TOP THREE OF JUNE & JULY:

• This is the best essay about sex I’ve ever read, and points to the myriad problems everyone, but women especially, grapple with when it comes to sex and partnership and identity and feminism in this country: “Sex Toys Will Never Be Able To Do The Hardest Work For You” by Fancy Feast
• “The idea of the “West” as a distinct and self-contained set of cultures and works is a deeply modern idea, and the gaps between contemporary articulations of “the West” and those from even the middle of the 20^th century show how closely that idea reflects the twists and turns of modernity rather than any kind of unchanging body of historical tradition…there is no stable “Western” tradition at all.” “Dismantling the “West” by Daniel Walden
• “In her fight to end sexual abuse, the Olympic champion is challenging the very institutions she led to glory.” “ALY RAISMAN TAKES THE FLOOR” by Mina Kimes

OBITUARIES (OK GRIM, BUT THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL):

• With any mass shooting (the tragedy in typing that habit, normality), you scan through the list of victims to see if you recognize any names: Hiaasen, a distinctive last name, had a brother, Carl, who has written many books that I like. I felt a wounded sense of camaraderie, in that you’ve hurt one of us. But then, I read his obituary, and felt wounded for the world’s loss of a “lanky, endearingly goofy storyteller,” his wife’s loss of “the best husband,” for our continued tragedies and eternal grief. (And unbelievable now, writing this in July, that this shooting barely registers in my memory anymore.) “Capital Gazette shooting victim Rob Hiaasen: A joyful stylist, a generous mentor” by Jean Marbella
• “Han Zicheng survived the Japanese invasion, the Chinese civil war and the Cultural Revolution, but he knew he could not endure the sorrow of living alone.” by Emily Rauhala 
• Beautiful memories of a beautiful relationship: “Marcel, My Brother” by Charles Krauthammer

REVIEWS OF BOOKS I READ RECENTLY (AND HIGHLY RECOMMEND):

• PAUL BEATTY. Everyone must read The Sellout. “No Compromises” by Hua Hsu
• From the sheer beauty and power of Robinson’s writing to the deep exploration of the idea of home, Housekeeping is a book that will stay with me for a long time. This is in part because “there is nothing fraudulent about her eloquence, nothing remotely shifty or meretricious about the beauty of her sentences. Her voice is at once sad and ecstatic, conversationally fluent and formally precise. It feels like wisdom.” “The First Church of Marilynne Robinson” by Mark O’Connell (Find this post’s titular quote — “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” — here.)
• Educated is a horrifyingly compelling but extremely inspiring memoir. “Tara Westover: ‘In families like mine there is no crime worse than telling the truth.’” Interview by Lisa O’Kelly

SEX / WOMEN:

• “Men are working on the assumption they must either look like Burt Reynolds and bum a woman across a landing or else psychologically manipulate women into doing things they wouldn’t normally do, because sex is about, somehow, winning, rather than a collaboration between two people who delight in each other … Despite there being 6,500 spoken languages in the world allowed the infinite space of the internet; despite sex happening all the time, everywhere, we still — still! — haven’t found a way to talk about it that is truthful, open, informative, and not scaring the living daylights out of our young people.” “How to Tell the Bad Men From the Good Men” by Caitlin Moran
• “Hollywood’s female-focused reboots require women to relive men’s stories — and to fix their politics, too. When the women of “Ghostbusters” gently sexually harass their ditsy hunk of a receptionist, it lacks the malicious edge of Bill Murray effectively stalking Sigourney Weaver under the guise of busting her ghost. Because real women are physically and socially vulnerable to men, granting sexual power to them on film feels harmless and a little cute…One gets the sense that these movies aren’t just fixing up old plots; they’re working as symbolic correctives to Hollywood’s mistreatment of women writ large. But the increased social acceptability often comes at the expense of the story.” “The Trouble With Hollywood’s Gender Flips” by Amanda Hess
• “Because he is a man, he is strong. Because he is strong, he cannot be overpowered. But victimhood is not just the domain of the weak. Sexual violence does not select against “strong” people.” Terry Crews is extremely inspiring. “Terry Crews and the Discomfort of Masculine Anxiety” by Hannah Giorgis

ENVIRONMENT:

• “There were bees back then, and they pollinated /
  a euphoria of flowers so we might /
  contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask, /
  “Hey guys, what’s transcendence?””
  “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now” by Matthew Olzmann
• “With falling farm returns, many of Marathwada’s farmers are now working as labourers in sugarcane fields – for long hours over five months, despite health risks, low wages, and the loss of their children’s education.” “Cutting Cane for 2,000 Hours” by Parth M.N. 
• “[My young relative who worked in tech] shrugged. “Why worry? Technology will take care of everything. If the Earth goes, we’ll just live in spaceships. We’ll have 3D printers to print our food. We’ll be eating lab meat. One cow will feed us all. We’ll just rearrange atoms to create water or oxygen. Elon Musk.” “But I don’t want to live in a spaceship.” He looked genuinely surprised. In his line of work, he’d never met anyone who didn’t want to live in a spaceship.” “An Account of My Hut” by Christina Nichol
• “Compared to most other passenger vehicles, the iconic yellow bus remains a crude and truckish conveyance; most lack air conditioning, seat belts, and other features that riders in just about everything else on the road have long enjoyed.” “How Has the School Bus Evaded Revolution?” by Sarah Holder
• “Before he pushed through the swinging doors of a bar, he paused and lifted an untucked shirt to show me the black handle of a .357 handgun poking from the front pocket of his jeans. “Too many death threats,” Wielgus said. “I never started carrying this till I started studying wolves.”” “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist?” by Christopher Solomon
• “A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw. Seriously.” “Disposable America” by Alexis Madrigal

IMMIGRATION HAS BEEN A HOT TOPIC LATELY (JOKE THROUGH THE SAD):

• “But the raises and new perks have not tempted native-born Americans to leave their day jobs for the fields. Nine in 10 agriculture workers in California are still foreign born, and more than half are undocumented, according to a federal survey.” “Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job.” by Natalie Kitroeff and Geoffrey Mohan 
• “If the Trump administration wanted to take border security seriously, it would forego high-volume, low-impact prosecution of economic migrants, and instead devote its prosecutorial resources to dismantling the criminal organizations that enable the illegal crossings in the first place.” “Want to Take the Border Seriously? Ask California How It’s Done” by Timothy Perry
• “When a text arrives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sister Norma Pimentel knows it is time to dispatch her volunteers to the bus station two blocks away. Another load of desperate people has been dropped off at the depot. A few minutes later, those families are led through Sister Norma’s doorway.” “God on the border” by Karen Tumulty 

TV AND PIXAR:

• “Netflix is hiring everybody in and out of Hollywood to make more TV shows than any network ever has, and it already knows which ones you’ll like [because] Netflix operates by a simple logic, long understood by such tech behemoths as Facebook and Amazon: Growth begets more growth begets more growth.” “Inside the Binge Factory” by Josef Adalian
• I keep reading about ‘Bao’ to relive the delight and pure joy I felt watching it. It is entirely lovely, and like with ‘Coco’, it is wonderful to be hearing the stories that have been shut out of pop culture. “The Creator of ‘Bao’ on That Twist: ‘Part of Me Wanted to Shock Audiences’” by Kaly Soto
• “Can one fall in love with nothing? With the desire to be in love?” “The “Nathan for You” Finale, My New Favorite Love Story” by Errol Morris
• “The unhipness of optimism! You know, I always noticed that in art school, that grief was considered more profound than happiness. But why? Break it down into something like acting: Comedy is super hard to do well, and yet every year, it’s dismissed by the Oscars. A great comedy like The Big Lebowski will never win Best Picture, you know? If it happens, it’s a fluke, once in a billion years … but if you’re playing an alcoholic with a harelip and a limp and financial problems, have we got an award for you! I just reject that notion that grief is more profound than joy.” “How Brad Bird Steered Incredibles 2 Through ‘Complete Chaos’” by Kyle Buchanan
• Mike Schur Mike Shur Mike Shur “‘The Good Place’ Creator Mike Schur on Season 2’s Debate-Spawning Finale” by Alan Sepinwall
• (Ok technically not TV but it is Mike Schur.) What I’d give for a Fire Joe Morgan post about Mike Trout — for consolation, here’s a fun ARod/Eckstein comparison from 2007. “Two of them are David Eckstein, an adorable 11 inch-tall translucent man who cannot play baseball very well, and Alex Rodriguez, who is better at hitting baseballs than every other person in the entire world.”

POLITICS / RACE:

• Two episodes of the Ezra Klein show: “Is modern society making us depressed?” and “The age of “mega-identity” politics”. In the latter, professor Lilliana Mason discusses the roots of today’s polarization — sparked, at least in part, by APSA’s recommendation.
• “Revolutionary Posters: An interview with the designers behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign” MARIA ARENAS, MARK KROTOV, RACHEL OSSIP, SCOTT STARRETT
• “Fireworks are the window dressing of the modern state. The exploding rainbows are a tribute to the bloody wars that made the celebration possible. They are a reminder that—under that same sky and upon that same land to which the ashes float—we are kinfolk.” “The Philosopher of the Firework” by Skye C. Cleary and John Kaag
• “Conservatives will always call socialists hypocrites. Ignore them.” by Elizabeth Bruenig
• “Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white, and brown, among other colors.” “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color” by Sarah E. Bond
• *chef kiss* This is a work of art. “Melania Trump vs. Ivanka Trump: Who Is the Beckiest of Them All?” by Michael Harriot

STORYTELLING AND ALSO MUSIC:

• “Some fairy tales may be 6000 years old” by David Shultz
• “And God said, “Let there be light,” and it was lit AF.” “And God Created Millennial Earth” by Sara K. Runnels
• “The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.” “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” by Gary Lutz
• “Twenty One Pilots’ songs don’t simply reflect suicidality, nor do they outright deny it. They are documents of working with suicidality—an extreme rarity in radio pop.” “How Twenty One Pilots rectify rock radio’s depression obsession” by Sasha Geffen
• POSTMODERNISM AS LIBERTY VALANCE: NOTES ON AN EXECUTION by Jonathan Lethem
• “I probably don’t drink as much as perceived. I’m too healthy,” Chesney told Parade magazine in 2010. “But a lot of my songs were written with the idea of having a good time.” There’s no doubt the audience appreciates this. And as Nashville continues to see dollar signs (a CMA study this spring found “country music consumers are spending more on alcohol” these days), artists will keep singing about it.” “Sobering Truths: Inside country music’s complex — and increasingly lucrative — love affair with alcohol” by Emily Yahr
• There’s enough good stuff here before the pay wall to make it worth sharing: Walker Percy’s interview with the Paris Review. For example, on marriage: “There is no secret, or rather, the secrets are buried in platitudes. That is to say, it has something to do with love, commitment, and family. As to the institution, it is something like Churchill’s description of democracy: vicissitudinous yes, but look at the alternatives.” “Walker Percy, The Art of Fiction No. 97” by Zoltán Abádi-Nagy

TECH / MONEY / THINGS I GENERALLY DON’T LIKE BUT FOUND INTERESTING:

• Deep analysis / comparisons of Google vs. Apple maps, how Google (creepily, of course) got so far ahead, and how they’re essentially “making data out of data.” “GOOGLE MAPS’S MOAT” by Justin O’Beirne
• FYI, studies found LeBron’s presence in Cleveland “increased the number of restaurants and bars within one mile of his team’s arena by 13 percent, they found, and increased employment at those establishments by 23.5 percent.” by Dylan Scott
• “Refinery29, Kylie Jenner, and the Denial Underlying Millennial Financial Resentment” by Jia Tolentino
• Here, have an essay detailing just another devastating case of being unable to pay student loans “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me” by M. H. Miller
• “Fake, fate, fame: The weight of mass attention … took the flimsy and serendipitous delights of their initial meeting and turned them, with the ruthlessness of media churn, into a money-making proposition. As Blair and Holden made their appearances on the morning shows—as they cheerfully sold their story and also themselves—they served as reminders: Even whimsy, these days, will be commodified. These commercial delights will have commercial ends.” when “Two Strangers Met on a Plane—and the Internet Ruined It” by Megan Garber

BONUS! URBAN PLANNING:

• What would the streets of Los Angeles look like if they were as narrow as those *not* originally designed for cars? How does that affect the neighborhood? See here, courtesy of David Yoon. For example: