We were in the path of a significant part of the winter storm that unraveled life across much of the country this weekend. It wasn’t supposed to be as bad for us as it was for my family back home in Tennessee; we would be north of all the freezing rain and ice, so it would just be inches of snow and severely subzero temperature windchills.

Seemed like a perfect weekend to do little to nothing. We gave it the ol’ college try, believe you me, but it wasn’t long before the effort at unplugging and forgetting about the frozen world outside seemed impossible. My phone wanted me to know a simple and horrible truth: Things had devolved in Minnesota, and another citizen had been gunned down in the streets.

I didn’t want to look, not at first. I didn’t say anything about it, still trying to hang onto the possibility the weekend had promised. I didn’t make it very long, though. I had to look, had to know what new information was unfolding in real time. The progression from “protester was shot” to “protester was shot dead” didn’t take long.

Then it was wanting — but still disbelieving — to know every detail, to hope for an explanation that made sense, to satisfy a curiosity that felt surreal because didn’t we just do this, haven’t we learned anything? The reality that we confronted was worse than we feared, and it was displayed for all to see who could stand to watch.

I watched almost by accident. The static scene before any video began — those people standing on a sidewalk — surely that can’t be something that escalates into a shooting. The gunshots actually caught me by surprise. Then the number of them shocked me.

I can’t imagine how much more so that feeling permeates every moment in Minneapolis: shock, shock that such a thing could come to pass in such a loving and community-oriented place. My heart breaks for Pretti and his family and friends, but also for the tens of thousands of strangers who shared a city with him without knowing him who, in normal times, still wouldn’t know his name.

Make no mistake: It is those who are deserving of all our sympathy and heartbreak and outrage and fear.

But don’t lose sight of this fact either: It doesn’t matter how far from Minneapolis you might live — your peace is being stolen, too.

Life is hard for all sorts of reasons. It’s not some moral failing to want to unwind and unplug on the weekend. It’s not selfish to be preoccupied with encroaching storms sure to drop inches of snow and sleet and ice and temperatures so cold they could kill you.

I felt a complicated mixture of those and more after I’d seen that footage; somehow, to not think about it, to not talk about it, felt disrespectful. Maybe even impossible. If you could manage not to talk about it ad nauseam, you certainly couldn’t manage to avoid thinking about it.

Without fail, every facet of your life which could serve as a distraction suddenly felt corrupted by this distinctly un-American thing we’d all been forced to witness. Your peace — no matter where we live, if still under the shadow of Old Glory — is being stolen, and it won’t relent until they’re out of office. November is near; let’s start there.

Ten Worth Your Time

1. It’s not lost on me that what’s happening in the streets of Minneapolis could have happened in my beloved Memphis. To hear the city’s name ooze out of the president’s mouth was truly unsettling. The Oxford American published a short essay by Marcus Wicker, a professor in the MFA program at my alma mater, University of Memphis, that reflected on what it felt like to have the National Guard deployed to a blues festival. I just loved the tone of this piece, its connection to the blues, its deeply lived-in observations.
2. It’s somewhat weird to realize there’s a massive, culture-shifting technology and phenomenon that doesn’t really interest me in the least. That’s legalized sports gambling to me. That’s powered by no real interest in any kind of gambling — casinos are fine but never my destination of choice — and a waning interest in sports as entertainment I spend my time watching. But it’s inescapable, this explosion of sports betting — in conversations, in advertisements, in the sports broadcasts themselves. This roaming writer-at-large piece in Harpers is jam-packed with interesting (and honestly scary) facts and figures about America’s obsession with putting a little skin in the games.
3. Jeopardy! has been on my mind a lot lately. Most pressingly, a daily morning meeting that used to include a fact-a-day calendar being read by one team member has been replaced by a Jeopardy! A quite serious amount of thought has gone into governing the gameplay and points are being tracked actively. That white board in the meeting room? Used for what? Get out of here. It’s for broadcasting our scores to the wider office, so they can get a kick out of the fact that I’m somehow -$2000. The other reason was more fleeting: I met the friend of a friend at the bar the other night, and within minutes of our introduction, we were talking about Jeopardy! I feel like Jeopardy! has to be a pretty big preoccupation for a person to get to it within minutes of “Hi, how are you? What’s your name? Where do you work?” But that’s how it happened; they were suddenly telling me about Jeopardy’s hold on their life. It felt apropos that I would be served up this delightful post from The Defector (gift link) on a burning question: Why are Jeopardy! contestants so bad at sports questions? The answer may surprise you.
4. In my sporadic sports fandom, I inevitably miss some things. One of them was this bonkers theory, held by surprisingly many San Francisco 49ers’ fans, that a nearby electrical substation has weakened the players’ bodies due to the electromagnetic waves it gives off. As a theory, I find it pretty lackluster, but the story, published in The Atlantic (gift link) was interesting because it speaks to how such beliefs could gain a critical mass of circulation (if not outright acceptance). It reminded me of the chapter in Chuck Klosterman’s book The Nineties in which he discusses conspiratorial thinking and radio’s Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell: “While it was easy to be crazy in the early ‘90s, it was difficult for like-minded crazy people to organize.” He goes on to talk about how the internet erased that problem, and the 49ers vs. the substation seems a uniquely internet-fueled story.
5. Speaking of football, speaking of Chuck Klosterman: The man is out with a new book, titled simply Football. I’ve listened to so much of his press tour, simply because I love the man as a writer and thinker, not so much the subject matter of the book. Two that I really enjoyed: Impolitic with John Heilmann (because the host has no interest in football fandom) and Pablo Torre Finds Out (for the conversations about media/writing).
6. Long live LitHub for publishing pieces like this one: A writer recounts the day jobs of famous writers through the lens of his own unhappy time working for the U.S. Postal Service.
7. I take in and produce a lot of different kinds of writing for my job and side projects. When I was tutoring regularly in a university writing center, I saw a lot of personal statements — those pesky annoyances that get included with all sorts of applications (NB: This also includes the same basic document by its other name “cover letter.”). I don’t work on those documents as much anymore, but every now and then, I will come back into contact with them. Last year, a student of mine invited me to speak at a student organization meeting about personal statements and cover letters. Later, that same student had me review multiple drafts of her own as she was applying for newsroom internships for this summer. She recently messaged to tell me she’d gotten the internship. I was vicariously riding high on that news when I read John Warner’s article in Inside Higher Ed on the scourge of AI in personal statements and how to reframe the “assignment” so students might not feel the need to turn to AI in the first place.
8. Everything about this deep-dive oral history into the FBI under Kash Patel’s leadership by The New York Times Magazine (gift link) is remarkable. The sheer number of agents who agreed to speak. The number that agreed to go on the record with their comments. The details from inside the circus. But honestly, I’m almost more rattled by how many of the news details were reported that I’d simply forgotten. It’s staggering how much happened and how unprecedented it all was. Kash Patel’s FBI
9. In less than a month, I’ll go across town and watch Nate Bergatze for the third time in six months. I can hear you already: OK, OK, I see how it is — clearly this weirdo is just some kind of Bargatze groupie. But I honestly don’t think I’d watched a single one of his specials until we already had tickets to the first show. I did, however, come to be a fan very quickly. He just sounded like home. The Tennessee accent was comforting, and the stories felt relatable in the ways only those from home can. I felt the same kind of comfort settling into this story in Garden & Guns first-ever humor issue about all things Bergatze by Justin Heckert.
10. Sundance’s last ride in Park City is going on right now, but it’s been off my radar largely. More than a few stars were trying to do interviews while things were deteriorating in Minneapolis on Saturday, contending with the uncomfortable reality of trying to prioritize the beauty of art in the midst of worldly ugliness. I liked this look back from The Hollywood Reporterat stories of days long gone at the famed indie film festival.

More From Me

Over on my blog, I’ve been writing about various topics of interest to me.

Alaska: Russia's Next Door Neighbor

Culture Diary

Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.

The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.

1/20:

1/21: HAMNET (theater)

1/22: The Secret of Secrets, Dan Brown

1/23: Australian Open (ESPN Unlimited)

1/24: Australian Open (ESPN Unlimited)

1/25: Australian Open (ESPN Unlimited); Heated Rivalry (HBO Max)