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In today’s edition:
WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight- The best little details of life, seen by Anne Lamott
- Recognizing multiple romantic partners, and nonromantic ones
- Black people are disproportionately struck from juries
- Dark Brandon returns. What if either candidate shuffles off?
Enjoying the details you don’t control
Anne Lamott writes the most delicious details.
Her big pictures are great, too, this latest one about the liberating effect of recognizing how very little control we have over the paths our lives take and especially the ways they intersect with others’ routes.
But her column begins with Anne’s difficulty getting up off her floor:
“I need either a hand or some furniture to lean on, and found neither. I started to do a sowbug, roly-poly move that I’ve developed, where I roll to my side and push up off the ground, but instead I lay there, sad aged old misunderstood sowbug me.”
In her recent column on accepting the brevity of her remaining life, she describes a stand of trees: “Tall and straight, exquisitely spaced, with funny Dr. Seuss tufts of leaves at the top, redolent of mint, earth and turpentine. I tell you, whoever is in charge of these sorts of things really nailed eucalyptuses.”
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And amid a meditation on knowing when to say “I don’t know,” an interlude to describe the style of a favorite artist: “In the center of many Bierstadt paintings, you sometimes see animals grazing or drinking. They’re fine, they’re animals; they are just doing animals. But they are not the point — the point is the light. No matter how low you are, the light can reach you.”
One begins to wonder whether all the keen observing of the little things is what has allowed Anne to understand the big things, too, because, boy, she does seem to get the big things.
A pearl from this latest column, which Anne spends the majority of preoccupied by the fact that she accidentally slighted a friend: “It was a dawning realization that this problem was, with a little time, going to sort itself out. I almost smote my forehead. Yo! That had not occurred to me. It was going to be okay. I actually smiled. This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input.”
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But the even shinier pearl, for my money, comes in the closing paragraphs of the piece, once Anne finds a little tranquility:
“The milky sky was pulling itself down over the ridge like a theatrical scrim, a play of cloud and hillside intermingling.”
Chaser: If you’re in the mood for more lyrical writing, here’s our bard David Von Drehle a couple of years back reflecting on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Some respect for pals. And polycules.
Inez and Barb are best friends. They’ve been best friends for half a century. And for the past 25 years, they’ve lived together, sharing a debit card and an email address.
And they really are best friends, not euphemistic “gal pals” or otherwise romantically involved. But they’re also not “just friends.” That sort of dismissive framework is the wrong way to think about what are often our most intimate relationships in life, writes Rhaina Cohen, a journalist and the author of a new book, “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center.”
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Our culture is fixated on romance and marriage; just look around. It would do a lot of good, Cohen writes, for the country to better acknowledge the many meaningful relationships that don’t come with “sex and sparks” — including legally.
Cohen lays out a plan for broadening the benefits usually reserved for married couples, such as shared insurance, work leave, and certain medical and financial protections. “U.S. policy can better match the reality on the ground,” Cohen writes, “and reflect the many ways people” — people like Inez and Barb — “find support and sustenance.”
Another alternative: Instead of no romantic partner, how about two, or three? Or more?
It might be that more of us are trying polyamory or open relationships; it’s definitely true that more of us are discussing it, with poly talk all over the media lately.
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The theory of the case, as Shadi Hamid notes, is that intimacy is not a scarce resource: “If love and sex are satisfying, why not have more of it?” His column is a brief intro to the ethical ways people do so non-monogamously. It involves more Google Calendar use than one might expect.
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Shadi, for his part, is skeptical. He works out his own feelings in the column, wondering whether someone who loves someone else could ever possibly “share” (scare quotes his) that person.
From law professor and author Stephen Bright’s op-ed on the disproportionate disqualification of Black people from jury service. He notes that despite the Constitution’s prohibition of removing people based on race, “nearly every study of jury strikes has revealed that prosecutors disproportionately use their strikes to exclude Black jurors.”
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In King’s case (a murder trial that resulted in a death penalty sentence), the prosecutor struck only three of 34 possible White jurors; it’s an elimination rate of just 8 percent, compared with the 87 percent wipeout of prospective Black jurors.
Bright writes that, if it takes up the case, the Supreme Court can “send a message to prosecutors across the country that this abhorrent practice is unacceptable” — as well as spare a man who never got an impartial jury.
Chaser: In 2021, criminal justice reporter Radley Balko wrote about how the covid-19 pandemic was producing impartial juries more likely to convict.
More politics
Dark Brandon has never been darker.
Molly Roberts is talking about the internetty persona of President Biden, the meme lord with lasers emanating from his eyes — the one who tweeted after the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory that he had orchestrated the whole thing, just as far-right conspiracy theorists had alleged.
Just like we drew it up. pic.twitter.com/9NBvc5nVZE
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden)
February 12, 2024 Dark Brandon’s evolution since his emergence two years ago, Molly explains, tracks how the left engages with the right’s battier notions. “These ideas,” she writes, “used to scare reality dwellers. … Now, what once terrified in its insanity amuses in its inanity.”
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Ready to go even darker? Karen Tumulty has an FAQ for what happens if one of the very elderly presidential candidates, you know …
She draws on euphemism when describing each eventuality: “a calamity” before the convention, “the unthinkable” between convention and vote, “disaster” for a president-elect or merely “something” before inauguration.
In other words, she’s here to explain what happens if somebody dies.
Smartest, fastest
- Army Gen. Paul Nakasone just retired from the National Security Agency after more than five years as its chief (and decades in public service). He shares the one thing that worries him more than Russia, China, cyber or, really, anything else.
- “Freedom to read is the closest thing we have to freedom to think,” Kate Cohen writes in a plea on behalf of the, well, free thinkers in communities where books are increasingly getting banned.
- Lee Hockstader worries that the Paris Olympics might be jilting security in favor of spectacle.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Roses are red, sure
Violets, blue. A poly life
Might not be for you!
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
Anne Lamott writes the most delicious details.
Her big pictures are great, too, this latest one about the liberating effect of recognizing how very little control we have over the paths our lives take and especially the ways they intersect with others’ routes.
But her column begins with Anne’s difficulty getting up off her floor:
“I need either a hand or some furniture to lean on, and found neither. I started to do a sowbug, roly-poly move that I’ve developed, where I roll to my side and push up off the ground, but instead I lay there, sad aged old misunderstood sowbug me.”
In her recent column on accepting the brevity of her remaining life, she describes a stand of trees: “Tall and straight, exquisitely spaced, with funny Dr. Seuss tufts of leaves at the top, redolent of mint, earth and turpentine. I tell you, whoever is in charge of these sorts of things really nailed eucalyptuses.”
And amid a meditation on knowing when to say “I don’t know,” an interlude to describe the style of a favorite artist: “In the center of many Bierstadt paintings, you sometimes see animals grazing or drinking. They’re fine, they’re animals; they are just doing animals. But they are not the point — the point is the light. No matter how low you are, the light can reach you.”
One begins to wonder whether all the keen observing of the little things is what has allowed Anne to understand the big things, too, because, boy, she does seem to get the big things.
A pearl from this latest column, which Anne spends the majority of preoccupied by the fact that she accidentally slighted a friend: “It was a dawning realization that this problem was, with a little time, going to sort itself out. I almost smote my forehead. Yo! That had not occurred to me. It was going to be okay. I actually smiled. This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input.”
But the even shinier pearl, for my money, comes in the closing paragraphs of the piece, once Anne finds a little tranquility:
“The milky sky was pulling itself down over the ridge like a theatrical scrim, a play of cloud and hillside intermingling.”
Chaser: If you’re in the mood for more lyrical writing, here’s our bard David Von Drehle a couple of years back reflecting on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Inez and Barb are best friends. They’ve been best friends for half a century. And for the past 25 years, they’ve lived together, sharing a debit card and an email address.
And they really are best friends, not euphemistic “gal pals” or otherwise romantically involved. But they’re also not “just friends.” That sort of dismissive framework is the wrong way to think about what are often our most intimate relationships in life, writes Rhaina Cohen, a journalist and the author of a new book, “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center.”
Our culture is fixated on romance and marriage; just look around. It would do a lot of good, Cohen writes, for the country to better acknowledge the many meaningful relationships that don’t come with “sex and sparks” — including legally.
Cohen lays out a plan for broadening the benefits usually reserved for married couples, such as shared insurance, work leave, and certain medical and financial protections. “U.S. policy can better match the reality on the ground,” Cohen writes, “and reflect the many ways people” — people like Inez and Barb — “find support and sustenance.”
Another alternative: Instead of no romantic partner, how about two, or three? Or more?
It might be that more of us are trying polyamory or open relationships; it’s definitely true that more of us are discussing it, with poly talk all over the media lately.
The theory of the case, as Shadi Hamid notes, is that intimacy is not a scarce resource: “If love and sex are satisfying, why not have more of it?” His column is a brief intro to the ethical ways people do so non-monogamously. It involves more Google Calendar use than one might expect.
Shadi, for his part, is skeptical. He works out his own feelings in the column, wondering whether someone who loves someone else could ever possibly “share” (scare quotes his) that person.
From law professor and author Stephen Bright’s op-ed on the disproportionate disqualification of Black people from jury service. He notes that despite the Constitution’s prohibition of removing people based on race, “nearly every study of jury strikes has revealed that prosecutors disproportionately use their strikes to exclude Black jurors.”
In King’s case (a murder trial that resulted in a death penalty sentence), the prosecutor struck only three of 34 possible White jurors; it’s an elimination rate of just 8 percent, compared with the 87 percent wipeout of prospective Black jurors.
Bright writes that, if it takes up the case, the Supreme Court can “send a message to prosecutors across the country that this abhorrent practice is unacceptable” — as well as spare a man who never got an impartial jury.
Chaser: In 2021, criminal justice reporter Radley Balko wrote about how the covid-19 pandemic was producing impartial juries more likely to convict.
Dark Brandon has never been darker.
Molly Roberts is talking about the internetty persona of President Biden, the meme lord with lasers emanating from his eyes — the one who tweeted after the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory that he had orchestrated the whole thing, just as far-right conspiracy theorists had alleged.
Just like we drew it up. pic.twitter.com/9NBvc5nVZE
Dark Brandon’s evolution since his emergence two years ago, Molly explains, tracks how the left engages with the right’s battier notions. “These ideas,” she writes, “used to scare reality dwellers. … Now, what once terrified in its insanity amuses in its inanity.”
Ready to go even darker? Karen Tumulty has an FAQ for what happens if one of the very elderly presidential candidates, you know …
She draws on euphemism when describing each eventuality: “a calamity” before the convention, “the unthinkable” between convention and vote, “disaster” for a president-elect or merely “something” before inauguration.
In other words, she’s here to explain what happens if somebody dies.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Roses are red, sure
Violets, blue. A poly life
Might not be for you!
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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