• Mark Evanier shares the story of the time he had lunch with Frank Capra. He tells that story mainly so that he can refer us all to the story of the time he had dinner with Jimmy Stewart. He enjoyed the dinner with Stewart a lot more, and I enjoyed that story a lot more.
• “Buc-ee’s, the mega-gas station taking over the Southeast, is a feast for the senses. If Walmart, Wawa, Cracker Barrel, and Bass Pro Shops jointly procreated, it still wouldn’t amount to a Buc-ee’s. It’s a rest stop that people drive hours to visit, just for fun. It’s a gas station with merch drops and famed brisket”
Emily Cataneo has a way with words, but it’s the overall tone of the piece — wonder mixed with fate and awe and portent — that hooked me here. It’s like reading some dispatch from ancient Gaul reporting on the inevitability of Roman conquest while also admitting that the roads and aqueducts and coliseums really are something to see.
• Don’t use lead sinkers if you’re fishing anywhere near where loons live.
That’s the takeaway from Krista Langlois’s long, fascinating article, “We Know What’s Killing Loons and How to Stop It. So Why Are They Still Dying?” That’s the bottom line that you need to know here if you click that link and are tempted to think tldr.
But you’re still going to want to read the whole thing to meet all of the thoughtful people in this story — the veterinarians and conservationists and legislators. And to see how what seems like it should be a simple thing gets complicated by the politics of guns.
Even if you deprive yourself of that experience though, please, don’t use lead sinkers if you’re fishing anywhere near where loons live.
• Also from Mother Jones, Margaret Kadifa on “A Courthouse Arrest, a Surprise Pregnancy, and One Family’s Shattered Dreams.”
This is about the sleazy, Kafka-esque new tactic of the MAGA regime that turns law-abiding, legal asylum-seekers into “illegal aliens” by abruptly dismissing the legal process they have been following. They came here “the right way” and were “following all the rules and laws” — so our government changed the rules and laws in order to declare them “illegal.” Mojo gives Kalifa the space to show us what this means for the actual humans whose lives are upended by this inhuman, racially motivated, violation of law and human rights.
• In a similar vein, if you can brace yourself to read another deeply reported story that puts human faces on the suffering and disruption caused by the lawlessness of the federal goons “protecting the border” everywhere other than the actual damn border, here’s a remarkable piece of journalism from Melissa Sanchez and Jodi S. Cohen for ProPublica: “The Real Story Behind the Midnight Immigration Raid on a Chicago Apartment Building.”
• A.W. Strouse on “Andy Warhol’s Queer Catholicism.” Strouse matches his tone to his subject, merging the reverent and the irreverent in a thoughtful piece that is also dishy, catty, observant, and very much both very gay and very Catholic. Years ago, I was complaining about Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and a friend explained my bewilderment by saying, “Well, yeah. You’re not Catholic.” Something like that is true here, or doubly true. I’m not Catholic and I’m not queer, but Strouse still helps me to understand someone who was both of those, in his own way.
• Religion, gender, and sex are also at the heart of Madison Pauly’s long profile of May Mailman, “Meet the Mastermind Behind Trump’s Definition of ‘Woman.’” Mailman is even more full of enigmatic contradictions than Andy Warhol, but reading about this anti-feminist, anti-trans crusader as she breeds and feeds the face-eating leopards being trained on her own scent isn’t nearly as much fun because, well, Andy was likable and she really, really is not. Strouse helped me better understand what is, to me, alien turf. Pauly helps me better see, but still not understand, an alien terf.
• “The Knotweed Factor” by Jennifer Kabat. This is about an aggressively invasive weed that chokes out and takes over local ecosystems. That’s bad, right? Yes. But this fascinating account of knotweed and the efforts to beat it back isn’t quite as unambiguously clear-cut as it might at first seem.
This piece is especially interesting for me because it involves Round Up, the mass-marketed herbicide that has so far overcome attempts to ban it due to its potential links to cancer. I have moved literal tons of this stuff at the Big Box, and will be handling tons more over the coming months. Customers often ask if it is “safe.” They want to purchase a toxin that kills whatever it touches, but they also want assurances that it is “safe” and I’m not entirely sure that I know or that they know what “safe” means I the context of that question. I mean, yes, they want it to kill weeds but not kill them, and I get that, but still. It’s a deadly toxin that kills as effectively as advertised, so it’s a bit like buying a gun and asking the guy at the gun shop if it’s “safe.”
• “I should mention that I’m not the kind of psychologist who treats people,” Adam Mastroianni writes, “I’m the kind of psychologist who asks people stupid questions and then makes sweeping generalizations about them.”
That’s in his post on “How to be less awkward: A three-part treatment for a near-universal affliction,” which is kind and self-deprecating and charming and full of advice for the almost-everyone who sometimes worries that they may come across as socially awkward.
I liked this bit: “Being socially clumsy is like being in a role-playing game where your charisma stat is chronically too low and you can’t access the correct dialogue options. And if you understand that reference, I understand why you’re reading this post.”
• “The Permanent Overclass,” by Rodger Sherman. This is about NFL owners — the billionaire boys club of losers who can’t lose money no matter how badly they screw up their franchises.
A lot of America’s problems are tied to the meritocratic myth that financial success is the clear and simple product of virtue, intelligence, and diligence. And thus also the myth that financial distress is the clear and simple product of a lack of virtue, intelligence, and diligence — that your precarious daily stress must be your fault. This keeps most Americans — people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, perpetually at risk of catastrophe should any of those paychecks be denied or delayed by circumstances beyond their control — in line. It ensures that their stress and insecurity are turned to shame instead of to anger, and that they will never make demands for anything better from anyone or anything other than themselves. Sherman suggests that talking about NFL owners can be an antidote to that toxic mythology. The only thing these bozos have merited is that scorn of football fans everywhere and, well, there are a lot of football fans and most of them would agree with that.
N.B.: The actress Mara Rooney’s name is not a coincidence.
• From the same issue of The American Prospect, Naomi Bethune writes about “Getting a Share in Green Bay,” and the exceptional exception that points to a very different and much better model for team ownership. (And, I would add, for newspaper ownership.)
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