What were you thinking?

not a rhetorical question

when the sky is oppressively gray… buy yourself bouquets from the grocery store

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m wondering

I try to stay optimistic about the future of journalism and literacy because the alternatives are too depressing. But the decimation of The Washington Post hits really hard. There are so few outlets reporting the news today and it gets harder and harder to imagine what substantive, reported journalism will look like in 20 or 50 years. That, of course, has a direct impact on how we think, how we conceive of the world, and how we relate to people who are different from us. I believe that journalism shapes our imaginative capacity. Less journalism—both the serious stuff, like investigative reporting and international news and obituaries, and the lighter stuff, like book reviews and the styles section—means we live smaller, more isolated lives, both in terms of our self-conception and how we help and relate to others. It’s dire.

I don’t feel very comfortable on a soapbox, but if this also matters to you: Pay for the news you consume. If there’s an outlet that you like, pay for a subscription. Think about what you pay for Spotify or Amazon Prime or Netflix and give yourself the same monthly budget for buying books and magazines that you like.

If nothing else, subscribe to your local NPR station, which has been entirely defunded by the Trump administration and plays a vital role in communities across the country. Or find some journalists writing meaningful local news coverage where you live! Coyote Media is fun in the Bay Area; here’s a list of some others. If you’re looking for interesting local publications, let me know and I will find some where you live.

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The New York Times Magazine has launched a new series called “What Were They Thinking?” For each article, the photo editors choose an evocative image from a particular historical moment, and a writer (in this case, me) interviews the people depicted about what was actually going through their minds. For one of the first installments, I interviewed Oksana Baiul, Lu Chen, and Nancy Kerrigan about the 1994 Olympics figure-skating medal ceremony. Kerrigan, who had been attacked by associates of teammate Tonya Harding weeks earlier, was a fan favorite to win; in a controversial ruling, sixteen-year-old Baiul beat her, becoming the first Ukrainian to win a gold medal after the fall of the Soviet Union. Chen, who had been physically disciplined by her coach, had decided to quit after that Olympics. After the scoring, Baiul’s team captain realized they didn’t have the Ukrainian national anthem; she had to speed back to the Olympic village, accompanied by police sirens, to find the CD. But Chen and Kerrigan were told that the delay was because Baiul had cried her makeup off and insisted on reapplying it, which led an impatient Kerrigan to complain on a hot mic, sullying her reputation as America’s sweetheart.

Most of the details didn’t make it into the short “What Were They Thinking?” piece, but it was so fun to talk to the Olympians about that surreal, specific moment in their lives.

It made me curious: What’s a particular photo that you’d want to hear about in this way, from all parties involved? (Could be a personal photo or a famous one!)

What (else) I’m writing

Somehow, my other two stories to share this month are also about athletes who are also teen/preteen girls.

For Esses Magazine, a beautiful publication about Formula 1 and motorsports, I wrote a profile of Alba Larsen, a teenager from Denmark who is maintaining an unreal balance: driving race cars at 150 mph in competitions across the world, while trying to find time to make up tenth grade and learn to drive her family’s station wagon so she can get her driver’s license. It was so fun to go hang out with Larsen in Las Vegas before the Grand Prix, to work alongside photographer Cassidy Ariaza, and to write for Joey Bien-Kahn, who I came up with at WIRED a decade ago. (Work with your friends! And subscribe to magazines in print!)

To continue my youth sports beat, I spent some time with preteens who are really, really into basketball for The New York Times. Turns out, youth sports looks very different from the days of twice-a-week afterschool soccer practice. (During which I would silently protest by sitting down and making daisy chains. Sometimes, you don’t learn to like exercise until you’re old.)

What I’m reading

Every so often, I read a book so good that I immediately try to recommend it to everyone. That’s how I felt after finishing The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. I think it’s the most precisely written fiction I’ve ever read: every line is polished to be exactly what it should be. And it’s plotty, a propulsive story too. So much to say about it. Shirley! Here are some particularly great lines:

Such a great character study, just a perfect send-up of when an older person bemoans and delights in how the world has gone to shit:

Despite angina, the father had fast, definite gestures—taking up his water glass with a sort of efficiency and setting it down with a hard little snap. Pressing a napkin quickly to his sculpted mouth, not to waste time. Snap snap, snap snap snap. He might have been at a desk rather than a dining-table. He talked with abrupt velocity, also, and had already reached the end of the world.

“Your generation will be the one to feel it. Some form of social structure existed until now. Say what you like about it. Now we’re at the end of all that. You’ll be the ones to bear the brunt.”

With rapid satisfaction he pointed out, to Ted and the girls, their almost culpable bad luck. In the same way, arrivals at a rainy resort will be told, “We’ve had fine weather until today.”

Some delightful lines:

A little curled chrysanthemum of a dog was in heaven at her approach.

The two girls walked home hand-in-hand, not so much lovers as like an elderly couple, grave with information and responsibility.

The dove-colored guide had laid her rod on a table and was showing with her hands, like an artist.

More wonderful character studies:

Major Ingot was thickly built, though in no martial way, having a citified paunch and large pinkish jowl. Within the restaurant doorway he cut the oval sweep of a watermelon.

Along the back of the front seat his heavy, extended arm was energized yet not quite human, like a turgid fire-house. His name was Captain Girling.

On big feelings:

She said “Yes?” as if accosted by a stranger. But trembled in the raincoat with her whole body so that she felt the separate stuffs of her clothes, and her anatomy delicately beating within.

It was now well into the afternoon. Caro was taking the Underground. Ted went to the ticket booth with her. “Good-bye.” They kissed. He watched her red coat pass the barrier, move with the Down escalator, gliding, diminishing, descending: a rush-hour Eurydice. At the last moment she looked back, knowing he would be there.

(A “rush-hour Eurydice”! Like one of the best teases of the 20th century, delivered by my first crush: “You have wished yourself a Scarsdale Galahad / the breakfast-eating, Brooks-brothers type.”)

Great example of how to set a scene to match the plot (trigger warning of waiting on a swampy NYC subway platform in August):

Following the storm, a sickly warmth; a humid sun pearling a film of gasoline on the steaming street. Rain-water swirling in sluggish gutters, redepositing rubbish.

On end-of-life:

Like a ball lobbed to a great height, he made his last few diminishing bounces.

Just a wonderful big gestural opening, pinpointing a certain time and certain class:

Girls were getting up all over London. In striped pyjamas, in flowered Viyella nightgowns, in cotton shifts they had made themselves and unevenly hemmed, or in sheer nylon to which an old cardigan had been added for warmth, girls were pushing back bedclothes and groping for slippers. They were tying the cords of dressing-gowns and pulling pins from their hair, they were putting the shilling in the meter and the kettle on the gas ring. Those who shared were nudging each other out of the way and saying, “And it’s only Tuesday.” Those who lived alone were moaning and switching on radio or television. Some said prayers; one sang.

It is hard to say what they had least of—past, present, or future. It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun. The weekends washing hair and underwear, and going in despondent pairs to the pictures. For some, who could not have done otherwise, it was their fate, decreed by Mum, Dad, and a lack of funds or gumption. Others had come from the ends of the earth to do it—had arrived from Auckland or Karachi or Jo’burg, having saved for years to do just this, having wrung or cajoled the wherewithal out of tear-stained parents. Not all were very young, but all, or nearly all, wished for a new dress, a boyfriend, and eventual domesticity. No two, however, were identical: which was the victory of nature over conditioning, advertising, and the behavioural sciences—no triumph, but an achievement against the odds.

Among the awakening women, that New Year, was Caroline Bell.

yours,

Charley