiologist asked a question: “Is there any sort of medical or ethical oversight on the publication of tasks?” They imagined a scenario where someone chooses a task, they said, thinking it does one thing but not realizing it’s meant to do another, and receiving inaccurate results from the model. “I saw one that was, ‘detect pancreas cancer in a radiology report.’ I realize this might be for play right now, but at some point people are going to start to trust this to do medical decision making.”
- "It seems clear that in the future, AI won't replace doctors, but doctors who use AI will replace those who don't."
- “The need is so urgent,” Ravitsky said. “Clinician burnout because of note taking and updating records is a real phenomenon, and the hope is that time saved from that will be spent on the actual clinical encounter, looking at the patient’s eyes rather than at a screen, interacting with them, getting more contextual information from them, and they would actually improve clinical care.” But this is a double-edged sword: “Everybody fears that it will release some time for clinicians, and then, instead of improving care, they'll be expected to do more things, and that won’t really help,” she said.

books.
finished in october:
- The Next Chapters by Haley Cass
- The Snowball Effect by Haley Cass
- Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Currently reading:
- The Details by Ia Genberg
- Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
- What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Does anyone have thoughts about Lauren Oyler?

This whole Bookforum drama has been kind of funny and I really do think it was just a perfectly timed storm of causing A Problem because Rothfeld's review was posted before and IMO did a better job of actually analysing the essay collection instead of Oyler herself. But I do not want to admit how long I have been thinking about Lauren Oyler and how long she's been driving me nuts and her specific brand of slightly confusing but also idiotic writing that basically comes down to her making sure you /know/ she is smarter than you. I keep reading the interviews and the reviews that are recent and it is just...very funny to me. Twitter has already done a 180 and is now saying anyone who is anti-Oyler is worse than she is which LOL. But it was a fun two days of waiting for it to drop...

Anyway here are some links of things I've been reading.

• A Sense of Agency: A Conversation with Lauren Oyler By Sheila Heti
• One thing that distressed me in your collection was the sense that someone as obviously intellectual as you are nevertheless does not carry around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read. It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches. It made me feel the relative shallowness of the contemporary mind that many of us share, compared to the intellectuals of the past who had a world of references inside them. Is this something you feel, or are bothered about in any way? Let’s first please allow that I am thirty-three years old, so I’ve had only about a decade of reading that actually counts. It’s probably true that I read the way a “digital native” reads, which is to say broadly and not as deeply, because of the way our technologies of reading work.
• Confidence, certainly, but I don’t know where that comes from, and I don’t like to use the word that often because it implies little connection to the convictions that might produce the confidence. I’m confident in my criticism because I am pretty certain of both my interpretations and my stylistic choices by the time I write. A sense of agency? A democratic sensibility, or maybe just a sense of proportion? I don’t think many of the people who call themselves writers actually care about literary form or style or ideas expressed in writing. They care about being called writers. So my attitude about this is, fine, if you want to be a writer, I will treat you like one—I will assess your writing on the level of form and style and idea. I’m as qualified to do this as anyone else, and anyone else is welcome to do it to me. If you’re a serious writer, you should be able to withstand criticism and determine which criticism is legitimate and which criticism is made in bad faith, even if it stings.
• Lauren Oyler Wishes You’d Fact-Check Your Reviews By Steven Phillips-Horst
• Lauren Oyler thinks she’s better than you by Becca Rothfeld
  • Who, exactly, is she mocking when she tags a metaphor as such? She is so desperate to demonstrate that she is in on the joke that she neglects to ask if the joke is even funny.
  • Of course, she is sort of joking — she is always sort of joking, if also often sort of bragging
• Star Struck by Ann Manov
• But Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle. Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.
• Having been a teaching assistant in the department Oyler is so proud to have matriculated at, I am familiar with the less-than-Herculean intellectual labors needed to get an English degree from Yale. But I digress. Beyond the literal meaninglessness of the claim to “value style over voice,” the sophomoric airs of saying one “enjoys an unfamiliar vocabulary word,” the absurdity of claiming to be able to “identify a decent percentage of the permanent collection” “at the museum” “by sight” (the Met has almost two million items in its permanent collection), the half-hearted allusion to “opera,” the boast about seeing an adaptation of a Kafka novel—beyond this arch guilelessness, this churlish, half-ironic catalogue of her accomplishments, there is something greater here: the way Oyler conceives of her own claim to cultural elitism as a series of adolescent signifiers flung on with the pride of a Goth teenager donning her first Hot Topic belt. “I despise a happy ending”? If she’s so highbrow, I advise her to try out the ending of War and Peace.
• Holding Court by Gene Seymour
• Though Cleveland’s heart was broken, Abdurraqib says he understood why King James did what he did. “I’m not immune to the desire for exits. I’ve said already that I once believed my salvation would be found in another place.” Still, as the book recalls, the manifestations of the city’s heartbreak were, to say the least, intense—most especially, the setting of fires to replicas of James’s Cavaliers jersey. Then T-shirts and, “for some reason, a pair of Adidas sneakers.” He recognizes these fiery rituals as a stage of heartbreak. Still, as he notices, “so many of the people with microphones pushed into their faces in the aftermath of The Decision were white, and so much of the language affixed to that moment, out of those mouths, revolved around death, around burial.” (“He’s dead to me,” they said of James after he’d left Cleveland behind.) Abdurraqib can’t help seeing in these flames a reminder of Black urban riots in Los Angeles in 1992, in Oakland in 2009, in Miami in 1980—“in any place where black people have been conductors to a symphony of fire”—and how often these Black rioters were asked why they would set fire to “their own place.” Abdurraqib retrieves a welter of emotional responses, “about how none of this shit is ours & you have mistaken being in a place for having control over it.” Implicit in his analogy is another one of his wishes: that people who set fire to LeBron merchandise understand that their reactions are just as irrational, yet just as understandable, as the inevitable outcome of heartbreak.
• I Need The Senators To Sit Down And Explain To Me What’s Acceptable To Do To An Empty Net And What’s Not By Barry Petchesky
• ESPN’s Win Probability Graphic Wants To Give You Gambling Brain By Kathryn Xu
• How South Carolina Got the Storybook Finish That Caitlin Clark Was Chasing By Seerat Sohi
• ‘The Rest of the World Disappears’: Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity by Jordana Cepelewicz
• She sees math as an art — and as a way to push at and play with the very limits of language.
• There’s the magic of a proof — the emotion you feel when you understand it, when you realize how strong it is and how strong it makes you. As a child, I could already see this. And I enjoyed the concentration that mathematics requires. It’s something that, getting older, I find more and more central to the practice of mathematics. The rest of the world disappears. Your whole brain exists to study a problem. It’s an extraordinary experience, one that’s very important to me — to make yourself leave the world of practical things, to inhabit a different world. Maybe this is why my son enjoys playing video games so much.
• Doing mathematics, most of the time I have to sort of fight against myself, because I am very disordered, I’m not very disciplined, and I also tend to get depressed. I don’t find it to be easy. But what I discovered is that at some moments — like in the morning over breakfast, or when I am walking through the streets of Paris or doing something mindless like cleaning — my brain starts working by itself. I realize that I am thinking about mathematics, without having intended to. It’s like you are dreaming. I am 62, and I have no real method for doing good mathematics: I still more or less wait for the moment when I get some inspiration.
• You could compare a mathematical theorem to a poem. It is written in words. It’s a product of language. We only have our mathematical objects because we use language, because we use everyday words and give them a specific meaning. So you can compare poetry and mathematics, in that they both completely rely on the language but still create something new.
• Rachel Cusk, the novelist on the “feminine non-state of non-being” by Merve Emre
• Character is a very difficult thing to believe in or to assert the existence of in anything other than a very static set of circumstances, where character can confirm itself all the time. But now I think slightly differently, certainly, about the question of time. I wonder why I have never used my ability to slow down time and why, in the Anglophone novel, it’s a rare thing for anyone to do—to make time go very, very, very slowly in a book. I’ve moved to France, I’m reading French novels in French all day, every day, and this is the thing that I’m most struck by: They go much more slowly. Time pauses. The book’s location in time is completely different.

© A.V. Marraccini

Read: 7 (out of 52) which means I hit my reading goal. I still feel like I am rushing through books and Not Really Getting it, but not sure how to work around that. Writing "reviews" to get ARCs helps somewhat, but it's just...a vibe check and not a lot of real thinking. Still want to slow down and actually Take Things In but definitely not bothering to do that when I'm reading romances.

books!

Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous by Mae Marvel (ARC)
Genuinely Did Not Have A Good Time. One of those super self-aware books where everyone talks like they're Tweeting and saying the right thing matters so much more than doing the right things. The premise was already kind of weird to me, but the dynamic between the two leads was awful. I know that lesbian romance novels almost never work for me anymore, which is truly disappointing, but this was one that I definitely wouldn't have bothered finishing if it wasn't an ARC.

The Perfect Guy Doesn't Exist by Sophie Gonzales (ARC)
Young adult so definitely not for me, but I really liked her last book (vague Bachelor setting, women falling in love behind the scenes, and "ruining" the show) so I was willing to give this one a shot. It was...very young. Don't really feel like I can say anything where it clearly wasn't meant to me. I think it could definitely be a book that could make kids/teens feel less alone but I just know if I read this when I was 14 I would've felt so embarrassed, deactivated Tumblr, and quit AO3, and maybe that would've been for the best.

Game Misconduct by Ari Baran
An attempt at a "realistic" book about gay men in the NHL. I didn't hate it, but a lot felt repetitive. It's a league where enforcers are still important, even if they are on their way out, but also where women play in the NHL. The world building in that sense felt very fic-like to me and I know there's an expectation to lean into it, but I didn't feel like it added anything narratively other than a check mark for ~remembering women exist or whatever. Sports books rarely work for me anyway and the way their careers was kind of odd to me, but whatever. Not the point of the book. Their relationship didn't really develop as much as it suddenly changed. It was hard to be invested when Things Just Happened. I liked that the author included drug and alcohol abuse within the story, but at times it felt almost so spelled out.

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett (ARC)
Short and easy to get through, even if the topics aren't exactly light. I requested this one because Brandon Taylor hyped it on Twitter. It was...fine. The character development was really good and I'm always impressed at how easily authors can sneak in details to really explain a character without it feeling like a list of facts and traits being stated just to get on with it. There was one paragraph on death that's really stuck with me, but other than that I don't think this one will stay with me.

Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas
Yeah! I really loved this one. Gay teens being awful and writing horrible fic (?) about their classmates. Read this one in two days and enjoyed all of it. One that I will think about for a long time. I don't know what else to say other than that I found this incredible and want everyone to read it. Also thought this was a really cool article by the author, related to his book.

Mrs. S by K. Patrick
In theory, it's got everything I want: literary fiction about a weird all-girls private school, age gap relationship, vaguely romantic trips to swimming holes, ~older woman cheating on her husband, but it just fell so, so flat. The writing is hard to get to and I kept getting lost on the page, partially to be blamed on my own reading issues/attention span, I'm sure, but it made the experience of reading so annoying. Everything was drawn out and would've been better suited to a novella/short story. The last ~30 pages were a lot stronger imo than the rest of the book, but the payoff wasn't there.

Death Valley by Melissa Broder (ARC)
I'm pretty hit or miss with Broder's books (Loved Milk Fed, was eh on The Pisces) but I will still probably read anything she writes. Death Valley was...inexplicable. I don't know if I liked it or not, her writing is still wild and weird and enjoyable. The meat of the novel felt a bit uncertain, but it's such a personal novel that it feels rude to be harsh. The ending was surprising, a lot more hopeful than I would've thought, and made the rest of it feel twisted up. It was interesting, which at this point is enough for me. Don't feel strong enough about it to recommend or anything.

Up next:
- The Lengthening Shadow of Dr. Andrew Taylor Still by Arthur Hildreth (School)
- Darryl by Jackie Ess
- Casandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
- Hoping to re-read either Beautiful World Where Are you or The Happy Couple too. Might wait for The Happy Couple Canadian release so I can buy the swan cover as an excuse <3

Read: 42
Honestly, I felt like it was a pretty bad reading year to date, but then looking through...not too shabby. Top 4 is very solid, loved all of them, and then 5-10 is a bit...wonky and are fine, but not near the favourite territory.

10. Chlorine by Jade Song
Weird book about a competitive swimmer who decides she's a mermaid and tries to become one. Gross but overall pretty interesting/compelling. Probably deserves a closer reading but I didn't like it enough to really dig deep.

9. Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel
Definitely over-hyped this for myself. Short timeframe, where a trans woman's ex-girlfriend comes to visit her in Denmark, and they talk everything through. Writing was a bit too flowery for me at moments and it got pretty repetitive. This is one I'd want to re-read to see if I get more out of it, but the first time through it was difficult to get to the point.

8. The Winners by Frederik Backman
This man ruined my life. Could've definitely been shorter, but it was so, so emotional and I will never forgive him.

7. Desperada by Sofia Mostaghimi
I really loved this one even if it was incredibly depressing. Read it early in the year and do not remember much of the details, but the writing was strong and the story was really heartfelt.

6. The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer
Other went to the University of Guelph which is somehow hilarious to me. Freshman at University of Toronto (I assume) dates a 38 year old woman. I liked the writing but it was a bit much at points. I liked that the story just existed and it wasn't exactly a statement on anything except a personal journey.

5. Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
I love a book with emails, sorry to say. I thought it was sweet. I probably would've enjoyed this more if I had more sympathy for men, but I don't. Felt like a lot of reviews were so unsympathetic to the main woman which isn't surprising, but still depressing to me. The SNL details were unnecessary to me, as someone annoyingly familiar with the show, but I get why they were included.

4. Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
I loved this book so much I shocked myself. Creepy, weird, fun. I love "horror" when it's about the ocean. I loved the main character. The writing was incredible and I liked the pacing.

3. Shark Heart by Emily Habeck
A happily married couple finds out that the husband has a mutation that is going to turn him into a great white shark. No notes! I thought this was amazing. I loved the weird structure of the book, I loved the characters and how realized they felt, I loved the oddness of the universe Habeck built. My only complaint is the epilogue. But I am not an epilogue fan in general and it was a tad too sweet for me contrasted to the rest of the book.

2. The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan
Yeah...she gets it. I loved it. I loved the mess of characters and all the dynamics. I love Dolan's prose. This was a lot better than Exciting Times imo, which I also liked. The structure of this one was interesting too. It worked because I did have an annoying bit of sympathy for Luke even though he sucked. All the women were fascinating and weird. Very excited for whatever Dolan writes next.

1. Boulder by Eva Baltasar
I check every week to see when the third book of this series is going to come out in English. It's so short but I loved it so much. I definitely prefer Boulder to Permafrost. I love mean weird lesbians who get to be mean weird lesbians. I love how the love story unfolded and went "wrong". Her writing is stunning and it was so easy to read, even if it was draped in pretty prose. It is pretty close to the ideal kind of lesbian book that I want more of: nothing is sugar coated, it isn't a straight forward romance, the characters feel like real people, and the emotions are so, so genuine.