There shouldn’t be any big mystery about why you feel anxious today.

The good news this morning is that we have ten days until the next debate, which gives the Earth plenty of time to slip out of its orbit and careen into the sun. That’s the good news. If we’re lucky. Here’s something new from Recondite, who have an EP coming out on November 11, which unfortunately may be too late for all of us. But you can listen to this now, and I recommend that you do. Enjoy.

★★★★★ The hosed-down sidewalks glistened and the red of the hose was like a beacon up at the corner. Inhalation was cool and soothing. The light, abundant and benevolent, traced the strands of the ropes dangling outside the window. It separated individual stalks of tall grass and the subtle gradations of driveway pavement 27 stories below and across the avenue. Soft uneven oblongs of direct sun through the trees made X’s on the ground with the sharp lines of the sun reflecting off rows of windows. Surprising colors flowed underfoot in the smooth surface of the steel curb face. The river shimmered and glowed. When the stuffiness of the sickroom became unbearable in the night, the opened window carried it all away at once.

“Grit” Don’t Put The Biscuit In The Basket

A World Cup champion was crowned last week. Most Americans, even American sports fans, were oblivious. Canada won the 2016 professional hockey World Cup, a thirteen-day tournament held in Toronto’s Air Canada Center. The United States, a team expected to compete for the championship, logged an 0–3 record and finished eighth out of eight teams.

Dean Lombardi was the team’s general manager. Solid choice! His Los Angeles Kings won the Stanley Cup in 2012 and 2014. But then Lombardi picked John Tortorella, who failed at coaching the New York Rangers and then failed even harder coaching the Vancouver Canucks. What about the well-respected Cup winner Peter Laviolette or dual-citizen Jon Cooper who has quickly turned Tampa Bay from mediocrity into a bona fide Cup contender? A top U.S. college coach would have been a better choice.

“Torts” is best known for his anger: at refs, at the press, at his own players. He’s angry at fans and at himself. Angry coaches can work, if they use that anger unselfishly to positively affect players. Tortorella does not do this. His anger is real and precious and all his and he ain’t gonna use it to motivate his players, goddammit.

Hockey players look at their coach often during a game; they can’t help it, he’s standing right behind them. They look to him for mental energy. But if you look at Torts during a game, he often has a weird partial smirk on his face that reads as “nothing” or “I’m not home right now” or “I have a load in my pants.”

Lombardi and Tortorella then assembled a team that was pieced together specifically to beat Team Canada, who were an overwhelming favorite — even more than in past World/Canada Cups. They repeatedly called the group “gritty” like sandpaper, and “mentally tough” like world-class chess players.

The roster had some obvious choices, like electric forward Patrick Kane (who did zilch in the tournament), solid all-around defenseman Ryan McDonagh, and the big, fast, and talented d-man Dustin Byfuglien, who was scratched from the team’s first game, a 3–0 loss to Team Europe — a move that made zero sense to pretty much every hockey person in the world. Byfuglien would have been a top-four d-man on Canada, for chrissakes.

Also on the team was Brandon Dubinsky, somewhere around the 200th best player in the league. He was there for one reason: to check and torment Team Canada captain and best player in the world, Sidney Crosby. (This is something Dubinksy has excelled at in his career.) In another bizarre decision, Lombardi and Torts scratched him in the Team Canada game. Maybe he butt-ended Crosby in the balls in the parking lot after the game?

Many US hockey fans (aka my friends) moaned about the “skill” players left off the USA roster. I thought there was only one glaring snub: Tampa Bay’s number one center, Tyler Johnson.

In 47 playoff games, Johnson has 21 goals, 21 assists, and a +14 on-ice rating. He’s a great passer-playmaker. And he plays a lot of the game in front of the opponent’s net, getting hammered by six-foot-four, two-hundred-twenty-pound d-men constantly. But apparently he wasn’t considered “gritty” enough for Lombardi and Tortorella.

Last week, It was win-or-else for Team USA’s game against Canada: time to put their “tougher, grittier team” theory into action. (One wonders what all the Canadian players — many of whom grew up and worked on family farms — thought of this mantra.) Canada scored three goals so quickly and easily in the first period that it buried the Americans morally and forced Tortorella into “smirk mode” for the rest of the game.

This contest, despite a misleadingly close 4–2 result, was the most lopsided hockey game I’ve watched since the Soviet Union vs. whomever from the Winter Olympics in the nineteen-eighties (post-“Miracle on Ice” of course).

Team USA looked like a real blue-collar team — a team of construction workers playing a beer-league game. It reminded me of one of the old Harlem Globetrotters against the patsy New Jersey Tomatoes basketball games from the early seventies. Canada is just still that much deeper and better at hockey than the USA.

The Canadians beat Team Europe in two straight games in the best-of-three finals. Both games were close for two reasons: Slovakian goalie Jaroslav Halak was damn good, and Team Europe clogged the neutral zone to slow the game down like the New Jersey Devils did when the won their three Stanley Cups. It was boring-ass hockey, even for Mr. Diehard here.

Team USA went on to lose the Czech Republic, the seventh-ranked team out of eight, with a score of 4–3, continuing a tournament trend of blasting wide-open forty-foot one-timers two-three feet wide of the net. But, to be sure, they were shooting the puck toughly, with much grit.

_____

NOTES:

The best ever tournament of this kind was the 1987 Canada Cup. The Soviet Union sent a great team stacked with skilled fast sharpshooters. Their only weakness was where their three-headed hydra of Vitali Samoilov, Sergei Mylnikov, Evgeny Belosheikin didn’t add up to even half of a Grant Fuhr. Meanwhile, Canada had Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, in their prime, playing together for the first time ever. The three-game final matchup against the USSR was some of the best hockey I’ve ever seen. The Soviets won the first game 6–5 in overtime. Canada won the second game 6–5 in double overtime on a Lemieux goal off a perfect Gretzky feed. Game three went down to under two minutes left when Gretzky set up Lemieux beautifully on a 2–1 for the game and tournament-winning goal:

ESPN’s Steve Levy’s awful play-by-play announcing forced me to watch the games without sound. He constantly called plays wrong, calling a slap pass a missed slapshot and habitually missing calling the names of players shooting, defending, etc. This was an announcer who didn’t do his basic homework before the tournament.

Here’s why you’re doing it wrong.

You know the thing you’ve been doing all this time? Probably since you were a kid? Maybe it was something your parents taught you to do, maybe you learned about it from friends. Perhaps you took a class — or a whole semester — about it. Maybe you even learned how to do it on your own. Well, you’re doing it wrong.

I know this sounds strange to you. “I’m very good at doing this thing,” you’ll say. “I’ve never had any problems with it. People have even complimented me on my thing-doing abilities. I won an award once. I get paid a good salary doing the thing.”

It doesn’t matter. However you’re doing the thing, whatever the thing is, there is a different way to do it, a way that is better than the way you do the thing, which is, that’s correct, wrong. You specifically, the person reading this piece, are doing it wrong. (But so are your friends, so be sure to share this.)

Why are you doing it wrong? Maybe you received incorrect information. Maybe there have been advances in the field of the thing and its proper implementation since you did the thing for the first time. Maybe someone realized that the quickest way to drive traffic to an article is to tell people that even though they know for a fact that the way they are doing the thing is the right way the thing should be done, that they aren’t actually doing it right and now an entire industry template is based on the cynical manipulation of your basest emotions to garner the click you can’t help but give. (You are clicking wrong, by the way, but that is the subject for another article.) Maybe you are actually doing it mostly right, but there is one subtle difference between the way you do it and the way this post is telling you that it should be done that we can exaggerate enough to justify an entire piece, and hopefully an accompanying video, explaining.

What’s the alternative? Well, obviously, you should do the thing that you are doing wrong the way we are telling you to do it instead. But also don’t worry about it too much. Give it a week or two, maybe less if this post is very popular, and there will be another post explaining that, no, the way that you are told you are doing it wrong is itself wrong, and there’s a third way you should be doing it. Or maybe you should even be doing it the way you were doing in the first place. It doesn’t matter, because you will already have clicked and shared and either responded with anger or humorous acknowledgment. (“I so do this!”) You’re a sucker, and you’re easily baited, and rather than confront the emptiness that is all around you as the moments of the one life you get speed past, you will get drawn in by something that has been designed to insult your intelligence so that it will elicit the very response it was created to engender. What else are you going to do? Read a book? Develop your personality? Be alone with your own thoughts? Of course not!

Listen, I’m not happy with the way the Internet turned out either. None of us are. But the money showed up and the phones made it impossible to escape and we decided that we were all going to throw our hands in the air and jack ourselves into whatever lowest common denominator matrix the people who sell our information created to keep us in a state of ovine complicity about our own pacification. Hahaha, you’re barely registering this, right? What are you going to click next, clicky? I bet it will be something that lots of other people are awfully mad about on the Internet at the moment. Or maybe it will be a piece that explains what we know and what we don’t know about a story that is trending highly enough that someone has decided it is worth explaining what we know or what we don’t know about it right now. It could even be a work of genius, the superiority of which is assured by the number of people who have so indicated with a pictogram of flames. There are so many options! You’ll just click, click, click. You might even forget to go to the bathroom, or feed yourself. You’re a big ball of soggy meat whose main purpose is to click. You’re so disgusting! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Being a gigantic waste of space who exists only to build buzz for a bunch of properties that are looking to cash in before the whole pile of bullshit collapses in on itself may be the only thing you’re doing right.

But it isn’t. You’re doing it wrong. You’re doing everything wrong. We all are. We’re all doing it wrong. What’s the point? Why even go on? It’s all wrong. Please like and share.

Soothing behind-the-scenes footage from Solange’s ‘A Seat at the Table’

If you are on this website and reading this post, you already know that Solange Knowles recently released an album called A Seat at the Table and that it is quite good. What you may not know is that she’s been working on it for over three years, enough time to produce and release twelve Ariana Grande records.

Apparently, during that time, she was also filming her songwriting process. A YouTube video called “Beginning Stages” uploaded Thursday invites us to take a peek at what that was like—here she is fiddling around on a keyboard, here she is improvising harmonies in someone’s textile-drenched living room. There’s no speaking and no real narrative, just quiet, arty establishing shots of the locations where she recorded and footage from those recording sessions.

It’s an eleven-minute video of someone… making an album in the midst of living a life.

So much of A Seat at the Table touches upon the experience of black identity within a culture working overtime to minimize your voice, a topic I’m not qualified to weigh in on. But at one point in this video, she dances with her son Julez in a post-dinner kitchen, and it’s a perfect capsule visual of how the record also makes me feel. The calm in their smiles, the glass of paintbrushes on the counter—amid everything, we’re watching a mother and her son play. We’re watching them be light with each other, love each other, in their own space.

Releasing an album is one thing, but for Solange it looks like the practice of making one was just as important. She built a warm, full life for herself and worked inside of it until she was ready to let us in.

And I’m really happy she did.

It was at the fifth “YASSSS!” that I began composing a tweet. What else is one to do in a trying situation than mentally write never-to-be-sent social media posts? I craned to see Dev Hynes on stage at the best-loathed music venue in Manhattan, this hellmouth of Hell’s Kitchen: Terminal Five, never again. I was also thinking, though, that there might be some kind of pun potential in this imagined tweet — something about there being a special place in Hell’s Kitchen for straight white dudes yelling like queer black people. I didn’t even reach for my phone. I’d only regret it.

You were packed behind me in the crowd, a head or so taller than me. I knew your height without looking because every time you yelled I felt the force and volume of your voice in my ears like a rush of water from above, specifically, like the dumping and pounding of a heavy, sand-clotted Atlantic ocean wave. “YyASSSS queen.”

Through bobbing heads and shoulders, I snatched little glimpses of Dev Hynes fireworking around the stage, and thought about stardom and Paris is Burning, the phrase executive realness. In the tight tectonics of the crowd I’d lost my husband and turned to see he was trapped a few bodies back. He saw me and wiggled his fingers. And now that I was looking behind me, I thought I might as well glance at you, too.

You were not some Caucasian bruh in a trucker hat. You were a tall, elegant black man in a cream polo neck with extraordinary ear tips, pinched and elfin, and a straight broad plane of shoulders, which you dipped and circled with such assurance that I thought this had to be your profession. Your shorter white friend beside you flipped his straight, shoulder-length hair around, unceasing, as though that were the specific, albeit lesser role that he had been assigned for the evening. Later, your companion would be a useful landmark as I tried to locate my friend in the crowd. He’d reply: “I’m over to the side, away from the hair flicking boy.”

I smiled at you, and then past you at my husband again, a dorky, rueful sort of smile, as if he might intuit the whole reversal that had just gone on. He reached an awkward hand up and over someone’s shoulder to make contact with my equally awkwardly stretched fingers. “Oh hey,” you said with warm consternation as you noticed this slightly pathetic moment. You said it with the considerate frown of someone who regularly rights small wrongs, like the best-loved kindergarten teacher who hushes down squabbles, firm and fair. “Let’s swap,” you said, and you were already shifting and ushering me past you, delivering me to him. Like a true queen.

The evolution of Friday

At first Friday felt like a complement to the week, a punctuation point that let you know you could accelerate all the energies you were bringing to your evenings already. Then Friday felt like a victory, the reward you received for pushing your way through the four days and nights that led up to it. Next, Friday felt like a reprieve, where at least your assailants went away for a couple of days (to rest up and return fully refreshed on Monday). Now Friday is only an occasion for anguish and anxiety, and the constant awareness that as soon as you shut your eyes for a second it will suddenly be Sunday night and everything will be about to start up again. Instead of a series of blows to the gut it’s one half-hearted crack in the jaw. It doesn’t hurt as bad but you still feel it for the next few days. Anyway, you made it. Happy Friday. Here’s something pretty. Enjoy.

★★★★★ The kindergarten dropoff would have been pleasantly cool, but for the effects of walking down 27 flights wearing a hoodie, after two fully packed elevators had gone by. Three floors below the open window and to the left was a maintenance rig, from which a balcony railing was being uprooted with grinding noises. Out on Columbus Avenue a red neon sign glowed in the deep shade, and neon-red running shoes glowed in a patch of sun. The cross street was dim but an aura of light came down off the brick and stone above. The rudest of the skyscrapers south of the Park was washed out almost to the color of the sky, even as everything else stood solid and saturated. People had come out in the Wednesday afternoon to the Sheep Meadow, in the damp and grassy smell of it; a few insistent ones still sunbathed. There was an open bench by West Drive, with sun to soak into the face and the ankles, as the dark bronze face of Giuseppe Mazzini in the shadows looked over the purple plumes of the carriage horses going by. Gradually the sun slipped over behind the buildings. An ostentatiously loud portable music player on a nearby bench vied with an ostentatiously loud portable music player going by on a bicycle, and the people on the bench got up and moved on. Flying rings soared in their over-straight, over-serious lines above the meadow. A couple nestled into the niches of the biggest boulder and into one another as they sat gazing back across the open space. Mower tracks ran silver or deeper green across the grass, out of the sunlight now but still lit by the ambient brightness. At dusk, up in the 80s, the children came out of the opticians wearing their new or newly repaired glasses to see a sharp sliver of descending crescent moon.

The student becomes the teacher becomes the student

The clock on the wall of one of my classrooms has stopped. The clock claims that it is 8:40, even when it’s not. The brokenness suggests 8:40 a.m. (time of cereal and socks) rather than 8:40 p.m. (time of drinks or lying down). There was a broken clock on the wall of my middle school biology lab too; its stopped hands taunted us. It was like the clock was saying, “It will be biology forever and you’ll never grow up.” Always a kid dragging on a school uniform, never a grown-up loosening their tie over a cocktail.

The costumes people put on in high school stick to them. “Badly behaved” was my costume once, but now it’s just my skin. I was exactly the kind of student I find the hardest to deal with now: one who finishes everything really quickly and then makes a bunch of jokes, if she shows up to class at all. The hardest thing is knowing that you can’t go back. I never grew up or became responsible, and yet here I am all the same, yelling at some kid who can’t keep his mouth shut. Left alone, I’ll sleep until noon and never do any homework. Cut class, smoke cigarettes: at school I showed no courtesy to my fellow students, and distracted them willfully. I wasn’t an evil kid, or mean — just badly behaved.

It’s very difficult to teach without remembering being a student. Broken clocks are always broken in the same way. Cereal is always depressing. You learn your role at school — how to recognize friends and enemies, the things you can do to make other people laugh — and in turn you learn how classrooms make you feel. The novice teacher experiences something peculiar the first time she first walks out in front of a group of young people. She steps through a portal that both transports her back and hurls her forward into another whole dimension. The hour and the minute hands spin in opposite directions, and the novice teacher must reconfigure her brain. Whatever she does, the novice teacher’s identity will come into contact with a universe of classrooms past. She slides in and out of the present moment, trying on old memories of other people for size. The distance from the front to the back of the classroom is small, but the air is very different up there.

Will the new teacher try on the armor of a teacher she feared, or emulate the one who was most kind to her? Will she disguise herself, or become somebody new? Often the new teacher will choose to inhabit teacherliness as a costume. By this of course I mean a stereotype of teacherliness: starchy in manner, brusque and brisk, funny only in the wryest of wry ways. She may wear a suit, wear her hair in some kind of low ponytail. She will become a cardboard cutout of a teacher, so that her humanity does not distract her students or allow them to latch onto signs of life in an effort to mistake her for a friend.

Inhabiting this teacherly costume makes the whole procedure easier, in some ways. The students must behave politely and rise to the challenge when the teacher asks them a question. The teacher’s job is to facilitate that rising, not distract from it. And distraction in the shape of a teacher can take on many forms. Not hotness, you understand: students are smarter than that. I mean that a teacher who can scale herself away from a self down into a type (always modeled on the teachers of her own past) can predict and manage the human relationships that grow inside her classroom.

The hands of the clock are supposed to go around. The minute hand is supposed to overtake the hour hand, teaching it how to go on its circular journey by example. Gentle and predictable, the teacher gives a rhythm to the days that tick by, until the graduation bell chimes and the whole thing rewinds. I thought it would make sense by now, from this side of the classroom — I thought I’d learned all there was to know about school. But every two minutes I glance up to check the time. Reflexes last longer than individual clocks, I guess, and people don’t really change.

Josephine Livingstone is a writer and academic in New York.

What’s scarier than an omnivoyant squash?

Spooping season is here, and if you’re like me you’re excited enough to make one small decoration. You’re not here to win any awards, but it’d be nice if your hands could manufacture a seasonal totem that you could catch out of the corner of your eye while moving through your home and say, “That’s the stuff.” Googly eyes are a really great supply for this level of commitment to the arts.

I learned this when, over the summer, I briefly experimented with having a tag. You know how teens have one signature graffito that they do over and over again? And when you see “jOsH” on a bus stop bench you recognize it from the jOsH on the dumpster outside CVS? I wanted my jOsH to be googly eyes. Nothing fancy. Just two, side by side, creating a face where there previously wasn’t one.

The first tag I did was on a sink at a bar. I turned the faucet into a lil elephant (some people said it looked like a human penis, but they were mistaken). The next couple I did were inside of the New York City subway system. The problem with all of them was the sticker-back was really tough to get off! And when you’re breaking the law for your art like I was, you need your movements to be swift and inconspicuous.

So I let the baggie of eyes sit at the bottom of my purse for months while I tried to think of the perfect place to stick all of them at once. It wasn’t until this week that it occurred to me: I could stick all of them onto one pumpkin!

For this craft, you will need:

• 1 pumpkin (size your choice)
• 1 bag of googly eyes (this is the one I got, but I bet there are better ones out there)

Step one is to peel one of the sticker-backs off and try to stick an eye onto the pumpkin. You will find, like I did, that the adhesive on the backs of the eyes is pretty useless within the context of this craft, so surprise! You will also need:

• a hot glue gun or some strong/fast-drying crafting glue

If you do not have any in the house, you can try texting your roommate, who has lots of hot glue guns at her office. When she says she will bring one home for you, pop open a seltzer and watch an episode of television. Have you seen Fleabag yet? It’s good.

The sun may go down while you are waiting for your roommate to bring the glue gun home, which means the light in your house will become extremely ugly. Don’t worry! You can glue the eyes on the pumpkin under the cover of night and photograph the final product in the morning.

From there you just squeeze a lil dot of glue onto the back of each eye (no need to take the sticker off now) and pop it onto your canvas.

Some things to be aware of: like all of us, pumpkins are bumpy and irregular. A flat-backed googly eye may not lie flush to the skin just the way you want it to, which means that you’re going to have to compromise on some of the positioning and aesthetics while you’re executing your vision. Isn’t that nice to practice? Crafting is zen as hell.

I opted to do rings of like-sized eyes around the pumpkin, starting teeny and getting giant and then shrinking back down again, but you can put your eyes on there however you want to. Zig-zags, a 666. First thought is best thought tbh.

Now go to bed.

When you wake up in the morning, the sun will be in the sky, and you will be able to take much better photos of your pumpkin in the natural light. Just look at it! Freaky and spooky and wrought from your own ideas! Sleeping before taking your pics has also given the glue time to dry and set, which is good.

You’ll probably need to be gentle while moving your little guy to where you’d like it to live for the rest of the month, but that’s good to practice, too. And now it’s done. You put some eyes on a seasonal vegetable in the name of all that is dark and evil and I really respect you for it.