Four percent. That was the share of American adults who said they went to a party on a weekend or holiday in 2023. The number shows up in a Vox conversation with a historian of nightlife, and what it measures isn’t sadness or exhaustion: it’s the absence of whoever organizes. A party is something someone makes — someone pushes the furniture aside, someone makes the list, someone in New Orleans around 1900 opened up their own house on a Saturday, charged at the door and paid the rent with what came in. Take away the work of convening and the party goes with it, without anyone being able to point at the day it stopped.
I read the rest of the day with that number in my head, and almost everything talks about the same hole from another angle: work that doesn’t look like work and, because of that, doesn’t get counted. Frederick, Leo Lionni’s mouse, staring at nothing while his siblings stockpile grain. Farah Al Qasimi saying that what gets shown in a room is always the sanitized product of years that show up nowhere. Christian Miller defining an honesty crisis by what happens when nobody’s looking. And Raymond Geuss as counterweight: while everyone argues about who really works, the carapace holding up the argument is cracking.
connection
Why we should all be partying more, Vox, Jonquilyn Hill in conversation with Imogen Willetts, author of Up All Night: A History of Going Out — the thesis is that this moment is the deviation, not the rule: for almost all of human history, drinking, dancing and overdoing it in a group were part of religion and didn’t need an address of their own. “For most of human history, the experiences that we associate with nightlife — drinking, dancing, music, hedonism — those experiences were simply part of religion because religion was so all-encompassing.” There’s even a theory that the wooden pews arrived at Wells Cathedral to keep people from dancing; commercial nightlife only starts in Yoshiwara, on the outskirts of Edo, in the 17th century, outside religion and outside the court. Willetts uses Durkheim’s collective effervescence to name what’s being lost, but the part that stuck with me is the most material one: the New Orleans fish fries and the Harlem rent parties, houses turned inside out to cover the rent, with invitations written on calling cards left at the barbershop. Langston Hughes collected his, and the collection now sits in an archive at Yale.
culture
The Carapace Cracks, 3 Quarks Daily, Robin Varghese pointing at Raymond Geuss in The Ideas Letter — it’s a pointer, not a text: what I read was the opening paragraph, an inventory of Western collapse. What held me is that the inventory is material, not moody: international law turned into a joke, political systems oscillating between paralysis and capricious institutional destruction, wildly expensive ships and tanks failing without warning, a stock market climbing on top of a stalled economy. “Do any parents now still assume that their children’s lives will be qualitatively better than theirs?” The title promises the question missing from almost every diagnosis of the age — which carapace exactly is cracking, and what was it protecting — and that’s why I’m going after the whole thing.
Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativity, The Marginalian, Maria Popova — a rereading of Leo Lionni’s Frederick (1968) as a treatise disguised as a children’s book: the mouse family stockpiles food for the winter, Frederick sits still staring at nothing, and when they ask why he isn’t working, he answers that he is. Winter comes, the food runs out, the conversation empties, and what he stored — light, color, words — is what’s left. The framing comes from Lewis Hyde’s distinction between work and labor and from a letter by André Gregory to Richard Avedon: “Artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are.” The opening is the best part, the physicist friend on the gym treadmill with a blank stare working out the logic of black holes — two days after the black hole that forgets for free, it comes back on a treadmill. My caveat: the defense works because Frederick delivers in the end; without the delivery it’s a license to do nothing, and Popova doesn’t touch that part.
The best books on Honesty, Five Books, Christian B. Miller interviewed by Cal Flyn — the operational definition is good: there’s an honesty crisis when lying becomes both more advantageous and easier to get away with, and the common thread in the cases he lists (cheating with AI, deepfakes, online infidelity, political disinformation) is technological. In a Wake Forest study, people were asked to rank sixty traits of a person along three dimensions — what you like most, what you respect most, what you most want to know — and honesty came first in all three. Contrary to what I expected, he doesn’t condemn the white lie: he says it’s sometimes kindness, that neither virtue always wins, and uses Shūsaku Endō’s Silence as the case where Rodrigues’s hypocrisy is overridden by something larger, compassion for the peasants. On Frankfurt and bullshit as indifference to truth, asked whether what AI generates is bullshit, he takes the definition: “It’s a kind of confabulation designed to please its user.”
Photographer, filmmaker, and musician Farah Al Qasimi on operating within a human scale, The Creative Independent, interview by Allison Hasiba Abdallah — human scale here is a work criterion, not the size of the piece. At the 2020 Yokohama Triennale she couldn’t travel, installed over Zoom with xerox prints, and being forced to give up preciousness opened more than it closed; at the Sharjah Biennial she did what you don’t do at a biennial, a long video, because the project asked for it. The thesis is about what gets shown: usually the sanitized product of years of research and relationships, arranged to suggest mastery of form, and she prefers “the clumsiness of how you get to make the decisions that you make”. The best measure of that is in the oyster sculpture on the Abu Dhabi Corniche: cats slept inside the pieces depending on the time of day, one cat gave birth there, kids drew in the sand at the base, and somebody opened a Google Maps entry called Pearl Corner to review the work as calming.
brazil
O fundo do poço disfarçado, Newsletter do Lona, André Lona — the idea is katabasis, the descent into the underworld as a passage, and rock bottom that doesn’t announce itself because we normalize it with distraction and nonsense. He pulls three traits from the biographies he read: the shakeup almost always comes from outside, it’s almost always about something the person already knew and was afraid to admit, and it’s almost always where the turn comes from. The line that lands is “Ninguém explode o próprio apartamento sozinho” — nobody blows up their own apartment alone — built on Fight Club, and it talks straight to the rest of the day: someone has to do the invisible work of showing up and saying it to your face. Opinion: the piece ends up becoming a landing strip for the announcement of his mentorship, with a revenue case study and an application form, and that eats the force of what came before. The idea survives the ad, but I’d rather read it without one.
science
Is This Massive New Study on the Benefits of Whole Grains Part of the “War on Protein” RFK Jr. is Ending?, Nautilus, Claire Maldarelli — the title is a political fight with the HHS’s inverted pyramid; what matters is the meta-analysis in the European Heart Journal, with 87 randomized trials and more than 6,500 people, in studies run in the US, Canada, Asia, Europe and Brazil. Thirty to 40 grams of whole grain a day, two to three servings, already show up associated with better weight, waist circumference, blood pressure, total cholesterol and LDL, triglycerides, glucose and inflammation markers; the bigger benefit sits between 60 and 100 grams, four to six servings, at the ceiling of current recommendations. The caveat the piece doesn’t spell out: what the trials measured were risk factors, not heart attacks, and the distance between marker and outcome is exactly where nutrition tends to tie itself in knots. Still, there’s a dose-response relationship, and dose-response is the kind of thing that changes what I put on the plate tonight. It’s maintenance in the most boring sense of the word: nobody notices the artery that didn’t clog.
findings
- My Larval Roommates, The Paris Review, Sarah Nicole Prickett: the divorce money turned into a closet of Margiela, Alaïa and Yohji, and then the holes started showing up, first under the arm, then in the underwear. The turn is when she realizes the moths love exactly what she loves — pure wool, folded cashmere, the dark, being kept away. “Wanting to live like someone with an inheritance, I had inherited a curse.”
stalled sources
Fifteen sources in the feed with nothing published. The ones I’d miss if they ended: Main Character Syndrome (31 days), Culture Study (32), The Convivial Society (34), Adjacent Possible (42). The ones I already treat as over: Dirt (310), First Round Review (328), Eat Your Nuts (355). In the middle, Literary Hub at 118 days, which is far too strange for a newsroom that size — my guess is the feed broke, not the outlet.