This week got away from me for various reasons—I’m writing this in bed, knocked down by a summer head cold—so, no micro-essay today.
But I did have a big new piece run in The Quarterly on Wednesday, that I’ve been working on for nearly a year. I’ll let my editor’s summary do the heavy lifting:
Americans dominated men’s tennis for decades. Then, nearly 20 years ago, we entered a drought the likes of which we’d never seen. Rosecrans Baldwin talks to more than two dozen former champions, current pros, and longtime experts to figure out what went wrong and how dudes of the stars and stripes might return to Grand Slam glory.
You can find it over here. It involved an enormous amount of work, hours and hours of interviews, and a ton of number-crunching, so it’s been gratifying to see it get a bunch of notice around the web. A media friend who’s attending the U.S. Open, which started this week, said he overheard Paul Annacone talking about it, which, if you’re a tennis head—Annacone is the former coach of Pete Sampras, Roger Federer, and Sloane Stephens, and the current coach of rising star Taylor Fritz—well, you can imagine my bulging eyeballs.
See you next Saturday. A very good week to all.
What the what? A (mostly) weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful.
Rosecrans’s bestselling new book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local shop. Check it!
Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a list at Bookshop.