Nathan Freise, Unseen Realities
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Boys 'Round Here

I was something to see on the May morning I left Missoula, Montana, for good, all my earthly belongings jammed in the back seat of my ’95 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, which is heavily dented and extremely pink. Missoula is a wacky and lovable university town that is home to a half-dozen microbreweries, herds of urban deer, and one saloon that has been open continuously, 24 hours a day, since 1883. I lived there for four happy and shiftless years of reading, waitressing, whiskey, inner tubing, burritos, and karaoke. I lit out on Interstate 90 for my parents’ house in Lincoln, Nebraska, washed in the wide-open sadness of the American range.

The indulgent, corny romance of my melancholy was not lost on me. I saw myself as straight out of a country song. I left Missoula early on a Sunday. Milk crates of clothes and books in my back seat. Cruising I-90 in my pink Oldsmobile. Something something something steering wheel.

The maudlin country-western spirit of my situation was what motivated my experiment: for all of my 18-hour drive through some of the emptiest parts of the American West, I would listen to country radio. I cultivated an interest in contemporary country music similar to my enthusiasm for any other pop culture that is craven, crappy, backward, prepackaged, and shallow. Entertainment that is lucrative and ubiquitous, loved by many and known by most, can tell us a lot about our emotional triggers — and I don’t say that in a removed, condescending way. I am not an anthropological researcher of my own culture. Commercial pop culture is engineered to make people respond to it, and I respond to it. And the common tropes in country music broadcast the genre’s values so astoundingly literally that the feelings, beliefs, and history it appeals to in its audience are more obvious than for any other kind of American music.

I anticipated that my country radio marathon would be novel, enjoyable, and occasionally grating. What I did not account for was the concurrence of my trip and Memorial Day weekend, and all the cringing that would accompany hours of patriotic bathos. “Support our troops/America fuck yeah” is a venerable trope of commercial country music — driving through southern Wyoming I heard Johnny Cash’s “Ragged Old Flag,” a Vietnam-era spoken number expressing contempt for anyone who doesn’t smile with favor on all of the USA’s contemporary and historical military entanglements. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” which updated displays of American patriotism to the Reagan years’ sappy jingoism, has become something of a standard.

Of course, today’s leading country saber-rattler is Toby Keith, whose anthem “American Soldier” — with lyrics as lazy you’d expect: “Oh and I don’t want to die for you/But if dying’s asked of me/I’ll bear that cross with honor/’Cause freedom don’t come free” — I heard just west of Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Keith took up his role as country’s patriotism police during his famous feud with the Dixie Chicks in 2003, after their lead singer Natalie Maines made statements criticizing President George Bush and the Iraq War.

At a concert, Keith displayed a picture of Maines photoshopped with a picture of Saddam Hussein, and Maines struck back by wearing a shirt saying “F.U.T.K.” to perform at the Academy of Country Music Awards. But Keith was vindicated — he won Album of the Year at the Awards for his über-patriotic Shock’n Y’all, while the Dixie Chicks were largely banished from country radio for their political statements. The Keith-Dixie Chicks conflict can illuminate a lot about country music’s gender dynamics. The genre’s most successful female act spoke out against authority, and the genre’s most successful male act felt it was his place to punish them for it. This is a notable pattern: in contemporary country, women are rebellious and angry, subverting a stifling (read: conservative small town) societal order whenever possible, while men hold fast to traditional norms, at turns smug and defiant.

This is pretty much the entire reason I almost always respond favorably to female artists on country radio, and to male artists almost never. The female singers are also more appealing vocalists, since a majority of male artists sing in corny, croony, tuneless baritone voices, imitating Keith and Garth Brooks. My most recent country favorite is Kacey Musgraves, who has taken up the space Taylor Swift vacated when she all but abandoned country for the greener pastures of pop radio. Like Swift, Musgraves is a young woman who sings in a simple, unaffected alto and writes most of her own music. But Musgraves is like Swift’s brunette alter ego in her “You Belong With Me” video — she is Swift with a dark side, singing, on her major-label debut album Same Trailer Different Park, about smoking pot and sleeping with her ex-boyfriends.

Musgraves has perfected an expression of the female country trope of longing to leave a dead-end hometown. Her single “Blowin' Smoke” describes a group of waitresses and their big talk about quitting smoking and quitting their jobs. Her first hit, “Merry Go ‘Round,” is a sharp and sad panorama of small-town life, where “Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay/Brother's hooked on Mary Jane/Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down.” Musgraves displays sardonic insight about why people in towns like these behave the way they do. “Same checks we’re always cashin’/To buy a little more distraction,” she sings, and, more to the point, “We’re so bored until we’re buried.”

by Alice Bolin, LA Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Dinner Is Printed

The hype over 3-D printing intensifies by the day. Will it save the world? Will it bring on the apocalypse, with millions manufacturing their own AK-47s? Or is it all an absurd hubbub about a machine that spits out chintzy plastic trinkets? I decided to investigate. My plan: I would immerse myself in the world of 3-D printing. I would live for a week using nothing but 3-D-printed objects — toothbrushes, furniture, bicycles, vitamin pills — in order to judge the technology’s potential and pitfalls.

I approached Hod Lipson, a Cornell engineering professor and one of the nation’s top 3-D printing experts, with my idea. He thought it sounded like a great project. It would cost me a mere $50,000 or so.

Unless I was going to 3-D print counterfeit Fabergé eggs for the black market, I’d need a Plan B.

Which is how I settled on the idea of creating a 3-D-printed meal. I’d make 3-D-printed plates, forks, place mats, napkin rings, candlesticks — and, of course, 3-D-printed food. Yes, cuisine can be 3-D printed, too. And, in fact, Mr. Lipson thinks food might be this technology’s killer app. (More on that later.)

I wanted to serve the meal to my wife as the ultimate high-tech romantic dinner date. A friend suggested that, to finish the evening off, we hire a Manhattan-based company that scans and makes 3-D replicas of your private parts. That’s where I drew the line.

As it turned out, the dinner was perhaps the most labor-intensive meal in history. But it did give me a taste of the future, in both its utopian and dystopian aspects.

by A.J. Jacobs, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tony Cenicola

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The Fed Has Investors Overjoyed For All the Wrong Reasons

[ed. See also: Is the Fed an Enabler?]

I suspect that I will always remember where I was when the Federal Reserve stunned markets on Wednesday by deciding not taper its experimental support for markets and the economy — just like I suspect that I will always remember where I was on May 22nd when the Fed surprised many by indicating that a taper was likely to be forthcoming. In-between, markets have gone on a wild roller coaster roundtrip that also speaks to what continues to be a disappointingly tentative economic recovery and frustratingly weak job creation.

All this is quite perplexing given that the Fed is not in the business of surprising markets, and understandably so. Surprises tend to increase uncertainty premiums which then can act as a tax on financial intermediation and economic activity. They can also undermine the credibility of an institution that is central to the wellbeing of the nation.

If anything, the Fed under Ben Bernanke has made a point of enhancing “transparency.” Mr. Bernanke is the most communicative chairman in Fed history. He and his colleagues are releasing more data and projections than ever before. And Janet Yellen, the Fed’s vice governor and Mr. Bernanke’s likely successor, has led a comprehensive transparency initiative.

Yet the Fed has ended up surprising in major ways over the last few months, leading to wild gyrations in markets. The Dow collapsed by 5% between May 21st and June 24th, before surging by 8% to a new record close on Wednesday. Commodity and bond markets have also been quite volatile, with the benchmark 10-year Treasury unusually trading in an almost 50 basis point range.

Changes in underlying economic fundamentals do not warrant such volatility. While the economy continues to heal, it is has remained stuck in a multiyear, low-level growth equilibrium that frustrates job creation and worsens income distribution.

It could be that the Fed is really worried about the upcoming congressional battles over funding the government and lifting the debt ceiling. As illustrated by the debacle of the summer of 2011, a slippage could undermine economic performance. And we should never underestimate the appetite of our polarized Congress for self-manufactured challenges. Having said this, the Fed usually prefers to be reactive rather than proactive in such situations.

It is also hard to argue that the Fed has made a major discovery about the longer-term impact of what is after all a highly experimental policy approach. If anything, our central bankers (and, I would argue, everybody else) are essentially in the dark when it comes to the specific evolution over time of what Mr. Bernanke labeled back in 2010 the “benefits, costs and risks” of prolonged reliance on unconventional monetary policy.

We have to go elsewhere to explain the Fed’s unusual surprises. And my preferred explanation at this point — based on partial information and a gut feel — has to do with decision making under considerable uncertainty and changing leadership.

When faced with a challenging decision, we all love focusing on what can go right. It is our natural comfort zone. Yet, particularly in circumstances of extreme uncertainty, it is also important to assess the potential scale and scope of what can go wrong.

by Mohamed A. El-Erian, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

Out of Season

“We got along really well,” is what I usually say when I have to describe our relationship, which doesn’t convey much unless you’ve had that kind of relaxed, thoughtless rapport with someone you’re also sleeping with. But when we always wanted to see the same movie at the same time, or go to the same gallery exhibition, or fall asleep together on a Friday night after work then wake up and walk around the corner for a late takeout dinner, when we liked every single one of each other’s friends, it felt like everything. He could charm me out of a bad mood — no easy feat — and had a knack for random gestures of kindness and affection. Our birthdays are exactly six months apart; as I was walking down Bedford Street to meet him at our favorite restaurant for his birthday, thinking proudly of the theater tickets I had bought as his gift, I saw him waiting for me and felt the small thrill of secret, happy recognition I always felt when I had a moment to enjoy his presence before he noticed mine. He also was holding a gift-wrapped package. “It’s your present,” he said. “For your half-birthday.” It was exactly what I wanted, an iPod.

But Russell had wanted to leave New York for years, and he was stubborn. He missed fresh air and open space, so much so that after we had been together for about a year and a half he issued what was essentially an ultimatum: I’m going, with or without you, preferably with you, but I’m going. It meant giving up everything I had worked so hard for, the toehold I had carved out in my career, the identity I had assembled, and everyone else I loved, so of course I said yes.

I said “yes” to moving but I hadn’t really said “yes” to a location. Because Russell was an urban planner, with experience that was in high demand, he could work almost anywhere. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer and was interested in living abroad again — somewhere English-speaking, he conceded, so I could get a job. He wanted to be close to places to canoe and hike and climb. He wanted to live in a smaller city. Wherever we ended up, it was understood that we would stay there for a year or two before settling down back home in the Midwest. In theory I was on board with all of this, and as he started to look for jobs and then started getting offers, I remained theoretically fine with all of the potential locations; I was in over my head at my own job and barely had time to get coffee in the morning, let alone ruminate on the implications of these very important decisions.

When Russell asked, almost in passing, how about New Zealand? I thought about Lord of the Rings for a second and told him to apply for the job. I really did not think he would get it, and if he did, there was no way he would say yes — it was so far! And all of this was far less real than the onslaught of demanding emails and sensitive situations I dealt with every day at work and the numb comfort of sinking into bed next to him at the end of a hellishly long day. In the end, one offer was from Calgary, another from San Francisco, and there was probably a third that I can’t even remember now. But he accepted the one from the city council in Christchurch, New Zealand, and moved there in the summer of 2005.

I had only been at my terrifying yet oddly fulfilling job for a few months, and I wanted to stick it out for at least a year, so we agreed to do long distance for an unspecified amount of time. “Long” distance was so accurate it was funny, almost. Depending on the season, the time difference was between 14 and 16 hours, which meant that to talk on the phone one of us had to either get up before 6 a.m. or stay awake past midnight, and this was pre-Skype/Gchat, so we were both spending a small fortune on phone cards. He wrote me a lot of letters, and when I find them now, they still make me cry. He was so happy, and I, in retrospect, distracted and confused and utterly unsure of what I actually wanted.

After eight months of this, he returned to the U.S. to visit me and his family. Bad weather and travel delays cut “my” part short, and I remember riding the subway back to my apartment after saying goodbye to him at the airport, crying in an orange seat in the corner and thinking I could not do this another time, that any amount of career stagnation or uncertainty or opportunity loss was worth not having to say goodbye another time. That’s when I started making plans in earnest, started shopping for tickets, giving away my things, began to acknowledge I was really going to leave. Four months later, in June of 2006, I left.

by Ruth Curry, Buzzfeed |  Read more:

Image: Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed

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Oyster Run 2013

[ed. Oyster Run 2013. My favorite community event of the year. Pretty windy day with periodic downpours but that didn't quell the enthusiasm of the crowd. Hats off to all riders that came despite the weather (still a great turnout). Here are a few pics.]

Free oyster shooters!

 Arrival

Last Meals

In January 1985, Pizza Hut aired a commercial in South Carolina that featured a condemned prisoner ordering delivery for his last meal. Two weeks earlier, the state had carried out its first execution in twenty-two years, electrocuting a man named Joseph Carl Shaw. Shaw’s last-meal request had been pizza, although not from Pizza Hut. Complaints came quickly; the spot was pulled, and a company official claimed the ad was never intended to run in South Carolina.

It’s not hard to understand why Pizza Hut’s creative team thought the ad was a good idea. The last meal offers an irresistible blend of food, death, and crime that drives a commercial and voyeuristic cottage industry. Studiofeast, an invitation-only supper club in New York City, hosts an annual event based on the best responses to the question, “You’re about to die, what’s your last meal?” There are books and magazine articles and art projects that address, among other things, what celebrity chefs—like Mario Batali and Marcus Samuelsson—would have for their last meals, or what the famous and the infamous ate before dying. Newspapers reported that Saddam Hussein was offered but refused chicken, while Esquire published an article about the terminally ill Francois Mitterrand, the former French president, who had Marennes oysters, foie gras, and, the pièce de résistance, two ortolan songbirds. The bird is thought to represent the French soul and, because it’s protected, is illegal to consume.

While the number of yearly executions in the United States has generally declined since a high of ninety-eight in 1999, the website Dead Man Eating tracked and commented on last-meal requests of death-row inmates across the country during the first decade of the new millennium. One of the site’s last posts, in January 2010, was the request of Bobby Wayne Woods, who was executed in Texas for raping and killing an eleven-year-old girl: “Two chicken-fried steaks, two fried chicken breasts, three fried pork chops, two hamburgers with lettuce, tomato, onion, and salad dressing, four slices of bread, half a pound of fried potatoes with onion, half a pound of onion rings with ketchup, half a pan of chocolate cake with icing, and two pitchers of milk.”

There are also efforts to leverage the pop-culture spectacle of last meals to protest the death penalty. An Oregon artist has vowed to paint images of fifty last-meal requests of U.S. inmates on ceramic plates every year until the death penalty is outlawed. Amnesty International launched an anti-capital punishment campaign this past February that featured depictions of the last meals of prisoners who were later exonerated of their crimes.

No matter your stance on capital punishment, eating and dying are universal and densely symbolic human processes. Death eludes the living, and we are drawn to anything that offers the possibility of glimpsing the undiscovered country. If, as the French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested, we are what we eat, then a final meal would seem to be the ultimate self-expression. There is added titillation when that expression comes from the likes of Timothy McVeigh (two pints of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream) or Ted Bundy (who declined a special meal and was served steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly). And when this combination of factors is set against America’s already fraught relationship with food, supersized or slow, and with weight and weight loss, it’s almost surprising that Pizza Hut didn’t have a winner on its hands.

The idea of a meal before an execution is compassionate or perverse, depending on your perspective, but it contains an inherently curious paradox: marking the end of a life with the stuff that sustains it seems at once laden with meaning and beside the point. As Barry Lee Fairchild, who was executed by the state of Arkansas in 1995, said in regard to his last meal, “It’s just like putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.”

by Brent Cunningham, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Prisoners Exercising by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. (Pushkin Museum of Fine Art)

Han Bing for Numéro China, March 2013
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What's Wrong with the Modern World

Karl Kraus was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin-de-siecle Vienna's famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death in 1936, he edited and published the influential magazine Die Fackel (The Torch); from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine's sole author. Although Kraus would probably have hated blogs, Die Fackel was like a blog that everybody who mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. Kraus was especially well known for his aphorisms – for example, "Psychoanalysis is that disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure" – and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings.

The thing about Kraus is that he's very hard to follow on a first reading – deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the playwright Hermann Bahr, before attacking him: "If he understands one sentence of the essay, I'll retract the entire thing." If you read Kraus's sentences more than once, you'll find that they have a lot to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment. (...)

First footnote: Kraus's suspicion of the "melody of life" in France and Italy still has merit. His contention here – that walking down a street in Paris or Rome is an aesthetic experience in itself – is confirmed by the ongoing popularity of France and Italy as vacation destinations and by the "envy me" tone of American Francophiles and Italophiles announcing their travel plans. If you say you're taking a trip to Germany, you'd better be able to explain what specifically you're planning to do there, or else people will wonder why you're not going someplace where life is beautiful. Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had existed in Kraus's time, he might have said that Germany is uncool.

This suggests a more contemporary version of Kraus's dichotomy: Mac versus PC. Isn't the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn't even matter what you're creating on your Mac Air. Simply using a Mac Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris. Whereas, when you're working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself. As Kraus says of Germanic life, the PC "sobers" what you're doing; it allows you to see it unadorned. This was especially true in the years of DOS operating systems and early Windows.

One of the developments that Kraus will decry in this essay – the Viennese dolling-up of German language and culture with decorative elements imported from Romance language and culture – has a correlative in more recent editions of Windows, which borrow ever more features from Apple but still can't conceal their essential uncool Windowsness. Worse yet, in chasing after Apple elegance, they betray the old austere beauty of PC functionality. They still don't work as well as Macs do, and they're ugly by both cool and utilitarian standards.

And yet, to echo Kraus, I'd still rather live among PCs. Any chance that I might have switched to Apple was negated by the famous and long-running series of Apple ads aimed at persuading people like me to switch. The argument was eminently reasonable, but it was delivered by a personified Mac (played by the actor Justin Long) of such insufferable smugness that he made the miseries of Windows attractive by comparison. You wouldn't want to read a novel about the Mac: what would there be to say except that everything is groovy? Characters in novels need to have actual desires; and the character in the Apple ads who had desires was the PC, played by John Hodgman. His attempts to defend himself and to pass himself off as cool were funny, and he suffered, like a human being. (...)

Maybe apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal. I have a brief tenure on Earth, bracketed by infinities of nothingness, and during the first part of this tenure I form an attachment to a particular set of human values that are shaped inevitably by my social circumstances. If I'd been born in 1159, when the world was steadier, I might well have felt, at 53, that the next generation would share my values and appreciate the same things I appreciated; no apocalypse pending. But I was born in 1959, when TV was something you watched only during prime time, and people wrote letters and put them in the mail, and every magazine and newspaper had a robust books section, and venerable publishers made long-term investments in young writers, and New Criticism reigned in English departments, and the Amazon basin was intact, and antibiotics were used only to treat serious infections, not pumped into healthy cows. It wasn't necessarily a better world (we had bomb shelters and segregated swimming pools), but it was the only world I knew to try to find my place in as a writer. And so today, 53 years later, Kraus's signal complaint – that the nexus of technology and media has made people relentlessly focused on the present and forgetful of the past – can't help ringing true to me. Kraus was the first great instance of a writer fully experiencing how modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse. Naturally, because he was the first, the changes felt particular and unique to him, but in fact he was registering something that has become a fixture of modernity.

by Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Imagno/Getty Images

Michael Powers

[ed. My golf partner today. Thanks, Michael. Hope we tee it up again sometime soon.]

Ana Zanic
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Kim Hamlet, Where Land Meets the Sea
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An Interview With Horace Dediu: On Blogging, Apple And What’s Next

Q: Turning to Apple, where is it at right now as a company in this post-Steve Jobs period?

A: Still too early to tell. They seem to be cooking a lot of things and the great experiment of whether a company can be Jobsian without Jobs is still going on. I have been trying to put together a picture of how it operates. It’s hard because that’s their biggest secret. It’s also a picture that few people have ever seen, even those who worked there a long time. The glimpses so far are tantalizing but there is so much we don’t know and thus can’t assess how robust it is. One thing that is clear to me is that there is no absorption by mainstream observers of what makes Apple tick. It’s hiding in plain sight because what it is isn’t anything anyone can recognize. Case in point is the functional and integrated dimensions. It’s the largest functional organization outside the US Army and more integrated than Henry Ford’s production system. Just describing it sounds medieval and it’s so far outside convention that it’s not something reasonable people are willing to believe actually exists.

Q: Is Tim Cook the right CEO for the company at this time?

A: I hold the belief that he’s been CEO for much longer than it seems. Jobs was not a CEO in any traditional sense. He was head of product and culture and all-around micromanager. He left the operational side of the company to Cook who actually built it into a colossus. Think along the lines of the pairing of Howard Hughes and Frank William Gay. What people look for in Cook is the qualities that Jobs had but those qualities and duties are now dispersed among a large team. The question isn’t whether Cook can be the “Chief Magical Officer” but rather whether the functional team that’s around Cook can do the things Jobs used to do.

Look at it another way: I subscribe to the idea that any sufficiently large company is a system and needs to be analyzed using a lost art called “Systems Analysis”. This is a complete review of all parts and the way they inter-relate. However, since for most of its life Apple was personified as an individual, what came to pass for Apple analysis was actually the psychoanalysis of that individual. It makes for great journalism and best selling books. It’s also banal and almost certainly wrong. The proof is in the vastness of complexity and number of people involved. Engineers tend to think about constraints and the constraints on companies are innumerable.

Q: You’ve written extensively on the post-PC period, when will we come to the post-phone period – if ever?

A: I think less than 10 years. Maybe even five. A wristband today can have more processing power than the original iPhone. An iPhone has more power than a desktop did 4 years ago. The speed of change is incredible.

Q: What’s going to be the “next big thing” for Apple? Watches, TVs, something else?

A: I segment along “jobs to be done” which are basically unstated and unmet needs. Unstated because they are usually so deep and so pervasive that they’re taken for granted. We have the need to feel good about our lives, to be healthy and to be connected in meaningful ways to others. These jobs are very poorly served by technology today and there are many non-technology products that are hired as poor proxies to help. The speed with which technology changes means that the trajectory of improvement will undoubtedly intersect that of the job. Even a small job like losing weight and eating well is probably worth as much as half the mobile phone market. Imagine if someone gives us a magic tool that does that for us. How much would you pay? How many of us would pay? There are so many next big things that I cannot choose. (By the way think of the job Facebook is hired to do: make me feel good about myself because I can show others how good I am. Boom!)

Eric Jackson interview of Horace Dediu, Asymco |  Read more:

Chinese painted horn comb, bird motif.
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NOAH Short

[ed. Pretty interesting... break-ups in the age of distraction.]

In a story that plays out entirely on a teenager's computer screen, Noah follows its eponymous protagonist as his relationship takes a rapid turn for the worse in this fascinating study of behaviour (and romance) in the digital age.

Halftime Speech

O.K., everyone, have a seat, grab a water, and listen up.

That was garbage. Seriously. If I could throw that first half into the trash can, I would. And I’d throw your cleats in after it, because clearly you don’t want to be playing soccer today.

What do I tell you every practice? Wait, I’m sorry. Do you even remember practice? Because, based on how you just “played” out there, I don’t think your brains have retained anything I have ever told you. Like, what’s the one thing I say every practice? Hmm? All together now: I can accept mistakes, but I will not accept lazy mistakes. That’s right, Lola-Belle, I’m talking to you. I hope you’re enjoying your career as a butterfly spotter, because your career at right halfback is over. Until next weekend, because everyone plays.

Listen, ladies, we went into this season with our eyes open. We knew we were stepping up a level. Girls’ U-8 separates the big girls from the little girls, and the under-eight girls from the under-nine girls, which I think is an important distinction, because there are a lot of developmental changes that year. But I thought we agreed that we were going to bring it! And play with intensity every game. Not just against the Purple People Eaters, who, as long as we’re remembering things, start a girl with a leg brace. So I’m glad you were all so pumped to beat them 2-1 last week.

But today . . . I mean, you were just strolling around out there like it was a picnic! When you all know the picnic isn’t until after the second-to-last game, because the twins are going to be out of town for the last game.

Honestly, the only one of you who played with any intensity that half was Jenna, and I know some of you are, like, “Ooh, shocking, Coach Mike said his daughter was the best,” but that’s not what I’m saying. She’s not the best. Maya’s probably a step faster, and if Stella M. took the time she spends braiding her hair every day and used it to practice her ball skills, she’d be killing it out there.

Seriously, girls, practice your ball skills at home. Please.

But what Jenna lacks in natural ability, which comes from her mother’s side, she makes up for in—what’s that word again?—intensity. It’s what I bring to my commercial-real-estate business, which is why my Shale Creek development is scheduled to open with only four per cent vacancy. Four per cent. Tell your parents, Stella R.—I can beat the rent they’re paying downtown.

Point is, I’m proud to see Jenna carrying my intensity onto the field, even if it’s on her mother’s bow legs. Don’t look around; she’s not here. She’s probably with her boyfriend, Scott, Mr. My-Rich-Dad-Handed-Me-A-Job. Go ask that guy about intensity—I hope you like thirty seconds of confused silence.

But, Jenna, I really am proud of you. And I don’t want you to worry about the sacrifices I’m making to coach this team, because that’s not important. Like, did you even realize, while I was teaching you how to trap the ball last week, that I missed a call about a zoning problem on Sixth Street? No, you didn’t, and that’s the way I want it, because it’s not important. Missing that call cost me twelve grand in fees and penalties, but that’s not important. Frustrating and preventable, but . . . you get the idea. What’s important is that we’re sharing this—the good and the bad, the wins and the losses—and that we have something that’s just between us, like you seem to have all those things with your mom.

A twelve-thousand-dollar phone call. Jesus.

by Kirk J. Rudell, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Carrie Boretz/Corbis

Scenery - Only Yesterday
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