[No stars] Morning was still puddly, still gloomy, still blown with flying flecks of mist. After the mist stopped, things felt if anything worse, the dullness and dark and cold even lacking texture. The ugliness was thorough and general; no single spot in view, not even the waterlogged cigarette butts or the dissolving cardboard in their standing water, was as grim to look at as the whole. A dime fell out of a pocket while the keys were coming out, and the numb fingers that dug it out from the threshold came up also pinching a filthy pigeon feather.

Some final smiles as things get dark

Oh my God, this song is twee as fuck. It makes my teeth hurt. And yet I cannot keep from smiling as it plays. Also, if you listen to it and picture a bunch of baby animals frolicking and singing before a giant boot comes down at the end to usher in a period in which anger is the dominant emotion, it seems timely. Enjoy.

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck is a New Yorker cartoonist. She is also on Instagram.

The Parent Rap

I am not an easy going person. It’s just not “who I am,” and so, although I am mostly kind and fairly gentle, I am honest with myself about the kind of mother I have been in the three years since I had my daughter: I’m dedicated, I love her more than anything in the world, I am completely obsessed with structure, and occasionally, I’m kind of a bitch about order. I don’t know where this dedication to order came from. I don’t really know what I hope to gain from Zelda in this department, either: I would never want her to fear me, but I do value, for some reason, her listening to me. I love to be the boss.

Her father, my partner, indeed, thought that I was insane to never allow her to be in her pajamas, even as an infant, once she was awake past 7 a.m. But I had read somewhere that a “routine” would help even the tiniest baby learn the difference between day and night so I made a routine, and I stuck with it. I’m still sticking. Much of my stickiness, if I am honest, was in service of one goal: getting her to sleep well. I’ve read the same book to Zelda every night since she was just a few weeks old. Every night. The same one. I travel with a white noise machine and black out shades. I honed my craft in this area, and I was and remain proud of the results. I still track her sleep every day in an app, because I am a little bit insane. At least I know it, I tell myself, as if knowing makes me less crazy.

The News Just Came in From the County of I’m Looking at the Internet

But there are other things, things totally unrelated to sleep that I have clung to. Our days have always been extremely predictable. I am strict about meals and manners. I don’t let her eat walking around, I ask her to be quiet a lot. I nag her to put her shoes away and to not stand on chairs or the couch. I am bossy with how others boss her, and sometimes more strict than I need be with a three-year-old. Of course, I’m making all this sound a lot less joyful than it is in the interest of making my point, but I really have dedicated myself, daily, to making her not be a monster.

The Quantified Baby

And she’s not! She’s the most wonderful little being I’ve ever encountered. She is polite and smart and funny and usually, she listens. Sure, at least 95 percent of this would have been exactly the same even if I’d not insisted she eat spinach and Brussels sprouts and tofu. Sure, she is naturally wonderful, I tell myself, not wanting to take too much credit for her. But here we are, Zelda and I, she is nearly three and I am nearly 40. We have, most days, an understanding, an agreement, as to how things will roll. She’s not perfect, I’m not perfect. She has her tantrums, I ignore them. I am sometimes tired and less than enthused to sing “Holiday Lights,” as we head into fucking February. But most days, I am enthused. We muster up the energy for art projects and watering plants, we bake and we organize drawers. We diaper and re-diaper her baby. We watch movies (in moderation, always less than the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends per day lol).

But over the long winter break she got sick. I was working, she was at home for 11 long days. We had people to help watch her but because she was sick all bets were sort of… off. I bent rules. Popsicles were eaten at 8 a.m. She crawled into my bed at odd hours and much “Peppa Pig” was watched. Her cold was so bad she needed to use a nebulizer, a machine with a tiny heartbreaking face mask that meant, well, sitting still for 15 minutes at a time four or five times a day. More “Peppa.” She ate at odd hours, and drank as much coconut water as she wanted. I worried about starvation and dehydration. When your kid is sick, even if it’s just a bad cold, you start to think like you’re a character in The Road, packing as many provisions as possible. You stock up on staples and you cling to your love for the kid who suddenly seems threatened, not the rules.

And within just four days, my daughter’s actual character revealed itself. After three solid years of waking each day to get dressed, walking to the kitchen table to have breakfast with me, and then proceeding with the rest of her day, we undid everything in what seemed like hours and she was reduced to instincts.

Here is what I now know to be the true nature of a toddler: in pajamas at 4 p.m., no socks, unbrushed hair and teeth, eating “tomato chips” in front of the television, belly hanging out, binge-watching “Peppa Pig.” Her ideal model in life is either Al Bundy or Homer Simpson, minus the booze (for now). She put her hands down her pants. She wandered around barely able to stay on her feet. She lied and said she didn’t feel better to get “wollypops” instead of dinner when it was clear she was feeling fine.

And I found myself also reduced: reduced to trying to “argue up” dinner from wollypops and tomato chips to “only pasta” or macaroni and cheese. “NO VEFABLES,” I’d hear her tiny, bossy lisp come from her playroom. Where was my civilized little girl?

I gave her nine days before I broke. I ripped off the bandaid in a single day, forcing her into clothes and brushing her hair, putting on matching socks and cooking broccoli and quinoa. I re-civilized her in a few days but I had an extreme revelation: everything I’ve done with her, is, essentially, window dressing. It’s all in some manner superficial. I have no idea where she got the idea that it’s better to lounge in pajamas than in clothes — her clothes are basically pajamas anyway — but she got the idea, all on her own. Pajamas, it seems, are inherently superior. She wants salty snacks and to do NOTHING, I mean NOTHING for hours. She ends up cranky and wandering around like a lost dog when left to her own desires, sure, because she’s three and she has no idea what is best for her, but her desires are what they are, and nothing I have done overrides that.

It is, I believe, our natural state to do almost nothing, to conform to no schedules, to be irritable and unhealthy slobs. I have seen this in the realities of my beautiful, adored daughter. I have no idea how we’ve gotten — any of us — to where we are today but I do know now, better than I have ever known, that all of us are just steps away from a backslide into utter sloth. And rather than feel defeated, rather than focus on the fact that maybe I’ve wasted all my time here trying to dull the sharp edges of my little monster, I’ve decided to give her this win. To admit that she is so strong and wonderful that even in the face of me, the Most Powerful Woman on Earth, she has prevailed and is the victor, the woman with the half-eaten bag of tortilla chips and M&Ms at 6:30 a.m. in a dark hallway. She wins, and I rededicate myself to her utter defeat. I will never ever give up, even if I haven’t made many inroads. Except for the sleep. That, I totally nailed.

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.

For one more day

This morning I was scrolling through my Twitter feed when something started to become apparent: Today is the last day we can sing along to Young Jeezy’s “My President” and have the lyrics be true. At least the “my president is black” part. (Maybe your Lambo is yellow.)

Reminder: Tomorrow is the final day to listen to Young Jeezy’s “My President Is Black”

The A.V. Club tried to get the word out yesterday, and there’s a Facebook event dedicated to raising awareness, but right now it only has 298 people registered as interested and 365 people going. Not enough imo!

So if inauguration eve has you feeling a little uhh squashed? Smushed? Steamrolled beneath the myriad simultaneous worries you have about America’s incoming leadership, why not hit play on this?

:’)

Classical Music Hour with Fran

It’s inarguable that you haven’t heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, either from his music or the movie Amadeus or just from being alive as a person. Mozart! He’s world-famous. A young prodigy who took the world by storm and had issues with his father. The Justin Bieber of classical music (I’m not kidding about this).

Having a favorite Mozart piece is like picking a favorite piece from an extremely young Canadian pop star who has suffered some very public meltdowns but always seems to come out with better and better albums: impossible. What’s your favorite Mozart piece? Is it Eine Kleine Nachtmusik? Is it The Magic Flute? Is it the friggin’ Overture to The Marriage Of Figaro? It could be anything feasibly, because Mozart is that good and his music is everywhere. In that case, I ought to share mine, which is, don’t laugh: Symphony №29 (Berliner Philharmoniker, 1992).

I mean, listen, just listen to this first movement, the Allegro Moderato (“relatively fast”). Is it not just the nicest thing? I’ve previously characterized Tchaikovsky as the king of melody, and I’m standing by that 100%, but Mozart is the king of nice. His music is easy and clear and uncomplicated. Keep in mind that Mozart was composing long before a lot of the other composers I’ve written about, so his music is really just playing with themes and variations on instrumentation, not so much grandiose scenes or stories. And the result is profoundly pleasant!

Even the Andante, its slower second movement, isn’t like the lengthy, mournful Andantes (or Largos) of symphonies past. This is pure nap music if I’ve ever heard it, and I mean that in a profoundly respectful way. This is conflict-free. You don’t have to think twice about it. Mozart has tapped directly into your neurons and told you to chill the hell out. All of this is very “the Austrian countryside on a nice summer afternoon,” which is why I’m introducing it to you in the dead of January.

The Menuetto and Allegro con spirito (“quickly, with spirit”) are Symphony №29’s shortest movements, but they’re also distinctive. The Menuetto doesn’t really bang as much as a traditional minuet kind of can — minuets are typically the dance movement — but its final thirty seconds bring in some heavy cellos to do a lot of heavy lifting. It’s plenty upbeat, ending on a little fanfare that kicks into the final movement which is the undoubted banger of this symphony. The Allegro con spirito is so playful and genuinely exciting. That’s the thing about Mozart: he can make listening to something so cheerful exciting without any type of stressful tension. Its conclusion is spirited — Allegro con, oh, I get it! — and ends with this big run on the strings before its final two notes. How do you not love it?

There’s nothing too astonishing about this symphony, unless you count the fact that Mozart wrote it when he was eighteen years old. Literally what were you doing when you were eighteen years old? Bieber was putting out Boyfriend, which, look, we all make mistakes. I was having my first vodka cranberry and dancing to this song in the basement of a house occupied by my liberal arts college’s Model U.N. team. Regardless, it’s a nice thing to listen to. I don’t know how it cemented its place as my favorite, especially when there are truly so many to choose from, but I love this contribution of teen Mozart’s to the world of classical music. You deserve an underrated gem.

Fran Hoepfner is a writer from Chicago. You can find a corresponding playlist for all of the pieces discussed in this column here.

Betsy DeVos teaches us there’s nothing left to care about.

Millions of Americans are upset that a complete idiot is about to become president of their country. But on Tuesday, upon hearing Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos say that schools should have guns in case of a grizzly bear attack, they realized with a strange kind of feeling slightly resembling pleasure that maybe they no longer cared about anything anyway.

“I have been pretty angry for the last two months, reading a lot, thinking about what I can do, how I can get more involved as a citizen and all that, but once I heard what DeVos said about grizzly bears, I was like, ‘Ok, whatever, I’m out,’” said Bob Ringold, 39, of Wethersfield, Connecticut, in the parking lot of his office in New London.

“Totally,” echoed co-worker Harry McIntosh, 35, pausing before getting into his 1999 Honda Civic. “I told my wife, ‘I am done,’ and she was like ‘With what?’ and I was like ‘With all of it. With the whole thing.’” He made a circle with his hands, ostensibly making reference to the whole world and everything contained therein. “Luckily my wife said, ‘Oh me too, I was so afraid you were going to say that you still cared about something or someone’ and I was like ‘Ha, no way’ and she was like, ‘Good, me too.’”

The couple, who met at the University of Connecticut and have been married five years, agreed that they were going to spend the rest of their lives just staring into space. “It’s good you’re on the same page,” Ringold said, and to which McIntosh replied, “Either way.”

Across town, at a children’s playground, six year old Mattie Bean jumped off a swing set, ran over to his mom, Katie Bean, 28, and held out his hand. “My mitten thumb has a hole in it,” he said.

“Ok, remember, mommy told you that nothing matters,” she asked. She led her son back to the swing then stood back and shrugged as the child recommenced playing. “My girlfriend and I talked about it last night, after we watched the thing a few times and confirmed that yes, indeed a grown woman had said schools should have guns in case one of the approximately 1500 grizzly bears remaining in the lower 48 states chose to attack it—and we looked at each other and said, ‘Realistically, how many times can you tell a six year old that nothing matters?’ But I gave it a try today and I think I’ve said it about fifty times, and I don’t see any problem with saying it fifty more. My girlfriend told me said she said it maybe ten times to him before she went to work, and that it rolled right off the tongue. So it’s all good.”

At Jimmy’s Pizza Shack down the street, Jimmy Salvatore, 48, was giving his customers pieces of white bread on paper plates. “I don’t have it in me to make pizzas and no one can taste anymore anyway, so, here we are,” he said, taking a sip of Diet Coke and Smirnoff out of a blue potato salad container.

“Can you cut mine into little pieces?” asked another customer. “Ever since I saw that thing about Betsy DeVos and the grizzly bears I can’t even chew.”

“I’ll see your no chewing, and I’ll raise you,” called out a voice from behind the unplugged jukebox. Erika Thane, 30, proudly pointed out a portable IV drip, administering glucose and various nutrients. “I went to the doctor and I said, ‘I know there’s nothing wrong with me, but I would really just like to engage with life as little as possible and I am willing to pay through the nose for the privilege.’” She looked around, put her finger to her lips, then lifted her shirt up to show a colostomy bag. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say this makes me happy, but it’s pretty hard to make any kind of decision or exert any effort in this state, so, you know. I guess I am feeling something like whatever happiness used to feel like, sort of, except, I feel nothing anymore, so. Yeah.”

As she trailed off, a customer could be heard inquiring, “Jimmy, how much do I owe you?”

Salvatore leaned against the glass display case, formerly filled with cannolis, now empty. “Uh, a dollar? Two? Three? Or you could just throw a cup of cold water in my face. It’s really all the same to me.”

It’s science.

Are you a narc or a square? Stop reading. This post is for badboys only.

Coast clear? Okay.

According to social science, swearing is linked to both honesty and niceness. So if you’re the kind of person who might point out that, “There were no fucking paper towels” in the public bathroom, or “The goddamn bus” was late this morning, chances are you’re more sincere than someone who’d simply say “no paper towels” or “the bus.”

A joint study published by the University of Cambridge, Stanford University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Maastricht University this month purports that swearing (online and in real life) is associated with honesty because “honest people get emotional, and emotional people swear.”

“There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes, and are often considered to be positively related,” the study reads. “On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings, and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty.”

In other words, we tend to swear when we’re in heightened emotional states, which makes people assume that swearing would be linked to irrational or deviant behavior—but this study explored the possibility that just the opposite is true: We swear when we’re too worked up to lie. Or more simply, if someone has the composure to lie to you, they’re probably not also emotionally worked up enough to swear. Those two states of mind might even be mutually exclusive in some cases.

Scientists tested this idea three different ways, and found that swearers “were far more consistent in keeping honest with other people” and “rarely lied to get out of difficult situations.” Moreover, “participants who swore less had a higher percentage of statuses deemed as ‘dishonest.’”

The explanation was that dishonest people subconsciously try to (1) dissociate themselves from the lie and therefore refrain from referring to themselves; (2) prefer concrete over abstract language when referring to others (using someone’s name instead of “he” or “she”); (3) are likely to feel discomfort by lying and therefore express more negative feelings; and (4) require more mental resources to obscure the lie and therefore end up using less cognitively demanding language, which is characterized by a lower frequency of exclusive words and a higher frequency of motion verbs.

So basically: liars use vague, pleasing language and honest people use specific, emotional language. Tell that to your stepdad.

Kompromat

Yes, we had footage of him
All the way back in April
Strung out on meth
In a white hood

And Old Glory thong
Pissing on a Bible
While shooting a black
Police officer

And a Mexican with no papers
Using two illegal diamond-
Encrusted handguns
In the transvestite brothel

Goldman Sachs financed
For a far-right Zionist
Hollywood producer
With ties to Russia

But then again
No one is perfect
And you know what they say,
Judge not —

Amit Majmudar’s most recent book of poems, Dothead, was published by Knopf. Godsong, his verse translation from Sanskrit of the Bhagavad Gita, is forthcoming in 2018.

The Poetry Section is edited by Mark Bibbins.

How are you going to spend your last day?

Good morning! The sun is shining, the weather is warming up and the hours stretch out in front of you. In however many years you have left you will always look back at this as the day before everything changed forever. I hope you have a good story to tell the other people huddled around the future fire about what you were doing.

Petre Inspirescu, whose Vin Ploile was one of the highlights of 2015, has a new album coming out at the end of March. Assuming there will still be a March to come to the end of I am very much looking forward to it. Here’s a sample. Enjoy.