The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“A sharp cough recoils to peel the corn:
Save me the husk of myself?”

— Lewis Meyers / “Going to Chicago”

“We have, in effect, turned September into July. That’s not hyperbole, that’s just data. And in so doing, September smashed through the 1.5 degree Celsius warming mark that the world set as a target in Paris just eight years ago. We’ve been talking about it ever since, and now we’re there.”

— Bill McKibben / “The Rays of the Sun” / Substack newsletter

“you work with words, which unlike the wallet, is not a material you touch, but you wonder if in reordering them you might disrupt what is presupposed, if you might work something other than emptiness from their grooves. you’ve only failed at this. you are not yet a skilled enough practitioner of failure, and so you keep reordering them, to see what casts a shadow.”

— Chaun Webster / “[by way of entry you sit with an object]”

“Women have been under-represented in the workplace for at least the past two centuries and continue to earn, on average, 13% less than men — an injustice as well as a puzzling ‘market inefficiency’.”

— Philip Ball / “Why women earn less than men: Nobel for economic historian who probed pay gap” / Nature

“I tried to become American, but America is toxic. I tried to become Mexican, but México is toxic. My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned.”

— José Olivarez / “Ars Poetica”

“… same-sex sexual behavior evolved when mammals started living in social groups. Although the behavior does not produce offspring to carry on the animals’ genes, it could offer other evolutionary advantages, such as smoothing over conflicts, the researchers proposed.”

— Carl Zimmer / “Same-Sex Behavior Evolved in Many Mammals to Reduce Conflict, Study Suggests” / The New York Times

“It is hard, in the era of the AR-15, to fear a vampire.”

— Alexander Chee / “When Horror Is the Truth-teller”

What I’m Listening To:

“Last night I dreamt that we lasted all the way ’til spring
But now the fields are full of red and blue with nothing in between
You can lead water to the daffodils But you can’t make them drink”

— English Teacher / “Nearly Daffodils”