★ Morning blue faded from the sky in the west as the day baked on. The four-year-old was ramming around in the air conditioning, and so went out to kick a soccer ball around the forecourt. An adult error immediately sent the ball into the algae-greened water of the fountain. It dried out a few kicks later under the press of the heat, almost as fast as the boy wilted and quit. In the elevator back up were neighbors defeated by a bike ride. It took multiple scrubbings to get the doggy smell of the fountain off the hands that had retrieved the ball. Hunting for a water pistol to replace his shattered old one, the four-year-old decided to go out again. The openable glass front of the wine bar was closed. So was the shutter on the toy store. A sign invited would-be customers to enjoy the summer.

A slideshow

How are you going to get from Williamsburg, Canarsie or Bushwick to Manhattan once the L train shuts down? Enterprising websites are already seeding the Internet with maps and infographics for an event that is two-and-a-half years away. Far be it from us to turn our noses up at potential long tail traffic! Here’s a photo-essay offering our own up-to-the-minute suggestions for the best way you can avoid the MTA-imposed Williamsburg L train shutdown/suspensions/closure/when does L train service stop?/when does L train service resume at such stops as Bedford Avenue, Lorimer Street, Graham Avenue, Grand Street, Montrose Avenue, Morgan Avenue, Jefferson Street [Okay, that’s enough SEO bait for a bit this stupid — Ed.] Hopefully one of these options will work well for you.

Wait, we need to wrap up what happened at that other convention!

You guys missed the best part of Thursday night’s big speech. The balloon-popping part. I traveled down to the convention floor to witness the rubber carnage and take artsy balloon and confetti porn photography. It was simultaneously fun and also weirdly scary. Fun because balloons! And confetti! In the shapes of stars. Red, white and blue!

Balloons were kicked into the air as people walked and collected in bunches in the chairs and corners. The kids on the stage did a pretty great job collecting them against the clear aquarium glass that was on the sides of the stage in front of the white stairs. Kids popping balloons — I could watch that all day.

Quicken Loans Arena housekeeping had these broomsticks with sharp things on the front. They diligently poked and poked. The time between balloons falling and balloons having to be popped was like 30 minutes. It’s strange to have them hanging in the rafters all week, prepared to fall. Only to then fall in about a minute. The sad life of popped balloons! But so fun in the popping!

Scary because the popping sound was sometimes a little too bullet-like. The popping from the top deck sounded at times like machine guns going off. A few times when I was on the convention floor and one of the larger balloon popped people jumped. It was a jumpy crowd, made jumpy by Donald Trump’s apocalyptic vision of America.

It had been a long week of dodging dudes dressed as a wall, dudes squirting each other with squirt guns full of urine, dudes preaching the creepiest gospel ever, dudes in police uniforms from all over the country. Expecting shots to come from God-knows-where. The RNC in Cleveland had been built up in numerous articles as some kind of OK Corral for all who dared attend. There would be blood in the streets. There would be noroviruses to catch. Welcome to the beginning of the end of the world.

And even if it wasn’t the end of the world it definitely felt like we were losing something just by watching everything that was happening. As Trump speeched, the upper decks where I sat were conflicted. Two or three people were way into it, giving an affirmative reaction to almost every scary line. Like “I alone can fix it.” Or “I am the law and order candidate.” Others stood and applauded frequently enough, as is custom. Most seemed to choose their standing and applauding when there was overlap between Mr. Trump’s ideas and theirs. The appointment of Supreme Court justices and protecting the Second Amendment evoked the most overlap. I was led to believe there was no cheering in the press box. I didn’t have a box, just the seat closest to the outlet all the way in the very last row.

Did Trump’s speech make the stars on the flag wave dimmer, the stripes seem a little meaner? Sure. The progression of Republican politics over the last thirty years has revealed the gears behind the mechanism: what once was covered by all polish and charm had slowly eroded so that one could come to see exactly how the Republican sausage was made. It’s become all shout and no poetry. They haven’t won the Presidency in a while, so they’ve gone shrill warning Americans just how dangerous it is out there to practically even try to live. Illegal immigrants are trying to kill us in anecdotal numbers that do not merit serious consideration. It’s like the number of people who die every year and are eaten by their cats. Who are these aloof invaders who eat their owner’s eyes out? How can we stop them from mauling us after death?

It’s been a few days since the end of the convention and I’ve had three long bus rides to think about what it all means. And it means nothing. Surely you’ve read an article by now about how Trump is an authoritarian and his vision for America is dark and bleak and terrifying. It doesn’t matter. There are 100 million moments between now and election day where he could win it or blow it. America certainly seems open to his style of American Fascism to cure whatever queasy, upset feeling in their stomachs they’re feeling about the direction of political leadership in America. And over the next four days, Hillary Clinton will have a chance to make her case, although with the big DNC email hack as a precursor, it’s already a mess.

Was it a toilet fire? No, it was long and most boring and at times a little scary. But maybe not a toilet fire. I mean, a toilet fire would be a fascinating thing to watch, and this was only fascinating in brief moments. America is probably just as screwed as it was before the convention.

What were my take-aways from Cleveland? I liked the city a lot. The Public Square park is a nice addition to the city. The cops were nice. All law enforcement acted in a restrained way that allowed the silliness of “protesters” win the day. No one mentioned young Tamir Rice, shot by police in a park while carrying a toy gun. I came to enjoy the chicken fingers and curly fries of the Quicken Loans Arena quite a bit. Would I like to cover one of these again in 4 years? Ask me in 4 years. Until then I will attempt to enjoy every day Donald Trump isn’t President of the United States as if they were my last days, as if they were the very last days of the Republic. America was a pretty cool experiment and it was going to eventually end anyway. Maybe now is the time, after much talk of the end of the world, to just embrace it. We spend so much time worrying about how things will end up if politics don’t go our way. Maybe we should just find out whether it’s worth worrying about.

Books that were written in other languages are usually not about the same boring-ass things that a lot of writers (you know where they’re from) go on about in English.

Translation is definitely having a moment. There’s the Tim Parks stuff in the New York Review of Books, and Liesl Schillinger’s series in the Los Angeles Review of Books and now this, from Rachel Cooke:

[T]ranslation is more important than ever — for suddenly, foreign literature seems finally to be finding its place in Britain, an island where it has previously struggled to attract substantial numbers of readers. How did this happen? It’s hard to say, but perhaps it began, thinking back, with the Scandinavian crime sagas — by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø et al — that we all began gobbling up in increasingly vast quantities around the turn of the century. Then there was Karl Ove Knausgaard’s confessional series of novels, My Struggle, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, and a strange new addiction for many (the first volume came out in 2009). Finally, and most gloriously, there was Elena Ferrante. This time last year, Ferrante was everywhere. Every single book-loving friend of mine had either read her, or was just about to.

Cooke chats with Edith Grossman, Ann Goldstein and Don Bartlett, among other practitioners in the field right now. It is worth reading if you’re interested. It’s certainly nice to read something about books where you’re not just like, ugh, again with Brooklyn? Although maybe if you translated Brooklyn in another language it would be marginally less irritating to read about. I would learn another language if that were so. Sorry, I got distracted by how fucking terrible every book about Brooklyn is. My point was read this.

Who knew journalists had so much to say about their occupation?

Over at New York, members of the media — a profession which hates talking about itself and hardly ever engages in any kind of navel-gazing — finally open up and offer frank and candid criticisms of the media. And when members of the media decide to be frank and candid you know that it must be significant.

How can you not admire the hard-boiled honesty in revealing just how sordid, self-serving and sad the general practice of what we used to call “journalism” is in our era of celebrity talking head “analysts” and unique-seeking click-guzzlers? These people — again, part of a group which systematically shuns the hunger for the spotlight and the chronic self-obsession that it rightly ridicules in others — are finally willing to give a little bit of insight into the part they play in making the world shallower, more frightened, and almost as cynical as the very same press that peddles all the nonsense we are ultimately given to understand is directed at us because that’s what we want.

So, yes, you’ll be shocked and angered to learn just how vapid and risk-averse and profit-driven the media is, but you should really pay attention, because it is so rare for the media to talk about itself that who knows when it will ever open up and discuss the topic again? (And remember: If they’re criticizing themselves it’s not self-indulgent. How could it be? They’re saying what the bad things are!) Anyway, here’s a little taste:

The real problem with journalism is groupthink. My father was a journalist — he never graduated from high school, he joined the Marines as a 17-year-old and then went to work at the L.A. Times. It was not a profession; it was a trade, and you had a whole diverse field of people entering it. Now, for a bunch of reasons — and this is the problem with American society more broadly, in my view — it’s just a masturbatorium, filled with people who think exactly the same, who are from the same backgrounds, who have the same assumptions about everything. And you get a much less interesting product when you have that. And you also get a lot of fearful people. A lot of people who are too dumb to go into finance, so they went into journalism instead. And they get older and they realize, ‘I’ve got tuitions, and this is actually a pretty shaky business model on which to build a career,’ and they just become unwilling to take any risk at all. When was the last time you saw anybody in the press — except the fringe press — really write a piece that challenged the assumptions of their neighbors? That would actually make their friends in Brooklyn avert their gaze?

You’re nodding your head in agreement, right? Well that quote comes from Tucker Carlson. How much do you hate yourself now? However much it is it is not as much as the media hates itself — and they’re not afraid to tell you, in their frank and candid way! It’s hard to get the media to offer an opinion about the media, but when they do, oh boy, it’s almost as if they can’t shut up. There is plenty more here. If you choose to read on be forewarned: You’re going to hear some very hard truths. I hope you don’t die of surprise.

Sorry.

Normally we use this space to bring you new music that you have probably not heard yet, but today for some reason this track — which is almost fifteen years old, please kill me — seemed like the most appropriate way to start the day. Also it’s going to be hot as fuck today and tomorrow will be hotter than fuck, and we’re not expected to return to seasonable fuck levels until Friday, so please try to be a little patient with each other out there, okay? It’s not just you, nobody’s happy. (I mean, nobody’s ever happy but this week it’s too hot to even pretend.) Anyway, enjoy, or do whatever is the closest approximation of that which you can.

★★★★ For the four-year-old’s satisfaction, the sunroof of the Cadillac could be opened on the ride back from the drugstore. Both children, after a bit of consideration and discussion, decided to be agreeable about going to the beach. The beach was agreeable in return: The temperature on the sands was just hot, no more; the near waves were yellowish, not big but sharp, breaking with a growl. Each child in turn consented or asked to be carried out to bob in the water, bearing up under the salty slap when a wave was too big for the adult child-holder to hoist their heads clear of. The younger one increased his own head’s odds of being wave-slapped by squirming and pushing down on the adult head in excitement whenever a big swell was drawing near. The air through the sides of the open-air beach trolley felt like a fresh breeze, gentle enough that the four-year-old, who’d insisted on a trolley ride, promptly fell asleep.

I want to say that you were shaving your toes “delicately” or “carefully” but the truth is there was total neutrality in the way you went about the act. The truth is, you shaved your toes non-adverbially.

It was eight A.M. on a Tuesday and the showers of the municipal pool were open to the world. Even in swimsuits, there seems something a bit outrageous about showering in the semi-outside, side by side with strangers. Men and women walked past on their way in (dry and overslept and meek) or out (dripping and smug and brisk) of the pool. Soaping your armpits or grimacing, eyes shut, against the shampoo foam slipping down your forehead feel like private acts. But here we all were, women who didn’t know one another, glancing at each other and trying not to, firing quick closed-mouth smiles if glances met, and you were doing something more interesting than soaping or shampooing.

You lifted your knee and lodged your foot against the wall and there was something quaintly, quintessentially sexy in the pose, like an ad from the ’50s, a sweetly smirking dame with scarlet lips and a nipped in waist, showing the reader how to snare a husband or something. I tried not to look, but later it occurred to me that if you were the sort of woman to shave her toes in public, you were probably also the sort of woman who didn’t care if anyone saw. But I also knew that my swimming goggles leave conspicuous, indented circles around my chlorine-stung eyes, making literal red rings around my face’s act of looking.

I noticed your swimsuit was both sporty and fashionable and that you were young. Younger than me, that was the main thing, because toe-shaving in public constituted the sort of admirable nonchalance I usually attribute to women at least twice your age. A “when I am old I shall wear purple” vibe. The walnut-tanned old woman I’d seen as a kid on a beach in Nice, standing in nothing but bikini briefs on the shore, squinting as she plucked her own nipple hairs.

Except maybe there was a tiny snagging paradox in your nonchalance. Because maybe true and absolute nonchalance would be just not shaving your toes in the first place, just Bilbo Bagginsing out—fuck you, patriarchy—and double beauty standards of hairlessness? I didn’t want to think about this because I preferred thinking about how good you and your freshly depilated toes must feel going off into your day, swum and showered by eight oh five in the morning.

In a better world this would be the song of the summer.

It’s Friday, the horror in Cleveland has ended, and for the next two days at least you can maintain enough of an ignorant stupor that the unrelenting agonies of this world seem, if not soluble, distant enough that they are someone else’s problem. Sure, it will be hot, but guess what, it’s summer, that’s what happens. And if you’re a New Yorker, you’ve still got winter in your soul. You can handle a little heat.

Listen, let me level with you: Everything is terrible and only getting worse. Anyone who tells you any different is lying, either because they need to convince themselves of that so that they can keep doing all the terrible things they’re doing without thinking too hard about how they are contributing the incremental awfulness we face every day, or because they are lucky enough to actually believe it in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. But things are bad and they’re not going to get better and we’re all trudging toward the tomb. So when something comes along that distract you even a little bit from that you’re a fool if you pass it up.

Here is such a thing: a collaboration between French blippy-bloopy merchants Cassius and Cat Power that is just delightful and amazing and terrific and helps you forget however briefly just how fucking hopeless our future is. Play it as often as you need to, and enjoy. I don’t want to tell you how quickly it will be Monday again.

★★★★ A tow truck was circling the parking lot outside the window in the depths of the night, its flashing light coming through the blinds so insistently that it fully broke through sleep, at which point the strobe could be understood to be no truck at all but lightning, unimagined quantities of lightning, coming without break or pause. Minutes went by with no slackening, as water sluiced down the windows in a solid sheet. There were more than 100 flashes as the stopwatch on the phone counted 60 seconds, once it was even possible to think and count. The morning was calm under a dusty blue haze. The temperature reading seemed mild but the water was boiling back up out of the gravel margins of the street and the soggy fake turf of the miniature golf course. The coffee shop was planning to shut down at noon for lack of air conditioning, and there were grounds in the bottom of the iced coffee cup. In the afternoon, the skates or rays were jumping and flipping out where the ocean turned from greenish to bluish. An inflatable boat, loaded with children roasted brown by the sun, was steered by adults in water up to their knees. When something big—a skate? a dolphin?–swam closer to shore, the little children were put ashore so that older youths could paddle out to try to find it. There were dead insects in the top of the water and dead-looking jellyfish floating below, sloshing in and out with the waves. Back ashore, a small rabbit nibbled grass at the edge of the sand patch where the grill sat. The time came for the full moon to rise, but the shapeless blue on the horizon must have been clouds, and the only brightness that could be discerned was the flickering lights of a ship, all but out of view.