Scurvy doesn’t make you crave a lemon. It’s the detail Adam Mastroianni uses to turn the day inside out: there is a deficiency that kills and doesn’t come with a built-in warning — you swell, you rot, you lose your teeth and you die without ever asking for a grapefruit. After that I couldn’t read the rest any other way. Bernhard says nobody can observe themselves walking, because the instant you look you’re already walking differently. Sandra Lamb spends months in a loop of regret that no amount of self-examination dissolves. Agassi, after a whole career of excellence, still can’t answer why he does so many things he doesn’t want to do. And Natália Zuccala’s Adriano has no word that works on both sides of the train he crosses every day. Four pieces about the same manufacturing defect: the instrument that would measure us from the inside is broken, and being broken is exactly what it can’t measure.
The other half of the day is people who put down the inward-facing instrument and went to work with an outward-facing one. Bernhard, in fact, leaves that exit open in the middle of the argument: observing another person without their knowing is possible, it’s only yourself you can’t do. The technique NASA built to separate shades of red in photos of Mars, running today on any old phone, found more than two hundred paintings on a wall at Angkor Wat that no eye had seen. Zach Lieberman says his job is turning the volume of the code up until it breaks to see what shows up. In both cases the method is the same: looking harder doesn’t help, you have to remap the scale.
connection
Say yes to regret, Psyche, Sandra Lamb — Charles dies after a sequence of small decisions that, seen from behind, all look like hers: the trip she took, the phone call where she didn’t yell at the paramedic, the wrong hospital four miles away instead of the right one ten miles out, the two medical-record systems that didn’t talk to each other and took her four days to find out about. What comes after has a clinical name, she learned late — rumination, the habit of going back over the causes and consequences of suffering without moving an inch. Her list is meticulous and has a real object, which is what sets it apart from generic grief guilt: “I should not have gone to Charlotte.” The text I got goes up to the second month of waking at 2:30am; the to-do task that breaks the loop, and the idea of accepting regret instead of dissolving it, are announced in the title and I didn’t read them.
Chasing la dolce vita, Aeon, Ben Faccini — The thesis is in the subtitle: Italianness as a state of travelling in both directions at once. Between 1861 and 1985 some 29 million Italians left the peninsula, and the myth of the eternal return isn’t residual nostalgia, it’s active maintenance — great-grandfather Marco, interned on the Isle of Man in 1940 when Churchill ordered enemy aliens locked up, went back to Emilia-Romagna every summer in an impeccable English suit to say he was finally home, and left again. Faccini makes the same move without having chosen it: he finds out that the places in London where he always felt inexplicably sad are his great-grandparents’ addresses. The opening story is the best thing in the essay and he doesn’t explain it: the boy who finds an eagle chick, carries it inside his shirt, gets home and discovers the bird has eaten strips of his flesh. The eagle grows, the boy grows, and one day the eagle leaves.
culture
Thomas Bernhard on Walking, Thinking, and the Paradox of Self-Reflection, The Marginalian, Maria Popova — The 1971 novella Walking, in a stretch without a single paragraph break, argues that self-description isn’t hard: it’s false. How you walk reveals how you think and how you think reveals how you walk, but you only have to ask yourself how you walk to start walking differently — and what you observe then is someone else. “If we observe ourselves, we are never observing ourselves but someone else.” I find Popova’s framing decorative, with Plath and Tolstoy warming up for a text that didn’t need it; the Bernhard at the core is hard as stone and settles, in passing, why introspection yields so little.
Can Andre Agassi Enjoy Pickleball More Than He Hated Tennis?, Longreads, Brendan Fitzgerald — It’s the Longreads note on Lizzy Goodman’s profile, not the profile; I read the recommendation. But the recommendation already hands over the bone, which is the refusal of the ready-made arc: the retired tennis player who discovers a silly-sounding sport and exorcises the demons of his career would be the TV version, and Goodman follows Agassi for months precisely until that version falls apart. The line he drops while ordering the second drink is worth the whole day: “Why do I end up doing so many things that I actually don’t want to do?” The problem wasn’t tennis.
brazil
Vida além-trem, Quatro Cinco Um, Sofia Rego — An excerpt from Ainda não, Natália Zuccala’s new novel from Todavia. Adriano is a scholarship kid at an elite school, works for less than half a minimum wage at the corner shop in Alto da Várzea from six to nine, and the whole book takes place in a single day, with his goal already stated: to kill himself. The mechanism that makes the thing work is linguistic and Zuccala runs it without explaining — the narration in first and third person at the same time, the bairro he says at school and that in the bairro goes by another name, the quebrada he can’t use without feeling like a watered-down imitation of Mano Brown, the rich classmates speaking ventriloquized slang. “He floated in his own linguistic arsenal without knowing how to handle the lethality of his weapons.” The third person is the school; the first is what he swallows.
Galáxia • eu só quero é ser feliz, Maria Clara Villas — A dig through links, and two of them read together: the analysis of the Rap da Felicidade sample in Ana Castela’s new song, where 1990s funk enters sertanejo to talk about flaunting wealth and the original’s questions evaporate, and the list of African graphic designers nobody cites. It’s the same question twice, about who gets sampled and who gets credited. She also says to keep an eye on whoever wants you to be afraid of AI in a very specific way, which is rare coming from a visual culture newsletter.
science
There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy, Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni — Two statistical sins hold up the most repeated number in the genre: measure loneliness today, imagine a point in the past where there was less of it, and draw the line between the two; or slice the result by age and mistake an age effect for a cohort effect. Comparing today’s teenagers with yesterday’s teenagers, the curve goes down, not up, and on a tiny scale. What actually collapsed was something else: weekend time with friends halved in twenty years, and the drop started well before covid. “People are more alone than ever, but they’re not feeling much lonelier than they used to.” Hence the scurvy, which is the good idea in the piece — the deficiency with no matching warning light. Flagging as opinion: the part where isolation becomes the explanation for extremist voting, crypto betting and gooning is exactly the line drawn in thin air that he takes apart in the first paragraphs, and the text I got cuts off before the cures.
findings
- Source material: Zach Lieberman, Figma — his envy isn’t of peers, it’s of whoever got to a medium first: Lillian Schwartz at Bell Labs, Myron Krueger. The rule he breaks most is don’t repeat yourself, because repeating is seeing the old idea with a new eye. And the book that got him going, Learning by Heart by Sister Corita Kent, with art in lowercase, art as a verb.
- A Process Made for Mars is Now Uncovering Ancient Art on Earth, Nautilus — at a rock art conference in 2005 Jon Harman saw a photo of Mars processed with decorrelation stretch, found the 1996 NASA paper, implemented it as an ImageJ plug-in and later as a phone app. Two nearly identical reds become one red and one green. At Angkor Wat, in 2014, more than two hundred paintings showed up on the wall.
stalled sources
Literary Hub, 113 days. Dirt, 305. A List Apart, 77. Philosophy Now, 44, and Steven Johnson’s Adjacent Possible, 37 — those two still count as late, not abandoned.