Nicole Chung, our beloved part-time assistant editor, has accepted our offer to come on-board full-time as the Managing Editor of The Toast, and I am experiencing such waves of JOY and RELIEF and cannot express what a delight she is, and also that her Inbox Zero game is TIGHT, and she will be writing in addition to her other duties, and what a time to be alive, really.
In 1968 James Baldwin was a guest on The Dick Cavett Show and said, “…as Malcolm X once put it: the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.” High noon, he said in a slight baritone as if trying to find the right key for a song. Baldwin then goes on to give examples of other institutions, not just the Christian church, where systematic racism has wielded its power; the labor unions, the real estate lobby, the board of education. Part of this episode can be found on YouTube and runs a swift one minute, one second. Baldwin’s voice—its’ near-sport of a voice—is one I cannot unhear. The way he says “evidence” is capable of galvanizing the most blasé listener. His is a staccato that quickens in clip when Baldwin repeats words like “white” or “hate,” but ripples with words like “idealism” so as to wane its meaning into nothing more than what it is: a naiveté.
When Baldwin asks a question, it does not ferry the inflection. Instead, he issues it declaratively, testing the acoustics of a room. Close your eyes and sure, Baldwin has a sermonizing tone, but one that bounces like a boxer in his ring. Baldwin’s voice multitasks, and requires of me what he was asking of America and the world: to pay attention. His words toll and have carried their repercussive meaning into today. So much so that in August when the headlines read “No Fly Zone Over Ferguson,” for a minute, I only heard those words in Baldwin’s voice.
Celebrity fan mail. WINONA, WHY?
I just adore James Wood on Penelope Fitzgerald:
Lee is oddly incurious about the question that must occur to every reader: why did Fitzgerald wait so long to start writing? The obvious answer is that she had three children, a wayward husband, and was earning a living—and yet you feel that, during the nineteen-sixties, had she started also writing, things could hardly have gone worse for the family. (The painter Alice Neel, for instance, lived amid domestic impoverishment in large part because she was furiously painting.) Certainly it seems relevant that Fitzgerald started to write after her children were old enough to leave home and take care of themselves. Was it also significant that she started writing shortly after the death of her father? Did some Knoxian combination of insecurity and confidence hold her back until she could be sure of avoiding public failure? “Decision is torment for anyone with imagination,” a character says in “Offshore.” “When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can. If there’s even one person who might be hurt by a decision, you should never make it. They tell you, make up your mind or it will be too late, but if it’s really too late, we should be grateful.” Potential remains potent if unused.
Genuinely hilarious dog video.
Are other people watching The Flash? I am watching The Flash and Gotham and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which is only becoming more delightful. Andre Braugher was so good in “The Mole,” an episode of recent memory, that I almost lost the ability to speak.
THE PAPER OF RECORD covers Dad Magazine:
One recipe for a successful Dad Magazine headline, a co-creator, Matt Lubchansky, told Op-Talk, is “a thing my literal dad has said to me.” More broadly, these headlines express the idea that dads “have this one thing that they seem to be obsessed with, whether it’s a hobby or turning off the lights.” These obsessions can be somewhat absurd (see for instance growing food in the basement). “The archetypal dad,” said Mr. Lubchansky, “is a very strange person.”
Makes you think:
Staged baseball photos!
WHERE THE FUCK IS PRINCESS LEIA?
In the Great Bartering Exchange known as trying to get a three-year-old dressed for nursery school I would spend not a small amount of time trying to convince her various pairs of underwear were in fact Princess Leia underwear. Some days I was more successful than others. Many days there were tears. Some days there were tantrums. Once or twice my nephew missed the bus as a result of our debates and had to be driven (by me, still in my pajamas, coffee mug wedged between my legs). Tired of the exchange and thinking she did in fact deserve her own Princess Leia underwear, or paraphanelia in general, I went to the local Walmart. Somewhere in the pink ghetto otherwise known as their girls toys section I figured I would find something.
I didn’t.
Not a thing.
*
The hands-free bird belt was the Google Glass of its day. pic.twitter.com/w4HklnfGfN
— Ben Richmond (@a_ben_richmond) November 19, 2014
