Warm and green here; time speeds up at this time of year and it feels like we’re careening into summer.

- Is a Baby a Luxury? (Mira Ptacin at Guernica)

I immediately called the department—surely they must have looked over the fact that I was carrying an unborn child who needed medical care, and couldn’t afford to purchase health insurance—but my explanation was greeted with a dry, breathy laugh, followed by, “Just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you get healthcare.”

If the United States truly prides itself on family values, why is it nearly impossible for so many of us to care for our family, starting with the most basic care of all?

When I first moved to England people on both sides of the Atlantic used to ask me what I liked best about living here, and I would respond, in a sort of joking voice, “the NHS!”, but, really, that’s my answer, or one of my answers, anyway.

- Everything in This City Must (Alexander Chee at The Morning News)

In both situations, Dustin’s status as my domestic partner, certified by the city of New York, counted toward his immigration status with the German government, and despite gay marriage per se not being legal here in Germany, I could include him; he could be with me. You could almost call it a small thing except that he is half of my life.

I think of it again as I sit on the Lufthansa flight lowering itself into Newark airport, and fill out the U.S. State Department visitor card. I sit beside him on the plane and next to the question “How many members of your family are you traveling with?” I write “0,” because our relationship isn’t recognized that way by federal law, and can’t be.

The legal protection the German government gave our American relationship is gone, now that we are back in America.

- On a Personality Trait (Jean Hannah Edelstein)

It reminds you that probably the reason you left, or the reason you’ve stayed away for so long, is that it can feel easier not to fit in to a place where you’re not from, than to feel that you didn’t fit in to the place that you are.

Short, but good – and very apropos of certain themes in the two articles highlighted above, too.

- Feels Blind (Emily Gould)

What made my first year of full-time freelancing so happy, besides not ever having to ride the subway during rush hour, wasn’t anything specific about what my workdays were like. I wasn’t accomplishing much, I was wasting a lot of time, and a lot of the time I was bored. Most days, my work did not go well and I felt dejected about my actual writing. But I still felt good and hopeful, because all these potential paths seemed possible. Everything seemed possible.

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More like “what I read over the last few weeks”…

- On the Road (Maria Bustillos at Aeon)

Dropping into the Central Valley from the mountains surrounding the Tejon Pass is like breaking open a petit four, getting past the glossy, pretty exterior: inside is the cake. The urban surfaces of California are what we see in movies and on TV: slick, manufactured, shouting, cajoling, bamboozling, seducing, ready to sell you something. And then the confected beauty of the city gives way; now the land reaches far out to the sky. Your ears pop from the pressure change, and a sign advises you that the next gas station is 19 miles off.

- Dove “Real Beauty” Redux (Autumn Whitefield-Madrano at The New Inquiry)

The beauty industry has a stake in keeping women in the space between desperate unhappiness with our looks and bulletproof self-esteem. A consumer who simultaneously believes that she is beautiful and not-beautiful makes for a better consumer.

- The Impossible Decision (Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker)

But, talking to my students, I’m aware that there are too many unknowns. There are too many ways in which a person can be disappointed or fulfilled. It’s too unclear what happiness is. It’s too uncertain how the study of art, literature, and ideas fits into it all [...] And, finally, life is too variable, and subject to too many influences [...] I’ll give advice about grad school if you ask me to, and I’m happy to share my experiences. But these bigger mysteries make the grad-school decision harder. They take a career conundrum and elevate it into an existential quandary.

- The Amanda Palmer Problem: How Does a Cult Musician Become a Figure to Be Mocked? (Nitsuh Abebe at Vulture)

It’s damnably difficult to carve a private audience out of the open web, and the artist reaching out to fans is, ultimately, not necessarily any different from a commercial entity reaching out for sales, market share, and the kind of customer engagement that nets Applebee’s enthusiasts the occasional free appetizer coupon. It just depends on if you like Applebee’s or not.

- Waiting to Be (Sarah Menkedick at Vela)

It feels like waking up on Sunday morning and drinking your coffee and longing for something concrete even when you know that what you do will always operate in a liminal space of unknowing, unknowing if what seems like success will turn quickly into failure or vice versa, unknowing if what feels right to you is right, unknowing what you are searching for exactly, unknowing your next move, unknowing why you keep doing this when there are so many other things you could do.

- All Cozy Now (Christopher Kempf at The New Inquiry)

In the work of Hardt and Negri, the metropolis is the common body of the multitude. The city we live in, lives in us.

The same is true for the city we run in. What makes the marathon such a fundamental event in the life of a metropolis is that it takes place in the same public spaces we occupy every day, transfiguring those spaces into sites of generosity and of sudden, serendipitous friendship. Marathons don’t take place in exurban arenas or in locked-down, hyper-secure stadiums, but in the same streets on which we drive to work, the same parks in which we play, the same campuses where we attend classes together. This is the public sphere. This is what was attacked that day. And it was this— the love of the common— that, like thousands of runners trying to access a single, central server, became obstructed by an unanticipated glitch in the system.

- Rudeness as Resistance: Presence, Power, and Those Facebook Home Ads (Whitney Erin Boesel at Cyborgology)

What if we take the physical co-presence of all that Facebook content a little less metaphorically, such that the three characters are present (and joined by their friends) rather than “absent” when they take out their phones? It doesn’t fully hold up, of course, in part because much of what comes to life seems not to be the characters’ friends, but the document artifacts of the characters’ friends’ experiences. Still, consider each “like” a character taps out as turn-taking in an ongoing, asynchronous conversation that takes place both with and without words. Consider that, for each character, his or her friends really are present, even though they’re not physically co-present. Suddenly, these three scenes look a lot less like people getting sucked into demonic glowing rectangles that take them away from the real world, and look a lot more like people simply being rude as they fail to manage conversations with several people at once.

- The Privilege of Fucking Up (Sarah Nicole Prickett at Hazlitt)

A friend recently tried to console me by saying that I’ve failed at more things than most people have ever tried. Most people, I said, try more honestly. Most people do not owe so much to those who believe in them. That is another privilege we don’t discuss: The unrelenting luxury of high expectations, and with it, the chances to fail.

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The other day I stepped out of a café and got a face-full of snow. Yesterday the sun came out and we walked along the river and sat outside at sunset drinking cider, admiring the serenity of the slow evening rowers, pretending that it was warm enough to behave like this, and it almost was.

- On Packing (Molly Beer at Vela)

This problem of weighty, freighted things terrifies me utterly. I do not want the burden of either the object or its implicit value. One I have to carry, the other I will inevitably lose: Crusoe’s knife, after the journey, won’t even look at him; it is a dull, dead thing. What objects, I wonder, will bear my history along some dusty, wrong-sided road? My grandfather’s compass? The leather-bound diary? A sarong (read: table cloth, dress, satchel, curtain, mosquito net, bed sheet, towel)? And what will I cast aside as dead weight?

- Cities of Sleep (Pico Iyer at The New York Review of Books)

The content of my dreams has long ceased to interest me; but their proportions, the way they rearrange the things I thought I cared about, the life I imagined I was leading, won’t go away. Why do I almost never see my mother in my dreams, although, alone in her eighties, she fills my waking thoughts so much? And why, conversely, do I return again and again in sleep to Paris, a city I haven’t visited often in life, as if under some warm compulsion?

- First Love: Memories of an Elusive Boyfriend (Lena Dunham at The New Yorker)

Here’s the thing, or at least a thing, about me—I hate offending people. Even though I love the feel of something vaguely offensive on my tongue, I guess I want to have my cake and tweet it, too.

- “Felicity” And The Joys Of Decent TV (Ben Dolnick at The Awl)

The things that I take pleasure in exhuming are the works of reasonable quality, created in at least relatively good faith. I’m talking about the books and movies and shows that did their job—causing some number of minutes of your life to pass with a minimum of fuss—with a certain soldierly sense of responsibility. Someone once took care to construct a plausible plot by which the character of Ben Covington could make the turn from an aimless slacker to an aspiring doctor. Some group of (deeply misguided) people once sat around a table and decided that, beginning with season three, “Felicity” needed a a new theme song and credit sequence. This care, this effort poured into something so soon forgotten, is oddly moving to me, in the way that watching monks work on a sand mandala is moving.

- Maps (Ben Lytal at The Paris Review)

What an act of love, I hoped, to have transposed these kinds of walks abroad back onto my hometown. As a teenager I guess I had sometimes half-wanted to slow down my car, to get out and walk around downtown Tulsa. But I never did. Tulsa was a table of facts, laden with buildings. I only got sentimental when I went way up in elevators and looked down. I couldn’t always quite understand what I was looking at; the topdown perspective didn’t match my experience driving through it.

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I’ve been struggling through a fog this week (and some of last week, too). A changing-of-the-seasons illness; a bright, mild fever, days spent oscillating between the couch and the bed, bouts of frustration and depression broken by periods of relative pleasure, as the rain came down outside and I was all wrapped up inside, with no obligation other than to myself, to make myself better. I’ve consumed innumerable kinds of soup, swallowed pills, kept my voice to a whisper. And I’d like to say that during all that down-time I read voraciously and smartly, made a dent in my ever-expanding list of things to “read later”, but the truth is: yes, I read Jane Eyre for the first time, and I’m most of the way through Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, but I mostly lay around watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, marveling at how well the women’s lipstick seems to adhere to their lips, even during 12-hour surgeries or passionate trysts.

Today a heavy snow is falling (or a snow is falling heavily), reminding me of a St. Patrick’s day blizzard we had one year in Boston; the weather had just begun to warm up, so it was a great disappointment to wake and realize that we had taken one step forward but about a hundred steps backwards. That afternoon my roommate and I took a bottle of André up to our rooftop and made a snowman that more strongly resembled a bowling pin. Later some friends and I went to a bar on Boylston street and sat around feeling almost grown up, because we really were almost grown up, in the sense that we were approaching the end of our college education.

Anyhow are are a few things that reached me through the fog:

- On (Un)organized Consumption (Cheri Lucas)

at the end of the day, we’re all going to miss almost everything.

Cheri being timely and elegantly spot-on, as usual.

- Meaghan O’Connell answers a question from a college student

But also I will say that college is your last chance to not worry about making a living — not that that’s always the case, but if it *is* the case, then it’s your last chance (well, uh, unless you are independently wealthy or marry someone who is? in which case, you won’t have to worry about money but you will still worry about your life, believe me) — so if you like reading books and talking and thinking and writing about books, do it while you can! It’s very hard to find a way to do that and also be a person in the world at the same time (and when you’re in college you’re not quite yet a person in the world, except for the people who are activists in college, who i do not mean to offend).

- What’s the point of running? (Mark Rowlands at the Guardian)

This experience is found in other sports too: an absorption in the deed and not the goal; the activity and not the outcome. This is play in its purest form.

I don’t run, or run much anymore – I have a mystery ailment that tends to prevent me getting more than a mile from the house before I have to limp back, and I’m too cheap (or, probably more accurately, too afraid) to see a physiotherapist – but I know this feeling anyhow, since it is, as Rowlands says, “found in other sports too”. I like the idea that this feeling of absorption – absorption in the practice, not the result – is play. I’ve been writing about this sort of thing recently, and Rowlands’ article seemed particularly apropos.

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- John Lanchester Rides The London Underground (John Lanchester at the Guardian)

But Londoners do act out versions of themselves in public, and wear uniforms, and signal that they belong to particular tribes. Not all of this activity is conscious, but quite a lot of it is, and even when it isn’t, a lot of it is easily legible. You can stand in a queue at a Starbucks and see in the line in front of you a City boy, a Sloane who has a job doing something arty, a guy working on a screenplay, a mother just back from the gym, three tourists and two policemen (mind you, they’re the easy ones to spot, since they’re literally wearing uniform). Everybody stays in character. The city spaces are performative spaces: people are acting out versions of themselves.

It isn’t like that on the underground. Londoners treat the underground not as a stage set, a place where we’re on display, but as a neutral space, one in which we don’t overtly direct our attention at each other. People sneak glances at each other, of course they do, but the operative word is “sneak”. They don’t look openly, in the way they would elsewhere. The main focus of people’s attention is inward. They go into themselves. Or they go into the world of whatever entertainment they’re carrying.

- How Augmented-Reality Content Might Actually Work (Caterina Fake interviewed by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic)

I think we are gaining a new appreciation for the here and now, for the place we live, for the people in our neighborhood, for groundedness. [...] You see the early indications of a return to the local.

The computers people have are no longer on their desks, but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world. So your location is known. It used to be that you would search for a florist in Bellingham, Washington, and get the most popular florist in the world. But now the computer knows where you are; it even knows what block you’re on.

- Wes Anderson’s Worlds (Michael Chabon at the New York Review of Books)

The box, to Cornell, is a gesture—it draws a boundary around the things it contains, and forces them into a defined relationship, not merely with one another, but with everything outside the box. The box sets out the scale of a ratio; it mediates the halves of a metaphor. It makes explicit, in plain, handcrafted wood and glass, the yearning of a model-maker to analogize the world, and at the same time it frankly emphasizes the limitations, the confines, of his or her ability to do so.

- Thom Yorke profiled by Tim Adams at The Observer

Sum up the music industry in five words:

“Hungry dog chasing its tail.”

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