Why Pro Golf is Full of Bad Marriages

Early in my career, a person I respected told me to find a woman who didn’t know who I was. On the surface, it made sense. Marry someone who isn’t chasing the lifestyle, isn’t measuring you by your World Ranking, loves you for reasons that have nothing to do with your sponsors.

The reasoning is airtight. What such a relationship does to your game is another matter.

I’m not talking about bad marriages. For most guys out here, the right partner is the only reason any of this is sustainable. She’s running the house, the kids, the calendar, the bills while you’re three time zones away missing a cut by one. She’s the voice on the phone Sunday night calming you down after a closing 74. The right person at home is the most underrated edge in professional golf, and it’s not close. Plenty of guys would have washed out years ago without the unglamorous, unphotographed work of a spouse holding their life together. That’s what makes the harder cases so confusing. Sometimes the genuinely supportive spouse or girlfriend, the person doing everything correctly by any normal standard, can wire backward into bad golf.

A lot of the best players out here have been with the same person since before they were famous. The high school sweetheart, the college girlfriend—she’s been there through the grind. She was there in the mini-tour years when you were sharing a rental car with your caddie and eating at McDonald’s. She watched you miss cuts and come home deflated and go right back out the following week. She knows what a Monday qualifier looks like. She understands why you’re on the range at 7 in the evening when the tournament ended at 4. She’s not asking why you’re binging course footage instead of Netflix. She’s been shown a thousand demonstrations of what this life actually requires, and somewhere along the way made peace with it. That’s no small thing. That’s years of negotiation that never have to be spoken aloud because the terms were established before anyone had anything to negotiate over. That dynamic works.

The woman who meets you when you’re already out here, who falls for the version of you that’s successful and sponsored and on television, she’s meeting a finished product. She didn’t sign up for the obsession because she never saw the ugly underbelly that often powers it. She saw the result, which can look from the outside like a man who plays golf for a living and has a lot of free time. Explaining the difference is harder than it sounds, and some guys never quite manage it.

Sometimes relationship dynamics shift. Some guys hit their mid-30s, their kids are getting older, and they want a change. They don’t want to wake up and find the children are off to college, that they missed ballgames and birthdays, that their kids barely recognize them. That’s a man getting his priorities straight. It’s often the same deal with a second marriage. Players who’ve been through a divorce are usually not making the same personal mistakes twice. The issues that ended the first marriage—usually just travel and time, not anything scandalous—are front of mind. That player has done the reflection. He’s had the hard conversations, probably with a therapist, definitely with himself at midnight in a hotel room on the back nine of a bad season. He knows where things went wrong, so he adjusts. He softens. He eases the schedule, comes home earlier, takes fewer optional practice rounds, skips a pre-tournament trip he would have previously considered non-negotiable. He texts back faster. He’s present in the ways he wasn’t before. By most human measures, he is better. But the game has no interest in what’s reasonable or mature. It only knows what you give it.

That’s the uncomfortable truth at the center of all this. Professional golf doesn’t reward balance. The guys at the top of the world rankings are not balanced people. They are obsessive, single-minded, occasionally impossible to be around and completely fine with all of that. When a player starts genuinely dividing his attention—not just his time, but his mental energy, his hunger—his golf notices before he does. His best is still very good. It just doesn’t happen as often, and out here, the real trick is getting the most out of yourself when your best isn’t available, so that’s exactly where you see the drop off.

The genuine disasters—the controlling spouses who create scenes, who make demands of agents and sponsors, who insert themselves into decisions that have nothing to do with them—are rarer than tour gossip might suggest. Most of the horror stories are exaggerated, or they’re about friction on the business side rather than anything that touches the actual golf. Even then, it’s not always a straight line to worse tournament results. I know one player whose wife was, by consensus among everyone who dealt with her, a complete nightmare. Managers, sponsors, tournament officials—everyone had a story. Yet, this guy played some of the best golf of his life when she was at her worst. (After the kids, she settled down.) The explanation I heard from a mutual friend made more sense than it should have: If she was going to cause that much trouble, he’d better make the whole thing worth it. Sometimes chaos focuses a man. It’s not a model I’d recommend, but I’ve seen stranger things produce birdies.

by The Undercover Pro w/Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:
Image: Madison Ketcham

[ed. Probably applicable to many other sports, as well. And there are so many 'distractions' out there.]

How Amsterdam is Reviving the Fine-Grained Courtyard Block

At Centrumeiland, a new district in Amsterdam’s IJburg expansion, the city is avoiding one of the great failures of contemporary urban development, the large-parcel megaproject. Rather than handing the 37 acres over to a few large developers to build massive, hotel-like buildings, Centrumeiland is subdividing the site into perimeter-block parcels, assigning each parcel a buildable role through a plot “passport,” and enabling many smaller actors to build within one coherent urban framework.

Begun in 2013 as part of Amsterdam’s IJburg land-reclamation project, Centrumeiland modernizes the old perimeter-block model for contemporary goals. It will be dense, but green; urban, but family-oriented; highly planned, but open to many builders. Amsterdam plans roughly 1,500 to 1,700 homes on the 37-acre island, or about 40 to 46 homes per acre. By American standards, that is serious density. But it is not being delivered as a monoculture of towers or double-loaded apartment blocks. Centrumeiland includes a mix of housing types and tenures: large family-sized homes, smaller rentals, social housing, mid-market housing, market-rate condos, individual self-build houses, collective self-build projects, housing-association buildings, and developer-led apartments.

The ambition is a dense urban neighborhood that can serve households across the lifecycle: singles, couples, families with children, older residents, renters, owners, and collective building groups. It also adapts the perimeter-block tradition to contemporary priorities: low-car living, accessibility, climate resilience, mixed tenure, family housing, and broader participation in development and ownership.

All of this depends on the subdivision and passport system. Amsterdam breaks the large site into many buildable pieces, assigns each parcel a role through a plot passport, and holds the pieces together through streets, blocks, party-wall conditions, courtyards, public-space rules, and environmental obligations. In this way, they have brilliantly resurrected the old urban formula that allows many builders to participate in the development of a large site, making a real neighborhood.

For American cities, the moral of the story is clear. On large brownfield and greenfield sites, cities should stop treating whole districts as single development packages to be handed to master developers. They should do the more civic work first of laying streets, subdividing land into buildable parcels, and issuing clear “parcel passports” that specify what each site can become. In existing neighborhoods, the same logic should operate at a smaller scale. Cities should create transit-oriented overlays that give ordinary private lots clear building rights that make great multifamily housing easier to finance, permit, and build.

Centrumeiland goes far beyond “build more housing.” It is more radical and more urbane. Divide the land, write good code, and let many hands build the city.

The Megadevelopment Trap

For the last half-century, large urban sites have met a sadly familiar fate. A railroad, port authority, public agency, hospital, university, or industrial landowner controls a vast tract of developable land. The master-planning process then carves it into a few enormous parcels and awards them to one or several major developers. After years of negotiation, public fights, redesigns, entitlement battles, and financing risk, the developer may finally build the megaproject, which is widely reviled by the public.

Megaprojects may be economically productive. They can deliver housing, offices, parks, retail, transit, and tax revenue. But the development model itself is thin. Too few actors control too much land. The parcels are too large, the buildings are too big, and the building code and underwriting norms push toward deep floorplates and double-loaded corridors. The buildings are dominated by small, expensive, hotel-like units that are poorly suited to middle-income families who need light, storage, bedrooms, outdoor access, and a sense of domestic permanence. These districts may be a success on paper (for now), but they make failed neighborhoods, lacking the social depths and street life that is the reward of fine-grained courtyard urbanism. [...]

The problem is the development system. A megaproject cannot make a great neighborhood. Neighborhoods require many actors, many front doors, many ownership structures, many building types, many ground-floor conditions, and many small adaptations over time. They need private yards. They need a public framework strong enough to coordinate many actors.

That is the old art of division and perimeter block planning Centrumeiland begins to recover.

Making Land Into City

Centrumeiland is part of Amsterdam’s IJburg expansion, a chain of artificial islands built in the IJmeer on the city’s eastern edge. IJburg extends Amsterdam outward into the water between the historic city and the open landscape of the Markermeer, turning what was once lakebed into new urban land. Centrumeiland sits within this larger archipelago, connected back to Amsterdam by bridges, cycling routes, bus service, and the IJtram to Amsterdam Centraal. It is therefore both peripheral and deeply urban, a new island neighborhood made from water, but tied into the metropolitan fabric of Amsterdam.

While the land reclamation is impressive, even more remarkable is the public framework that governs the development. The city divided the land into kavels, and created parcel-specific rules through kavelpaspoorten, or plot passports.

A passport can define the parcel boundary, buildable envelope, maximum height, frontage condition, access requirements, open-space obligations, water-management rules, parking expectations, program, tenure, sustainability requirements, and sometimes ground-floor use. It tells a builder not merely that “residential” or “commercial” is allowed, but what kind of urban contribution this specific piece of land is supposed to make: a row of townhouses, a small apartment building, a collective self-build project, a social-housing block, a mid-market rental building, a mixed-use corner building, or a larger perimeter-block parcel with shared courtyard space.

The subdivision and passport framework enables much broader participation in the development. Of the planned 1,500 to 1,700 homes, roughly 60 to 70 percent are intended to be self-build. But “self-build” here does not only mean one household designing one eccentric house. It includes individual self-builders, small groups, collective private commissioning, building groups, housing cooperatives, and other resident-led or small-group development structures...

Its lesson moral here is that parcelization broadens participation and creates more development pathways than the master-developer model. [...]

The American Application

For American cities, the lesson is to create a modern urban passport system.

There are two obvious applications: large-site development and existing-neighborhood overlays.

On brownfield and greenfield sites — former industrial land, rail yards, malls, hospital campuses, public land, waterfronts, and other large redevelopment areas — cities should stop defaulting to the megaproject model. They should lay out streets first, shape interesting blocks, design public spaces, subdivide land into buildable parcels, and assign parcel passports. Those parcels could then be allocated to many actors: small developers, cooperatives, housing associations, community development corporations, nonprofit builders, resident-led groups, and larger developers where appropriate.

Large developers may still participate. But they should not control the whole district. The city should not ask one actor to simulate the complexity of a neighborhood.

by Alicia Pederson, Courtyard Urbanist |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

A Quiet Refusal to Compromise

Over the past decade, with amazement and dismay, I have watched former friends and acquaintances make radical turns toward a conservatism that I no longer recognize. This story is well known by now: beginning in 2015, conservatives began to divide into pro- and never-Trump factions. Some visited or moved to Hungary. National conservatism and integralism and “Common Good Conservatism” emerged as new options for disaffected traditionalists, and of course, liberalism “failed.”

All of this is chronicled in Laura Field’s new book, Furious Minds (reviewed earlier for Law & Liberty by John Grove). The volume is basically a book of highbrow gossip, and it has its faults. But it also provides a fairly accurate account of the past ten years. Field completed her PhD in (Straussian) political philosophy at the University of Texas in 2011. During her student years and afterward, she existed on the margins of intellectual conservatism. She watched many of the movement’s major players as they engaged in activism, wrote provocative essays, and instigated revolution on the Right. [...]

The problem in 2026 is that many of the most prominent intellectual conservatives have sold their birthrights for the fleeting fame promised by social media, podcasts, and coverage in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other prestige outlets. They appear more interested in making names for themselves or “blowing up the system” than in doing the quiet, unobserved, humble work of renewing the institutions that are so vital to civil society. They are, at root, interested in winning the culture wars, and winning requires fighting. It’s what a friend has called “punch-in-the-face conservatism.” In borrowing methods from the cultural Left, many of them have become right-wing Gramscians. These men (and they are nearly all men) sense that America has arrived at an eschatological moment, and they definitely want everyone else to know it too.

I also think they find it exciting and invigorating. At last we have come to a crisis point that demands strategy and action! Enough with all the subsidiarity, little platoons, and institutional reform. Conservatives should be bold enough to grasp the levers of power and use them against the Left, just as the Left has used them against us. As one Claremont Institute commentator has written, breathlessly, “Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding of America.” Helen Andrews has imagined a parallel crisis in the relations between the sexes. Her “great feminization” thesis lays the blame for “wokeness” on all those overachieving and schoolmarmish women who now dominate the white-collar professions. In her words, they are a “potential threat to civilization.” And on and on. It’s easy to adduce multiple examples of this overheated rhetoric.

To be fair, there are (of course) elements of truth in many of the scathing critiques leveled by the New Right. Andrews is correct that, in the aggregate, there are differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles. Christopher Rufo and others aren’t wrong that advocates of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” greatly overplayed their hands. And much of the extreme reaction on the Right is undoubtedly a response to the provocations of the Left, whose activists haven’t exactly been models of self-restraint over the past few decades.

Unlike those on the New Right, though, I’m not sure that we’re at an eschatological moment in Western culture. We might be. But whether or not we’ve arrived at a civilizational crisis, there are alternative ways of responding to this moment, ways far more authentically conservative than what is now playing out in so many contemporary institutions.

In thinking about what conservatism means, and about how to respond to our cultural moment, two courses of action come to mind. The first is to recalibrate our view of the world; the second, to engage in practices that don’t incite battles but preserve and rejuvenate culture. Work like this is not likely to be praised or even recognized, and it asks for quiet self-assurance, not loud declarations on social media. Cultivating a positive and hopeful vision in the midst of disorder simply is the primary obligation of conservatives, especially if we’re Christians, whose hopes lie not in the rise or fall of any particular worldly power.

Why is it so difficult, and so unpopular, to embrace this hopeful, alternative vision, and why are conflict and battle so enduringly attractive? William Hazlitt offers an answer in his shrewd essay from 1826 entitled “On the Pleasure of Hating.” There is a “secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind,” he writes, which “takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.” Life would “turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible.”

Most of us will recognize this universal human tendency to take perverse pleasure in hating, and in dwelling on ugly and disordered things. The desire to see awfulness helps to explain the market for polemics and declension narratives rather than subtle and qualified arguments. Who has not felt, in a moment of crisis, a sudden sharpening of the will, a vision of exactly the path forward?

The pleasure of critique also provides a sense of superiority, both intellectually—because we have seen things as they truly are—and morally. Deny it though we do, it is pleasant to think oneself smarter than others and to imagine that we, not they, stand on a solid foundation of truth. Similarly, in the moral sphere, if we are part of an unappreciated or persecuted minority, there is solace in knowing that our way of life is simply better than that of our opponents, even if the world at large does not agree.

And then there is the boredom factor. Temperance, civility, politeness, and all the other virtues that accompany political moderation can seem boring and mundane. Even if we mostly depend on norms of civility and respect in daily life, it is exciting to have a firebrand in the room—someone who will stir things up and throw rhetorical bombs. This is as true in a seminar room as in a board meeting. We admire and emulate the provocateur, the celebrity, and the radical, and are drawn to those with outrageous and “cutting-edge” views.

Yet these moral and intellectual eccentrics depend for their existence on an unseen foundation of equanimity, careful argument, civility, and self-control. They themselves may neglect or disparage this foundation, but it is nevertheless vital that somebody shore it up. Traditionally, this has been a job for conservatives.

So should conservatives be warriors or maintainers? Part of the answer will undoubtedly depend on temperament. Everyone knows people who are thoroughly pacific and disengaged or, on the other hand, full of spirit and always ready to argue. The latter disposition is what one sees far more often in the new conservatives I have been identifying, those who clamor to fight and win the culture wars with snark, meanness, and irony.

The tenor of the alternative—of a more gracious conservatism—is not adversarial but generative. It looks toward the present and the future, though not in the way that progressivism does, with its hopes of constant political improvement. Instead, this conservatism focuses on the things that are being conserved by living them fully, and by engaging in practices delivered from the past. It asks us to act within our own small spheres of influence, doing good where it is real, tangible, and visible, at levels much less national and much less public. While most of us aren’t prodigies, we all possess talents, aptitudes, and loves, which we would do well to use and develop. And this will make some difference, or all the difference, to those who live around us.

by Elizabeth Corey, Law & Liberty |  Read more:

Image: Agostino Masucci; Artcurial Worldwide/Wikimedia Commons
[ed. This is a conservative perspective I can get behind, but one that glosses over the 'tactics' the fighting contingent employ. Tactics that are frequently dishonest, threatening, sleazy and/or outright illegal. No valor in that, whatever rationalizations conservatives use for the ends justifying the means. By the way, the Hazlitt link (Pleasure of Hating) is well worth a read.]

Gen Z and Men Who Yearn

The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn.

 

I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes.

For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?

As I wrote for Public Discourse recently, many young women have turned to “romantasy,” a literary genre blending fantasy settings with romantic plots, as a way to express their desire for marriage. While some novels in the genre are relatively harmless, many teach women to confuse abuse with love, often romanticizing forced marriage, as well as suggesting that male violence is evidence of commitment. This is hardly surprising, since so many of us zoomers and younger millennials are children of divorce and have grown up without a model of a healthy marriage. Many of these novels also feature very graphic sex scenes; but again, this is largely unsurprising given that we live in a pornographic culture and that women largely favor written over visual forms of pornography.

The “male yearning” trend is different, so much so that it took me by surprise. It’s somehow more wholesome. The fictional male characters most often referenced in TikTok videos about male yearning may be tall, dark, and handsome, like romantasy protagonists, but unlike in the romantasy storylines they tend to exercise restraint in their longing for the female protagonist. Where male desire in romantasy is about quick consummation, this kind of “male yearning” tends to be about acts of service, patience, and a slow-burn romance instead.

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.

The common denominator among these male characters is their willingness to accept a life of service to their loved ones...

These men exercise selflessness. They serve without expecting anything in return. They embody a healthy version of masculinity in that they use their strength not to subdue, but to support those who are more vulnerable than they are.

But how can the smutty romantasy trend coexist with this ubiquitous desire for men who respect, provide, and protect? And secondly, if data show us that young people are getting married less, why are young women consuming fiction that shows marriage, kids, and commitment as goods rather than impediments?

The first question is perhaps easier to answer. While it is overwhelmingly obvious that women—rather than men—engage with both the romantasy trend and the men-who-yearn discourse, the age range of said women overlaps only partially. Generally speaking, Gen Zers prefer to see less sex depicted in fiction than do their millennial counterparts. Romantasy reading stats, as I discussed in my previous article, point to the fact that millennials are a substantial chunk of consumers, even though the themes and plotlines of romantasy novels ostensibly target young adults.

Since I wrote that article, for example, the gay hockey romance show Heated Rivalry (yes, I’m afraid that is the title) has skyrocketed to international success. I’m given to understand that it features prolonged sex scenes, and yet most viewers are women, with millennials being a high proportion. This may seem an anomaly at first. But the book by Rachel Reid on which the show is based was released in 2019, the same year that the extremely graphic, water-cooler show par excellence Game of Thrones came to an end. By that point, millennial women had been subjected to an entire decade of adulthood of explicit content in film and TV.

I am afraid women have become somewhat desensitized. Millennial and older Gen Z women especially have, for decades, been told that they should feel no moral qualms about being both consumers and products of explicit sexual content.

Yet younger zoomers are beginning to differ from their millennial counterparts. Anecdotally, as an older zoomer myself, I’ve seen the generational divide happen right in front of my eyes. My high school peers who were just one or two years older than I have a significantly different attitude toward, and experience of, sex and relationships than my sister-in-law who is only five years younger than I. What’s surprising is not that Gen Zers are consuming smut, but that they are not consuming it at higher rates than millennials, who, now in their thirties and forties, you may expect to have progressed to a more mature view of sex and marriage.

That simply hasn’t happened. I’m hardly the first to point out that millennials are a generation marked by arrested development. They are not getting married; they’re not having kids. Some of this is explained by factors outside their control (rising house prices, etc.), but some factors are cultural. Millennials grew up engaging fully in hookup culture. Their consumption of graphic fictional content is but a reflection of their consumerist attitude toward love and relationships.

Younger Gen Z women are also not getting married, but the difference is that they are, on average, more averse than millennials to both casual sex in their own lives and depictions of sexual activity on the screen. The Marriage Foundation has spoken of a “collapse” in early marriage, “with only 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 marrying before age 25, marking a historical low.” But this collapse is not due exclusively or even primarily to a preference for cohabitation. The Institute for Family Studies has recently reported that Gen Z is not only marrying later and less frequently: they are also cohabiting less and having less sex overall. Essentially, zoomer women are increasingly retreating from interaction of any kind with the opposite sex, a phenomenon that is now often described as involuntary celibacy.

As well as this, recent reports suggest that Gen Z men and women want to see less explicit sexual content in films and TV shows, preferring depictions of non-sexual intimacy, whether that is deep friendship or a romantic bond. Finally, an article by Wendy Wang, also for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that, while Gen Z women are generally more egalitarian than previous generations in their attitudes toward relationships between men and women, there is one role that they still want men to play: to protect.

by Beatrice Scudeler, Public Discourse | Read more:
Image: FlixPix/Alarmy

Mary Tyler Moore

There was a scene that Robert Redford wanted for “Ordinary People” in which Beth Jarrett, played by Mary Tyler Moore, takes a cake out of the refrigerator. The cake has a circle of cherries on top, and the only action in the scene is Beth, the cold, bereaved mother, looking at the cake, adjusting the cherries, then putting the cake back in the fridge. Moore was alone in the kitchen. Redford wanted to capture Beth in an unobserved moment — what was this woman really like? How was she coping with the accidental death of her older son and the recent suicide attempt of her younger son? Had she escaped into her fastidiousness and her uptightness?

He shot it once; no good. He shot it again; no good. She tried to bring a motivation to each take: Was this cake good enough? Or, Did the cake need more cherries? And each time he’d say: “No, no, clear your mind. Let’s go again.” Every time the kitchen was set up for another scene, Redford used the opportunity to try the shot again. Moore called it “the bane of the production.” He shot it over and over, 26 times in total in front of a “mystified” crew, she wrote in her memoir.

Redford knew the role was a change from Moore’s sunny appearances as Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” so much so that he was initially worried to even approach her. But when he did, he told her that when he read the Judith Guest novel that he was adapting, he couldn’t stop picturing Moore as Beth. Redford had a home in Malibu, and sometimes he’d look out on the beach and see her taking walks. She seemed like a sad figure on those walks, so different from the spunky and triumphant walks she took in the opening credits of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He told her that it was the most important role in the film. He wanted someone to play her sympathetically. Moore agreed emphatically. Beth reminded Moore of her father. She also had a little of Beth in her herself — she would realize that eventually. She told Redford that she didn’t think of Beth as a villain but as just another victim in the story.

Moore called “Ordinary People” the “holy grail” of her career, not just because it had a remarkable script and production, or because of the Oscar nomination that she earned from it, but because it saved her from eternal typecasting just when she needed it. She had been so good in sitcoms. But what now? She was only in her early 40s, and it seemed as if she was sentenced to a life of short-lived series and celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms and game shows. Depth and mood and range weren’t things people associated with her.

When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuted in 1970, no one could have predicted how iconic it would become for the way it portrayed women’s experiences in the workplace, and for the way its heroine, Mary Richards, remained plucky in the face of discrimination, both passive and aggressive. That was back when plucky seemed like a good solution to the constant insults of merely trying to function while female, when smiling with moxie at all the crap thrown in your direction seemed like the best way to survive and advance.

Mary Richards struck an exact balance of wit and intelligence with a kind of wise understanding of people’s natures. She was a perfect guide for navigating the a-wokening of the corporate American man (a project that is still ongoing, to say the least). The show’s cultural impact over its seven years was monumental. Mary Richards allowed women to ask themselves questions out loud about what exactly they were hoping for in life, why it was so important for them to marry and how the families we build for ourselves can be as important and sustaining as the families we’re born into.

Mary Richards was a hero for all she represented. But Moore wasn’t Mary Richards. She didn’t have her ease or confidence. She grew up in a house with distant parents; her mother was an alcoholic. Moore lived between her parents’ house and her grandmother and aunt’s house. When she was at her parents’ house, she slept on the couch, because there were only two bedrooms and she felt uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with her brother. She grew up to struggle with diabetes, with rejection, with alcoholism, with divorce, with another divorce, with the death of a grown, only child, with forgiveness. She left her second husband, Grant Tinker, with whom she had so little intimacy that they never undressed in front of each other except during actual sex. She moved to New York, away from him. At night, in her apartment, she made margaritas in her blender that were one-quarter drink mix, one-quarter ice and one-half tequila, so that they had the consistency of a milkshake. She got into her bed at night, next to the air-conditioner, and built a kind of fort around herself with pillows and drank until those margaritas began their work. (She would eventually marry a third time.)

People still mistook Moore for Richards, though. In 1980, Gloria Steinem asked Moore to speak at an Equal Rights Amendment rally in Washington. Moore said yes, but when the time came, she lied and said she had an ear infection and couldn’t fly. Steinem suggested she take a train instead. She told Moore that Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House, had agreed to meet with Steinem’s group — Bella Abzug, Gloria Allred, etc. — only if Moore was in attendance. So Moore took the train, begrudgingly, now roped into a four-hour trip instead of an hourlong flight. She showed up to the meeting and submitted to the “big hug” that O’Neill demanded of her. (“Where’s that little cutie?” she remembered him saying.) But it was a waste of time. The amendment stalled, and she found the women rallying for equal rights well intentioned and intelligent but off-putting, with their shouting, like “angry children.” This, she believed, was one reason the amendment ultimately failed to become law. Yes, she saw the paradox in all this. Yes, she loved Mary Richards, too. But didn’t all the women in America know by now how exhausting it was to aspire to be Mary Richards?

So there she was, a few years after her show went off the air. She told people she ended it so that they could go out on top, but the real reason was that the producers, the writers and Tinker, who co-founded their production company, MTM Enterprises, saw so much potential in spinoffs — “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant” and others — that it seemed like the smart move. Great for the bottom line, yes, but what about Moore? She had these Maryisms, she called them — referring to the movements and speech patterns that she had absorbed into her own manner after so many years of playing Mary Richards.

She did some theater, including playing a quadriplegic who wants to end her own life, in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” for which she won raves and a special Tony. Then came Redford’s offer. But it wasn’t really an offer, in the end. After they spoke that first time, he took three months to consider if she was right for the role, auditioning just about every actress in town, from what Moore heard.

When he finally returned to her, saying, Yes, please, come be my Beth Jarrett, she nearly fell over with relief. Now she could show something of herself to as big an audience as she’d always had. She had been so afraid that people would find out that she wasn’t Mary Richards. But in the time she waited for Redford’s offer, she realized she was more afraid that they wouldn’t; she was more afraid that she’d never be seen or known or loved for who she was.

Redford continued to try to get the shot of Beth and the cake, but it was never to be. It appears nowhere in the movie. Moore said later that she believed that Redford had been looking for Beth’s soul. But Beth wasn’t the kind of person to reveal her soul. Beth was the kind of person who would rather give you a cake and a smile. She could mourn by overcoming sadness in a lifelong pursuit for perfectionism. Beth’s soul was the act of not showing her soul. How did Redford not see that? How did Redford not see that Beth’s soul was right in front of him the entire time?

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Philippe Halsman

[ed. From the series The Lives They Lived. See also: Delia Graff Fara.]

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

This is the edited transcript of an intewiew with Feynman made for the BBC television program Horizon in 1981, shown in the United States as an episode of Nova. Feynman had most of his I$ behind him by this time (3e died in 1988), so he could reflect on his experiences and accomplishments with the perspective not often attainable by a younger person. The result is a candid, relaxed, and very personal discussion on many topics close to Feynman's heart: why knowing merely the name of something is the same as not knowing anything at all about it; how he and his fellow atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible weapon they had created while on the other side of the world in Hiroshima thousands of their fellow human beings were dead or dying from it; and why Feynman could just as well have gotten along without a Nobel Prize.

The Beauty of a Flower 

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says - “you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understind how it subtracts. 

Avoiding Humanities 

I’ve always been very one-sided about science and when I was younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn’t have time to learn and I didn’t have much patience with what’s called the humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best to avoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was only afterwards, when I got older, that I got more relaxed, that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I’m really still a very one-sided person and I don’t know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.

Tyrannosaurus in the Window 

We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something, or the tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This thing is twenty five feet high and the head is six feet across,” you see, and so he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by.” 

Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so I learned to do that - everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating and so (LAUGHS) I used to read the Encyclopaedia when I was a boy but with translation, you see, so it was very exciting and interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude - I wasn’t frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this, I don’t think, but I thought that it was very, very interesting, that they all died out and at that time nobody knew why. 

We used to go to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in New York and the Catskill Mountains was the place where people went in the summer; and the fathers - there was a big group of people there but the fathers would all go back to New York to work during the week and only come back on the weekends. When my father came he would take me for walks in the woods and tell me various interesting things that were going on in the woods - which I’ll explain in a minute - but the other mothers seeing this, of course, thought this was wonderful and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks, and they tried to work on them but they didn’t get anywhere at first and they wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn’t want to because he had a special relationship with me - we had a personal thing together - so it ended up that the other fathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend, and the next Monday when they were all back to work, all the kids were playing in the field and one kid said to me, “See that bird, what kind of a bird is that?” And I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown throated thrush,” or something, “Your father doesn’t tell you anything.” But it was the opposite: my father had taught me. Looking at a bird he says, “Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it’s a . . . in Italian a . . . ,” he says “in Chinese it’s a . . . , in Japanese a . . . ,” etcetera. “Now,” he says, “you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that,” he says, “you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now,” he says, “let’s look at the bird.”

He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it - I remember this - it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my father and I said, “Say, Pop, I noticed something: When I pull the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, and when I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon,” and I says, “why is that?” And he said, “That nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding - he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early. He went on to say, “If you look close you’ll find the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon, but it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pulling against the ball; that the ball stands still or as a matter of fact from the friction starts to move forward really and doesn’t move back.” So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways and seeing indeed he was right - the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forward. It moved backward relative to the wagon, but relative to the sidewalk it was moved forward a little bit, it’s just [that] the wagon caught up with it. So that’s the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions, no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.

by Richard Feynman, Learning Media MIT.edu |  Read more: (pdf)
Image: uncredited

Childhood And Education: Letting Kids Be Kids

I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have gotten about destroying the lives of children and along with them the lives of parents and others forced to devote endless hours to actively destructive supervision.

I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.

People Don’t Let Kids Do Things

As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:

1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.

2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.

Harris Poll: More than half of the kids surveyed have not experienced many real-life experiences on their own. According to the kids surveyed aged 8 to 12 years old:

• 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store

• 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents

• 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them

• 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult

• 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse)

• 67% have not done work that they’ve been paid for (e.g., mowing lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting)

• 71% have not used a sharp knife

Lenore Skenazy: During that visit, I was told that children could never be left alone, inside or outside the home—EVEN IN THEIR OWN BEDROOMS—until they were 13 years old. Social Services said specifically that I had to be in each room with them at all times until they were 13. That investigation ended without incident. …

When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.

Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.

“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”

Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”

There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.

Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]

Let Your Children Play

Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.

We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.

Girl about something: Is it ACTUALLY true that it’s good for me to let my baby entertain himself, or is it just selfishness because I can be doing something else while he plays? Tell the truth.

Based Sipper Wife | Mrs. Tomasone | Already sipped: It’s good for him! You know how people suffer from short attention spans and always needing to be entertained? Every time you let him play uninterrupted, you’re holding off that problem and helping him sustain focus

shiloh.: it’s so good, please teach your baby to play independently. if he were unhappy or lonely he’d cry & come to you. development of independent play is SO good for them (or course balanced with showing / talking / engaging)

is for baby whisperer: actually, seriously, a fantastic gift you can offer your child.

The problem, of course, is not any threat other than CPS.

Don’t Fear The CPS

And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.

And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):

MNBonnie: Over 54% of you need a visit from CPS. Holy shit.

Romy: wow yeah the logical conclusion here is that over half of all parents should have their kids taken away.

This behavior is obviously fine except insofar as someone might call CPS, but even if it wasn’t fine, it’s crazy to think about what that call implies.

Kelsey Piper: I don’t think that it’s a good idea to take peoples’ children away because they do a completely safe thing that is slightly different than the completely safe thing you do.

It is a bad outcome when CPS conducts an inspection of a family that is doing a great job raising kids in a lovely home but doing something slightly unusual. It is a way to terrorize those parents into compliance with standards that would never be the law and make no sense.

… I have had friends who have had their homes inspected because of stuff on the scale of ‘toddler fell at the playground and got a bruise’, yes. It was super stressful and probably made them inclined to be more safetyist and terrified of normal childhood falls!

Andrew Rettek: Yep. It sucks.

Romy: the number of people invoking cps every time they hear about a parenting choice that they wouldn’t make is really disturbing.

do you understand what claim you’re making when you say someone should have cps called on them? you’re saying that you believe their child would be better off ripped from the only home they’ve ever known and put in the care of strangers. moreover, you’re saying you believe the median foster parent is a better parent than their current parents.

you’re also saying you think we should dedicate state resources to carrying out this process. social workers already have caseloads too big to manage dealing with kids in homes with serious drug addiction, abuse, neglect and often fail to successfully intervene when it’s desperately needed.

you want these same social workers to spend time taking kids away from parents who leave them in a locked and air conditioned car for 2 minutes while they run into the store, or who watch them on the baby monitor while they catch up with the neighbors? really? if you were in charge of society this is what you’d do?

yep, in every case i’ve ever seen this raised for on twitter it would be infinitely worse than the home the kid is already in, even without accounting for the trauma of the kid being taken from their parents.

Mason: We also don’t actually want a society of traumatized and cowed parents

One function of CPS is to serve as a “wake up call” for bad parents. But you do not want a huge % of good parents making all of their parenting decisions under some abject terror that they may look negligent.

One problem with allowing any idiot to use the state as their cudgel is that a lot of people lack the imagination to anticipate the immediate consequences of their actions for other people, asking them to consider second-order effects is a total lost cause.

This is why a lot of older story arcs involve a “nosy neighbor” character who comes to embody something like the banality of evil or malicious ignorance. There used to be very strong norms against even *suggesting* that you might report people to the state for minor infractions.

Romy: the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept.

having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: X

The Desert Safety Net

Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it's not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford.

Every autumn across North America, migration begins.

And across the continent’s highways and desert roads, another migration gathers – this one made not of birds or fish, but of humans.

They go by many names: nomads, drifters, snowbirds, boondockers, van dwellers. Some travel in search of warmth, others for freedom and community. And for a growing number, the migration is not simply seasonal but economic.

Among those is 55-year-old Derek Hansler, a chef by trade.

Known to friends as D Rock, he spends the summer in New Hampshire visiting his children and grandchildren, parking his 2003 Van Terra shuttle bus in driveways along the way. He picks up gigs when he needs cash or a place to park, but the season is less work than service, volunteering in the communities he revisits every year.

“New Hampshire tells me when it’s time to roll,” he jokes. He likes to stay until the leaves turn crimson, then leave before they fall. When that moment arrives, he says goodbye to his family and points his bus 3,300 miles (5,310km) to the south-west.

In Seattle, as the rainy maritime chill brings out jackets, Stephanie Scruggs and Gustavo Costo prepare to head south. After three years on the road, they recently decided to move in together – a milestone in their nomadic life that meant trading their two vans for a half-finished bus they named Magpie, a weathered 1999 International Thomas.

It’s been more than five years since Scruggs, then 35, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer known as a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma. After surgery, six weeks of radiation, and a year of chemo, doctors told her she might have two to five years to live.

Retiree Theresa Webster makes a final pass through the Oregon campground where she volunteers each year as a summer host. Fire rings are doused. Bathrooms are scrubbed. Trash is gathered and hauled away.

In return for the work, she has been given what has become increasingly rare: a legal place to park.

With the season over, she packs up Old Yeller, the mustard yellow 1977 Dodge van she bought for $3,000. Her dog, Miles, rides shotgun as she takes the long way south, first turning east toward her son’s driveway in Iowa, folding briefly back into the family rhythms of grandkids and shared meals. When winter presses in, she points Old Yeller down the interstate.

In driveways, campgrounds, and borrowed corners of parking lots, autumn departures like these unfold across North America. Soon these migrants will spill on to back roads, highways and interstates, license plates tracing faint lines south from Alaska, Quebec, Maine and everywhere in between, navigating by a kind of winter constellation – an invisible beacon in the American southwest that most maps barely notice, a place they return to year after year.

A small desert outpost called Quartzsite, Arizona.

*****

For many road trippers speeding along Interstate 10, Quartzsite, or “Q-town” as it is affectionately known, appears little more than a gas station and fast-food stopover halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix. It sits in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, 20 miles east of the Colorado River.

Summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits, sending the valley’s human residents indoors to air-conditioned rooms and its wild inhabitants – including desert tortoises, cottontails and kangaroo rats – into underground lairs.

According to the 2020 census, the population is 2,413.

But as winter approaches and temperatures fall to something more forgiving, the great migration of motorhomes, RVs, buses, trailers, vans, cars and trucks begins to pour into Quartzsite – and more precisely, into the vast stretches of open desert that surround it.

But not everyone keeps moving.

Tens of thousands instead gather inside BLM-designated long-term visitor areas, or LTVAs, seasonal enclaves established in 1983 to accommodate the growing number of people wintering in the desert. Seven LTVAs stretch across Arizona and California. But the largest of these and the center of gravity is La Posa – Spanish for “the resting place” – an 11,400-acre stretch of land on the outskirts of Quartzsite.

Each winter, a vibrant social world takes hold. Clubs form and dissolve – singles groups, quilters, metal-detecting hobbyists – while daily gatherings emerge at sunrise and continue late into the night. Around them, infrastructure hums into being: laundromats that double as showers, RVs converted into hair salons, swap meets, mail-forwarding counters for lives without fixed addresses, mechanics coaxing life from failing engines.

Theresa remembers arriving in Old Yeller for the first time in 2018. She had kept her apartment in Oregon just in case van life didn’t work out. But as the desert opened around her, the contingency plan dissolved.

“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “This is the life.” She had grown tired of paying rent and bills and having nothing left over – a treadmill she could never step off. Out here, there were no landlords to answer to. Eight years later, the desert around Quartzsite still carries that weight for her. “It has a magical feeling,” she said.

Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.

For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.

Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out. [...]

Dr Graham Pruss, executive director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition – a network that advocates for the rights of people living in vehicles – spends part of each winter moving between desert camps as he connects with vehicle residents across the country. He sees many of them as part of what he calls an “economic refugee class.” They are people displaced not by conflict or famine, he said, but by rents, wages and the shrinking availability of stable housing.

He describes what he calls “settlement bias” – our tendency to treat familiar forms of dwelling as legitimate and unfamiliar ones as suspect.

“If you park an RV on to a private space and you pay for rent, that’s called a mobile home park,” he said. “But if you move that RV 100 feet onto the street, we call that homelessness.

“These are people who are using their private property to solve a housing crisis that we all see around us,” he added. “That adaptive strategy is innovative. It creates solutions where they don’t exist.”

For many vehicle residents, public lands have become one of the few legal geographies where long-term habitation remains possible.

“Public lands are the lifeline for a lot of us,” said Mary Feuer, a longtime public land resident. “When the money runs out, they literally support us.”

by Joshua Jackson, Re:Public |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Jackson

Consider the Sister

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.

 

Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right.

“Watching television with David was an interactive experience,” Amy says. The two children weren’t content with what was on offer. Often, they would invent new dialogue for the characters extemporaneously.

“That was one of our hobbies,” Amy says. “We just thought, whoever’s writing this, it could be so much more interesting.”

David identified as the Road Runner and told Amy she was his Wile E. Coyote. He had the speed, the tools—and the upper hand. She was left with only her wits to try to keep up with him, but of course she never could. The lot of Wile E. Coyote was to follow the Road Runner hopelessly, never to catch up.

It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

Amy, who lives in Arizona, is now the only living member of the nuclear Foster Wallace family. James (a philosophy professor) and Sally (an English professor) moved from Urbana to Arizona in 2012. James died in July 2019, and Sally died just over a year later in July 2020.

The grief over the deaths of her brother and then her parents is a constant companion.

“Nearly every morning of my life, as a fully grown adult woman living a full adult life, I wake up and I’m back in my childhood bed,” she says. “My mom is making breakfast and David’s in his bedroom and it’s so vivid. Then I open my eyes and it’s like nope, that’s all gone.”

Amy’s own children are adults now. She says her eldest is now a writer as well. (Amy asked me not to describe them, to preserve their privacy.) They were old enough to have strong memories of their uncle, and they bear a strong physical resemblance to him. David’s death was a very public wound for a mostly private family.

In 2001, David published a piece of fiction about a man grappling with suicidal ideation. He wrote, in part: “I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause” his family. To some extent, he foresaw the shadow he would cast.

Years after David’s death, their father asked Amy to write a book about him from her perspective. He asked her to make sure the people who raised him got a say in his memory, too.

Amy decided a book would be too invasive—but she came to understand that she had a responsibility to talk about her brother beyond the legend that was partly of his own fashioning. She has given radio interviews, appeared at a conference dedicated to David’s work, and has spoken to me at length about the person who teased her, protected her, alienated and embraced her, and eventually broke her heart.

“I do feel that it's kind of incumbent on me to let the world know what a very normal person he was,” Amy says. “And that he was mostly happy, generous—and extremely funny.”

*****

Amy has a knack for making you feel, very quickly, like you too knew this brotherly version of David, knew the sincerity of his often oddly shaped affection.

My own connection with Amy came as the result of my insecurity around David’s work, not the sort of deep, life-defining fanaticism that one often encounters in the cult of DFW. Generally, I have viewed his work the way I have at times felt about Salvador Dalí—we’re all humans with the same general set of blood, guts, and brains. How could these people pull so much more out of themselves than the rest of us?

In many ways, this envy has stood in the way of my own appreciation of David’s writing. It’s great, profound, and will never be repeated. But how did he know so many words? What’s the deal with that syntax? Why do I write in plain, gray English while his work hits my eyes like Technicolor?

In April 2025, I emailed Amy out of the blue. Here is what I said:

“I'm hoping that you might be willing to be interviewed about your mother and let me learn more about her life and work. I have always had a hard time getting past my envy of your brother's vocabulary, and I felt a little bit better about it when I read a bit about Sally.

“So, naturally, my curiosity turned to her and her life. I'd love to write a real feature piece about Sally.”

Amy and I spoke at length over the following weeks. She suggested I buy a copy of her mother’s textbook Practically Painless English. I read it on the subway and felt immediate clarity upon reading just the first few pages.

In a section about verbs, Sally laid out an exercise:

1. Please circle each verb you find in these sentences.
2. The fox moaned and groaned when the chicken escaped.
3. I baked a cake for Mongo, but he turned bright green after he ate some.
4.George is upset because his father thinks he lied about the cherry tree.
5. Florence sneaked out of her room, tiptoed down the stairs, and dynamited the refrigerator.
6. The big fish kept out of trouble because he shut his mouth and stayed in school.

Practically Painless English isn’t just a textbook for people who want to learn to speak proper English. It’s a guide to using language with personality. If Strunk and White offer a guide to frictionless diction, Practically Painless English demonstrates how to stand out within a traditional framework. I probably would have been a much more interesting writer if I’d been raised by a parent who felt so strongly that storytelling should contain detail, whimsy, and flair. Then I realized that Amy was raised by just such a parent, too.

Eventually, months after our first conversation, I reached out to Amy again. This time my curiosity turned to her and her life. I asked her if I could write a real feature piece about her.

In the course of subjecting Amy to many, many hours of conversations about herself, her brother, and my own writing life and hangups about it, I found someone who is as entertaining as she is earnest. Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists.

She carries that family trait of delighting in absurdity. She hasn’t deified or demonized her brother despite the persistent desire in the literary community to do one or the other. One afternoon, as she was detailing how David watched television, she described just how long she had to sit with him on Saturday mornings before the start of their cartoons.

“Well, no one ever accused your brother of brevity,” I responded, anxiously. I wondered where the line was between respecting the memory of someone and treating them like they were a real person whose peculiarities were worthy of note.

“Or patience,” she said, upping the ante and putting me at ease. “He bounced off the walls in those days.”

One of the ways that Amy protects her brother’s humanity is by showing how his anxieties seemed to travel through a prism and shoot out at unexpected angles. The gloomier results are well known, but there could be humor, too, in the fears provoked not just by his anxiety but by his own ethic of deep care.

She recalls David had an obsession with sharks—which she believes stems from a book called Shark Attack that lived in the bathroom they shared for a portion of their childhood.

Many years later, Amy went to study abroad in Australia. The water was warm there, and she was enjoying herself at the beach regularly after spending her childhood in the landlocked Midwest. Back in the United States, though, David kept thinking about the sharks. He sent letters reminding his sister how to spot them in open water. There was money, too, because he was distraught at the idea that she might wind up short on resources while out on her own. Amy was fine, but David was determined to protect her, in his own way.

“He’d sign off his letters to me with a picture of a shark fin,” Amy says. “Then there’d be a little stick figure. Oh my god, it was great.”

Amy says the last time she and her family spent significant time with David was on a vacation to Stinson Beach.

“When any of us were in the water, he'd be standing on the deck with binoculars scanning for fins,” she recalls. “He was so terrified of sharks and he didn't stick a toe in the water.”

Before he was the most revered and studied contemporary American author, DFW was just someone’s older brother. Amy didn’t see him as DFW, the public character. But she can talk at length about the person she grew up with.

by Lindsey Adler, The Small Bow | Read more:
Image: Road Runner Show/dreamstime

Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth

Previous generations inherited relatively stable systems for determining what was real: newspapers, universities, scientific institutions, courts, and professional journalism. Those systems were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided shared reference points. Gen Z has inherited something fundamentally different: an information ecosystem where truth is increasingly shaped socially, emotionally, algorithmically, and now synthetically through AI.

As journalist Maria Ressa warned in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy."

But Gen Z may already be building something to replace what's been lost. Not institutions. Not gatekeepers. A distributed, socially negotiated sense of who earns the right to be believed. They're not abandoning truth. They're auditing who gets to deliver it.

That verdict, built by millions of young people navigating this system together, is already in.

by Steven Rosenbaum, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.

COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?

SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”

Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.

On the sound of the Rolling Stones

COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?

SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.

COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.

SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.

COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?

SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode. [...]

On art colleges and rock ‘n’ roll

COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.

SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.

Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—

COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?

SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music. [...]

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band. [...]

COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.

SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.

COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.

SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.

COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?

SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.

COWEN: What year is this, just for context?

SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”

As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.

He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.

COWEN: He was good?

SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before. [...]

On Robert Caro

COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?

SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”

We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.

COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?

SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.

COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?

SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.

by Tyler Cowen and Bob Spitz, Conversations |  Read more:
Image: uncredited/Conversations with Tyler