People in the pandemic; sports superstars; at the edge of the known world

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I read three articles from recent issues of The New York Times Magazine that blew me away.  

In “I Feel Like I’m Just Drowning”, Sophomore Year in a Pandemic (NYT Magazine, 5/16/21), Susan Dominus offers us a deeply moving detailed report on her 8 months spent with a group of high school sophomores and their families and teachers. If you are like me (late 60’s in age, retired, financially secure, healthy, lots of friends and family, able to exercise with joy outdoors alone), then you may also be awe-struck by how different this last 15 months has been for most other people.  Different in a challenging way (I’m tempted to say different in a bad way, although hopefully many of these other people will find the “bad” to have been “challenging” in that the lessons learned bring deeper understanding and insight into how to live and survive. It’s also true that bad things happen to good people. But I struggle to just accept that it’s happened, whatever it is. But this philosophizing is not my point.  As I read the piece, I kept paging back to stare at Kholood Eid’s photos of these kids and the adults, amazed by the depths of their suffering and the range of their reactions to the catastrophe of 2020-21, as they reach out to others in their wildly altered community. As a retired pediatrician, I’ve spent lots of time around kids this age.  But this article shows the part of them I didn’t see: how they exist in the context of their everyday lives. To understand that better seems so enriching to me now, and I am grateful that Dominus and Eid brought us this report from deep within the core of the pandemic, where trauma that will resonate indefinitely could not be avoided.

I also read The Moody Monkish Genius of Kevin Durant by Sam Anderson (same magazine, June 6, 2021).  Anderson is a staff writer at the magazine whose new work I always look for. I fell in love with his writing reading Boomtown, his wonderful extended group of essays in book form centered around Oklahoma City, published in 2018.  His magazine articles on musician Weird Al Yankovic and the NBA Bubble were similarly great fun to read.  Maybe the first piece of his I read was The Misunderstood Genius of Russell Westbrook from the Times magazine in February of 2017.  Now he’s back with this new NBA feature, and it’s as fun as ever.  Sam is a master of over-the-top metaphor and gloriously exuberant analogy.  It’s just so much fun to read, so not-related to the stuff that might cause human civilization to collapse, that it’s irresistible to me, a hard-news and serious-analysis addict. OK, it also will  help if you are an NBA fan (a claim I cannot make), but any sports fan will be fine (baseball for me).  Those who eschew sports altogether, your tribe no doubt contains writers like this too.  If you don't laugh or cry enough while reading, review your reading list and consider Sam.

Finally, how is your understanding of cryptocurrency coming along?  After reading Million-Dollar JPEGs by Clive Thompson (NYT Magazine, May 16, 2021), I have a much better handle on it.  Pretty scary. The focus of the article is on art work and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and there is good and bad lurking there.  It’s very wild and on the edge. To bring in a song lyric from 1967, “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear”.  This piece is of particular interest to me in that I have a daughter-in-law who is an artist, and we’ve just barely grazed this topic of “cryptoart”. The conversation went something like me saying “What’s an NFT?” and she saying something along the lines of the capitalization of everything. And the article really opened my eyes to that dark side. But to harken back to another reference from the past (from the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life), when Clarence the angel points out to George Bailey that they don’t use money in heaven, George snaps back “Oh yeah, that’s right, I keep forgetting.  Comes in pretty handy down here, bub”. Heaven help us!

Department of Transportation, Salem, Oregon



My son Tyler and friends along with Carol survey property near Salem.  They plan to move here!




Comments

  1. RandyJune 11, 2021 at 5:27 PM

    Rob, thanks for your latest. Important, often-overlooked concept, seeing how people exist in the context of their everyday lives. Always bothered me when studying history, the emphasis on military events and political events, & little if any focus on what the fabric of people’s lives. (I’m told that academic emphasis has changed since I was in school. I hope it’s true.)

    Philosophy and all those things that could cause the collapse of civilization ::: In a way, so extraneous, big concepts. For sure I’m always forgetting to look at the moment and believing the big picture is more important than the small moment, when the moment is all we’ve really got.

    As far as the Capitalization Of Everything, I don’t have much to say except that overuse of capitals Is Not Such a Good Thing. Then too, I don’t like that new word “monetizing,” with its crass connotations.

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