☞ 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 a feeling about time that’s less persistent.

And there’s something intimate in the experience without the appearance of being so, aside from the ways our bodies touch, brushing each other in the aisle. The cabin is both immense and small, a tunnel of chairs. It’s like traveling via train or bus, but there’s no sense of motion with the windows shaded. Going forward, never backward, and yet a flight can feel like a back door from life.

Or a communion with oneself, amidst a couple hundred people also communing.

(Or maybe not: one woman across the aisle, a row head of me, spent most of the flight texting with ChatGPT.)

Regarding time, I wondered at one point what the young man sitting next to me would think. He was one of the last to board. Early twenties with poofy hair, in a black leather jacket, carrying the biggest Starbucks cup. No bag, no books, no magazines. Instead, he tuned the seat-back monitor to a map of our trip, with a clock at the top counting down the minutes remaining—and for four and a half hours he looked at little else, except occasionally to glance at the email inbox on his Android.

What was he thinking? What was he feeling? Occasionally he’d swipe his inbox to refresh, though he didn’t have Wifi, he seemed to be swiping unconsciously.

I thought at another point, maybe a flight attempts to allow a person to return to just being. Sit, breathe, eat, sleep. You’re free to move about the cabin—sure, but how free, and how free do we really want to be? And how little tolerance there is on a flight for change, how deterministic a flight must be, how stable the world inside the plane seems compared to the world outside it.

Weird thoughts appear at 35,000 feet—is it the altitude, or is it just me? Things like…

is it a coincidence that the end of social voicemails, social phone calls, came about with the rise of podcasts?

do babies perceive bubbles as enclosed air?

Halfway through the flight, above the middle of the country, my neighbor finished his Starbucks and requested coffee, black with cream, though he asked the attendant to pour it straight into his Venti cup. And around that time, I wrote down, “it is possible on a flight to feel an expansion of mind.”

Also: “I forgot how tasty Cheese-Its.”

I was rereading On Breathing by Jamieson Webster on the plane, in preparation for an interview, and this phrase stood out to me: “somatic vicissitudes.” I underlined it because I didn’t know what it meant. At that point, there was an hour left in the flight and my neighbor had finished his coffee, he was attempting to sleep on his traytable with his poofy hair around his head resembling a small, curled-up dog. Had the somatic vicissitudes gotten to him? Was the timer no longer tolerable? Lately, talking to friends, it sounds like there’s an emotional plague on the land. Things feel adrift, formulas seem broken; the psycho-political deformations are perverse, and yet the stock market soars. I know one person who has a group chat with colleagues where there’s no texting, just pictures of nice things from nature (to cheer them up). Yet I also know people doing incredible, inspiring things: adopting and/or fostering children, making art, organizing political groups, all the physical human movements that bypass complaint, that sneak around social media and AI. The atmospheric conditions of this moment, the “plane” we’re all traveling in, seem to allow for it all.

The flight finished and I headed for the subway. I would take a bunch of subway trains over the next few days, and almost all the ads I saw in the train cars were for AI. And the one I saw most that wasn’t for AI software promoted a book instead, a hardcover titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.

Each time I saw it, I thought, is this what it was like to live during the development of nuclear weapons? And I also thought occasionally about my seat-mate, the kid with floppy hair, and wondered what larger timers we’re not paying attention to.

𓀠 Tomorrow’s 3+ things for members:

• Speaking of AI, a recent experiment I conducted with Claude that had startling, enjoyable results

• My favorite tote bag for a six-day trip, and other bags I’ve got an eye on

• Short fiction to try if you (like me) read very little short fiction

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

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❀ 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.

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, and homemade signs are the Post-Its on the manuscript: applique-d, torn off, thrown away. A walk this week yielded dozens, maybe hundreds of signs—and that was ignoring (for the most part) all the business placards and corporate billboards and bar neon, because I’m more interested in the handmade and taped-up, those printed in Colby Poster fashion.

Comedy nights, disco nights, gallery openings.

A kink-positive “play party” with a phone number to call.

The posters appear to change out weekly if not daily—a taco festival, a spring fair, a rodeo. There were posters promoting politicians who said they stood for working families. Several posters promoted Honey, a young pitbull looking for a good home, while another asked for information about Mushie, a rescue French Bulldog gone missing, for whom there was a phone number to call and a $10,000 reward (and a website).

A club for Latinos who wanted to improve their Spanish.

Soltera y su sonido sexual, also with a phone number to call.

Speaking of, what I didn’t see much of were any tear-away phone numbers, the kind you traditionally saw on flyers pinned to community bulletin boards—they’d been replaced by QR codes. I scanned one code for an “adult immersive scavenger hunt.” Another for “gay and lonely?” A third for a woman offering hypnotherapy, though that one looked more like a personal ad than anything else.

One poster, headlined “Try Group Therapy,” had three different QR codes for different therapeutic needs: “Existential Artist Group,” “Body Acceptance Group,” “Childless Grief & Hope.”

Are street posters effective? Do they give good ROI? Perhaps most beautiful, constructive or not, are the handwritten or hand-typed posters, similar to notes left on windshields—admonishments, wishes, public letters. One I found taped to several lampposts instructed dog owners to clean up after their dogs. I’ll quote it in full, typos and capitalizations and odd spacings intact:

Dog Owners / Runners

Please don’t have your dogs poop on sidewalks, people’s driveways, front doors, gates. Have them do their business on dirt patch/ grass area by street side, Doesn’t matter if you pick up, still some left that’s tracked al over the place by runners, walkers into people’s homes.

You wouldn’t want doggy poop all over into your home, garage, WOULD YOU? You wouldn’t want to go home after a hard day of work to clean up someone else’s doggy poop outside and inside all over your home, WOULD YOU?

Runners / Walkers carry a good light, watch where you’re stepping.

Do you REALLY want doggy poop all over in your home? Where your children play? Where you relax? Eat dinner? In your car?

Dog Owners, don’t have your dogs pee/ poop on people s gardens, children play areas, Not Necessary, thats so many people’s only joy in this stressful world.

You wouldn’t want other people to make you suffer, clean up, disrespect you, your family and children, Would You?

In college, “signs” were something I steered away from, the semiotics and critical theorists, signifiers and signifieds. Still, what the posters mean outside the fences of what they say is interesting. Are they yearnings of the lonely? Capitalism meets song? My city is constantly shedding, changing its skin, and all the old wheat-pastes and flapping flyers are part of the molting.

One billboard, high above the street, advertised a skateboard magazine with “Sure He Makes $100k But Can He Kickflip?” Though my favorite poster was less commercial, more romantic—

Guy Seeks Girlfriend

ME:
50-ish, intellectual, director/writer/filmmaker,
homeowner, liberal, atheist...

LIKES:
Sondheim Deep Conversation Cats
Yard Sales Critical Thinking Pepsi
Cooking Movies with Subtitles Tex-Mex
Ghost Stories Pizza Theatre Chocolate
Classic Film Screenings Board Games
Libraries Mini-Golf Irony Film Noir
Truth Beauty Love Art

DISLIKES:
Trump Disney Marvel
New-Age Hooey Bro Culture
Reality TV Trump

It was one of the few posters, I’ll note, that did feature tear-aways with a phone number—and maybe only because this guy-seeking-girlfriend, 50-ish, was too old for QR codes. If so, good for him: several of the slips of paper were gone.

Perhaps signs, however transient, can lead to things more lasting.

𓀠 Tomorrow’s 3+ things for members:

• A new suit I wore to a middle-age-crisis party

• Nonfiction books about breathing, and my favorite albums from the week

• A deep dive into fashion (one particular piece of fashion) in cinema

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

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❀ 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.

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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 maybe stopped talking for thirty seconds.

Collaborative conversation, the nonstop flowing kind, is one of my favorite activities, and I’ve found it’s best conducted on a walk-and-talk. Very simply, asking someone to meet you somewhere, then the two of you spend ninety minutes doing some kind of loop. I schedule two or three a week. Urban or in the woods, doesn’t matter. Coffee beforehand, a margarita afterwards, doesn’t matter. The walk and the talk is thing.

And ninety minutes does seem to be the sweet spot. Sixty minutes feels curt. Two hours is an activity. An hour and a half gives both parties enough time to unpack recent grievances and events, then start to go somewhere with the conversation, to make observations together and fashion something before parting ways.

A hike has more exertion. A constitutional to me sounds solitary. Maybe it’s a stroll, but who cares?

From Wikipedia—

Walking is defined as an “inverted pendulum” gait in which the body vaults over the stiff limb or limbs with each step. This applies regardless of the usable number of limbs—even arthropods, with six, eight, or more limbs, walk.

I’ve found that, when possible, it’s nice to have a body of water nearby—going alongside a river, around a reservoir, or by the beach. Because maybe better conversations are the sort that rely on listening more than speaking, on agreement and overlapping rather than debate and studied thoughts. I mean, I do love conversation that’s all debate and reflection, parties fighting from their corners. On a walk-and-talk, though, as we’re both rambling forward, it’s like we’re waves in the same ocean, rather than two side-by-side lakes.

Finding the right companion matters. One of the first signs for me is if they’ll repeat something I’ve said back to me as a way of opening their next gambit. E.g., if I end whatever I’m saying with “…and that’s really the only way to drink coffee,” the other person might start whatever they’re about to say with “It’s the only way to drink coffee, but you also need to consider…”

A novelist friend and I are in a long text exchange over whether it’s possible to know oneself outside of relations with others. Not romantic relationship, necessarily, but any connection. Say a person’s alone in a cave—how far will she get regarding self-knowledge, regarding knowledge of herself in connection to other things? My opinion, based on my own life, is: nowhere. But my friend’s opinion is up for grabs. On that note, I went on a solo walk this week, listening to a podcast, and the host got into how Aristotle arranged three containers for friendship: utility, pleasure, virtue. And I thought about how today there seems to be less emphasis on virtue and civic participation, especially regarding friendship, compared to things like vulnerability or emotional support—friendship as connection, collaboration, intimate for being curious, spontaneous, improvisational. And though I wouldn’t call a walk-and-talk virtuous in any way, maybe it is both useful and pleasurable? For physical and mental wellbeing, via movement and collaboration, via conversational back-and-forth.

When both people pay attention to something other than themselves, something temporary is fashioned before it dissolves. Basically, briefly, you figure shit out.

𓀠 Tomorrow’s 3+ things for members:

• Favorite new rock albums and singles, and an unexpected guided meditation

• An horological refresh

• Exploring “the small web” overlooked by social media and AI

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.

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 twitchiness: every time the bus stopped, he changed seats, looking around as if he had lost something, or was hoping somebody had left something behind.

—Los Angeles is a car city, and it’s long been called a car city, derogatorily, suggesting its residents are fragile for preferring solitude in their cars to interactions with others, their flimsy egos contained by the slightly less flimsy frames of their sensible sedans. And maybe that’s valid. But it’s also reductive, and it neglects the millions of people who rely on the bus, subway, and train networks to get around.

Regular readers know I do a thing once a month called “focus aerobics,” where I spend 60 minutes in a place, observing. A coffeeshop, an Apple store, “downtown” in a Balkan village. And though I’m not a daily Metro user, I am a frequent one, and Tuesday evening, when an author friend was giving a reading at a bookstore, I didn’t feel like driving—but for $1.75 and thirty minutes each way, I get to read a book or do the crossword?

Or, this time, take notes.

—The bus stop is a five-minute walk from home. The sun was high, no shade. Two long-haired high school girls, soccer cleats tied to their backpacks, had been waiting for a while, from the sound of it.

“This bus is taking way too long,” one moaned and got up.

The other followed her away, protesting, “I swear to god, if we’re walking and this bus passes us.”

Two minutes and they were back.

One minute later, the bus appeared.

—Scanner broken, ride was free. It was about six p.m. and the bus was half full. Floors clean, seats clean, air conditioning running, also a couple windows cracked open for a breeze. The mood was sedated: people chatting in English or Spanish, a lot of people scrolling their phones.

—Two stops in, the high school girls departed; they’d taken the bus to cover six blocks. Maybe soccer was especially strenuous?

—According to LA Metro, the system currently sees around a million daily boardings, and about seventy-five percent of them are on the bus.

Regarding Los Angeles being a car city, there is a darker side to things, which I often see on morning jogs and walks: those cars and trucks where many people sleep. Six a.m., seven a.m., I’ll see people waking up in shotgun, or stretching their backs with the door open, or changing clothes at the trunk before heading to work.

—Four stops in, the long-haired man, the guy talking to himself who seemed maybe problematic, exited cautiously, as if unsure this was his stop. Still, as he disembarked, he said loudly in a squeaky, cheerful voice, “Thank you! Drive safe!”

—At the same stop, maybe twenty people boarded, and now the bus was full enough to require many people to stand. This was the after-work crowd: women wearing polo shirts with embroidered chain-restaurant logos, men in paint-splattered pants. The mix was the world’s everybody: high schoolers, middle age, elderly with walkers.

In terms of fashion, the color palette leaned black: black adidas, black Dickies, black hoodies. A young woman wore a black Lana Del Ray concert T-shirt. A middle-aged man wore matching black Dodgers hat and sweatshirt, both commemorating the recent World Series wins.

Then a tall woman boarded and sat next to me, and all eyes were on her briefly: hair in a twisted gray spiral, she wore a floor-length gold gown, lace in parts, embroidered in parts, with a golden crepe flower on the chest, gazing at us like a reflective sun.

She sat, smoothed her dress, settled a grocery bag on her lap (from Vonn’s), before pulling out her phone to watch Reels.

—More than one stop, I watched a mother with kids race to make it, and I noticed the driver in her mirror noticing them too, and I wondered if she was urging them to run faster.

—Throwing someone under the bus, I note down at one point, is a truly an evocative phrase.

—Regarding entertainment, or how people kill time: Most everyone was on their phones. Were they using the free Wifi? Playing games, scrolling TikTok. I watched a young woman watch one of those vertical dramas you’ve heard about, while across the aisle, a twenty-something man with a ponytail read All About Love by bell hooks.

Toward the end of my ride, a woman sat down near me, wearing a Covid mask. She pulled out a notebook and started writing, composing little stanzas that appeared to be lyrics or poetry. Occasionally she stared out the window, then scribbled down another line.

I got off at my stop. The driver eyed me in the mirror. I smiled and mouthed thank you. She smiled and mouthed you’re welcome.

—The reading was fun and I ran into several friends. Two hours, two cocktails later, I walked to the bus stop in the dark—and now I was the one racing to make it, the lit-up box idling at the stoplight. Inside, seats were packed. Mood was weary, sleepy, bone-tired: people heading home at nine p.m., carrying grocery bags, plates of food tented by foil. Aromas were onions and peppers, carne asada, human sweat.

One man, seemingly homeless, had a garbage bag on his lap full of cans.

The stop before mine, a woman boarded and looked confused. She asked the man next to me in Spanish, was she on the right bus? He looked up from his phone, asked where she was going. Downtown, she said, Union Station—he assured her that she was all set. A moment later, she started talking rapidly about what I’m not sure, too quick for me to follow, all I know is it became part of the bus’s overlapping conversations, though apparently it was interesting enough for the guy to stop watching soccer highlights on his phone—and wherever that went, I don’t know, I was off the bus a moment later, two blocks from home.

I thought this on the walk to my door: The delivery system delivered us somewhere; all we did was share a ride. It’s not romantic, it’s not ideal; plenty of riders, I’m sure, would’ve taken a Lyft if the Lyfts were free. Still, the bus got me where I was going, and while I’m walking home, hearing other vehicles slip through the dark, I did feel grateful. We may be a car city, but we’re more.

𓀠 Tomorrow’s 3+ things for members:

• Men’s suiting (for under $1,000) to meet summer expectations

• A playlist for your next sports-themed party

• A great documentary I didn’t know about, 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.

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❀ 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.

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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It means sifting through a lot of newspapers, news websites, obscure websites, and a very thick RSS feed, in order to see what’s interesting. And I also subscribe to a bunch of newsletters that bring me interesting information I might want to share.

And none of them come from the big, mainstream publications, because their news-summary newsletters are only… alright?

Here’s a couple I recommend, new and old, if you want to keep up with events—

If you like what you’re reading, you probably want to try a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

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• For news specific to Los Angeles, L.A. Material just launched with a masthead of pros. They’re running a daily summary of Angeleno things, plus they’re publishing features of their own. Really good so far.

• Interruptrr is an excellent weekly roundup of what’s happening in the world, though always via female experts

• For news specific to the African continent, I like This Week in Africa. There’s a lot of development info, but also broad items and various countries’ politics and culture

• Semafor’s “Flagship” newsletter is a pretty great, twice-daily briefing for business and politics

• Foreign Exchanges gets into the nitty gritty of global affairs, but with good summaries

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What can be written about reality television that hasn’t already been written about reality television? Or what could be better, more magnificent, than what John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in 2011, in his 2011 article about The Real World and contestant “the Miz?”

I’ll stick to the personal. Because …

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☞ I like watches, but I don’t wear one every day. For me, they’re tools or jewelry, and I’ve got one for each mode: an old Seiko SKX013 I got off eBay and wear in the mountains—here’s a good write-up on its appeal—and a Cartier tank my dad gave me, that he once received as a gift, which I wear with a T-shirt when I want an accessory.

But I am on the look-out, and though I’m not ready to commit to a Black Bay 54, the announcement this week that Timex is reissuing its Intrepid model reminded me of one I might desire in the meantime—and it’s not the reissue, or at least, not quite.

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The announcement shows Timex isn’t stupid: JFK Jr. used to get photographed wearing an Intrepid, and JFK Jr. is definitely in the news, at least the style news.

Prior to the Netflix glow-up, though, Timex actually brought out a different, better version of the Intrepid. The collab was with Dimepiece (pictured above), and everything about it is nicer to my eye: smaller size, more interesting colors, altogether cooler in subtle ways.

Of course, it sold out, and I’ve yet to see an Ebay listing that I can stomach. Still, great watch!

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“This is 45 seconds of an eight-count hold… ooooooOOOOOOOEEEEEE!”

…is a thing you hear while running past a pilates studio at a little past sunrise.

Out of nowhere, I’m a morning runner. Not a new routine, but a thing to do: Wake up, tie sneakers, go out the door. The hills are dark, slightly misty. Sunrise is maybe thirty …

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(Or maybe you’re using the Jay-Z concert news to relisten to The Blueprint, and if so, yeah, me too.)

So, not exactly Kim Gordon but—

Not exactly Warpaint but—

Not exactly triphop but—

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Then, for big symphonies, Marek Janowski’s box set of Bruckner symphonies was released in 2024. I’ve enjoyed his recording of the eighth from 2010; other platforms may have more than Spotify’s selection.

And if you like the sound of that, I really like enjoy Vladimir Jurowski conducting Mahler’s ninth.

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The motel is next to a pawn shop. The rental car is a Korean import. At dawn, the retired elderly of this town clog the chain coffeeshops. At happy hour, they clog the chain restaurants.

The New Balances are mostly white, not gray.

I left Los Angeles to spend a couple days this week in Anytown, USA, reporting a story for the Quarterly. The piece has been in the works for over a year, but we needed one final component. I hopped on a plane to another state, rented a car and drove for an hour, then spent a bunch of hours talking to young and middle-aged people in deep crisis, in a strange, extremely contemporary despair.

So, that was the work of the thing; more on the subject when it publishes this summer. But I kept thinking how grateful I was, after two and a half months of basically staying home, to be on the road again, even if the road and its sites weren’t much.

Applebees, Starbucks, an Amazon fulfillment warehouse. It could’ve been most anywhere in the United States that’s not big city or rural. Antique stores because people die. Addiction centers because people use. Tattoo parlors because people people.

So many gyms, so few parks. Shopping complexes lit up all night like revival tents.

Not one graveyard I saw, though plenty of car dealerships.

In a Starbucks one morning, one customer after another wore scrubs, which made sense, the complex included several healthcare facilities. Though when I arrived, facing a cheery, pregnant young barista, the middle-aged woman behind me in line was not in scrubs, she wore jeans and a T-shirt, long hair and tattoo sleeves, and she openly carried a Glock.

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Last week, the keywords were paperback, international, voice-y, strange. The bookseller walked away and returned with (So What) If I’m a Puta?: Travesti Diaries by Amara Moira, translated by Amanda de Lisio.

Perfect, it turns out.

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I’m halfway through and it definitely meets the criteria. Maybe not for the pearl-clutchers, but it’s fascinating, eye-opening, well written.

Here’s the publisher’s description—

An incisive, intimate diary of the life of a travesti sex worker in Brazil, with a foreword by Charlotte Shane

So What If I’m a Puta, originally published on author Amara Moira’s popular blog of the same name, consists of 44 crônicas that wryly portray her experiences as a trans sex worker in Brazil. In a brazen, funny, and at times heartbreaking voice, Moira explores the political and personal textures of her encounters with the men who buy sex from her, and the complex reality of her labor of a sort of love.

Woven through Moira’s essays are reflections on transition, safe sex, desire, whorephobia, consent—in the grim context of Brazil’s record rates of violence against trans women. Ultimately, Moira writes to center trans sex workers in Brazil’s putafeminist movement, modeling a feminism that envisions inclusivity, safety, self-determination, and joy for us all.

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A recent favorite word is “jouissance.” I learned it about three years ago. Beautiful not only for how it sounds—fun to pronounce, a little misshapen, over-long—but how it emerged in my life as something lived.

I mean, definitely better than “riz.”

First of all, it’s from the French, though different from pla…

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