Here is something quiet, calm and beautiful to help you start out another morning in our seemingly endless series of days without sun. I hope you are all taking Vitamin D supplements. Enjoy.

★ Not enough rain was falling, or not big enough drops of it, to justify opening the little green umbrella on the way to preschool. Nor was there enough to convince the four-year-old to take custody of the umbrella for later. The dampness made it chilly outside the clothes and hot inside them. The early rain landed so softly that the puddles on the bare grainy dirt of the tree planters were clear water, like a spring filtered up through sand. A little more than an hour later, it was falling hard enough to stream from the scaffold. It was streaming from the canopy over the subway mouth on Union Square, too. Just beyond that, a dangling little radio played the news under the shelter of the array of the fivedollaUMbrella man. The spray was blowing too hard for five dollars to have much hope of making a difference. Then it blew even harder. The afternoon dried out but got no more inviting, and in the middle of rush hour a faint drizzle returned. It took effort, under the pall, to see that all around was bright green.

“There are different ways to connect to your organic masculinity. Hair is one way to do it.”
 — Chest hair is in again, you guys! You can stop waxing and shaving and electrolysizing your chests! I know you have felt alienated from your manliness for a while now, but the concerns you couldn’t completely resolve by growing a beard will be fully assuaged by getting that thick thatch of pectoral matting back. My joy in seeing society once more register its approval for a tufted canopy up front is only tempered by my thoughts of those who didn’t make it through to see this happy day. But life is for the living, and the best way to know you’re alive is to affirm your virility by sharing your gigantic front shag with the rest of the world. I’ve never been prouder to be a man.

All writing is fraud, but menu writing is so over-the-top grasping and pretentious in its fraudulence that it makes regular writing read like our language’s most honest, elucidating prose.

Awl favorite Leon Vynheall has a hand in this one, so it comes pre-recommended. Enjoy. [Via]

In any reasonable world the frequency with which our ludicrously self-important political handicappers prove themselves incompetent at the only skill with which they are supposed to have any facility would result in shame, scorn and termination. As it is these same puffed-up “analysts” are going to get another bite at the apple with a series of “I was wrong about Trump — here’s why” pieces and then pivot so quickly to issuing predictions once more that you will forget they apologized in the first place. You must remember: These people don’t know anything more than you do, and they are so obsessed with keeping their seat at the table — no matter how far that table is from the center of the room — that they are actually more blinkered and prone to error than you are. Plus you at least have the good sense to shut your stupid mouth every now and again. God, why aren’t you doing our horse race coverage? It would be so much better. Please do me a favor and get one of those gigs.

by Juliet Lapidos

A friend who works in the movie business was ranting about the popularity of television and waxing nostalgic about the seventies, when his preferred medium was culturally ascendant. When I asked him why he thought television had dethroned film as the mass medium that matters, he answered that it offered a higher potential return on investment.

It takes an episode or two for a television viewer to meet the main characters, get the gist of a new show, and decide whether or not she likes it. If she doesn’t, she can drop it; if she does, she can look forward to a full season or even several seasons of programming. In exchange for an hour, she might secure dozens or even hundreds of hours of entertainment. Movies don’t work that way. At the end of a positive 90-minute experience, the still-hungry film viewer has no choice but to move on to another, self-contained work of art, which she may or may not find as pleasurable. Calculating enjoyment in terms of time, there’s no chance of a jackpot payoff.

We don’t binge on television because we like it, we like television — more than movies — because we can binge on it.

If binging is the objective, the popularity of serialized entertainment more generally — from multi-episode podcasts (like Serial) to franchise films (Batman, Superman, Star Wars, Fast and Furious) — suddenly makes perfect sense. Of course, the book world is in on the trend too, with serial novels across genres raking in cash for publishers: George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone Alphabet Mysteries, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

On a surface level, all this obsessive watching, listening and reading is a mark of tenacity, of dogged persistence. Who says Americans have no attention span? We are so dedicated to our stories that we are willing to submit to them for years! We will lose sleep and skip work to find out what happens at the end of Lost! (Not worth it.)

Looked at another way, though, our preference for binge-able narratives seems lazy.

That label won’t surprise television viewers, who are used to name-calling. It might throw podcast people, though, and book people for sure. We don’t usually accuse readers of laziness, even when they’re reading pap, since we figure they could be doing something perceived as even more lazy — like watching television. It may seem especially strange to say it’s lazy to read not just one, but six long autobiographical novels outlining the banalities of some random Norwegian guy’s private life.

But it’s ultimately easier to absorb series — all series, including Scandinavian literary series — than independent works.

The most demanding part of any narrative art form is the beginning, when everything — the style, the plot, the characters, perhaps even the universe in which the characters operate — is new. You must ask yourself: “What is this place? Who are the people? What are they after?” Series minimize that period of difficulty relative to the total experience. You do the work once, and then you’re free and easy for aforementioned dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment.

I speak from experience. Like most people I know, I watch what was once considered too much television — at the moment, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Veep, The Americans — and I have all but lost interest in movies. And for the last twelve years, I’ve been addicted to serial novels. Over that time period, I’ve never not been in the middle of one.

I’ve read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, David Lodge’s Campus trilogy, John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. I’m on volume two of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, volume three of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, volume seven of In Search of Lost Time and volume three of Anthony Trollope’s Parliamentary novels (a.k.a. the Palliser novels.) Eventually I’ll get around to My Struggle and Song of Ice and Fire. (I’m brow agnostic.)

I’m not flaunting my resolve; I’m exposing my torpor. Sure, many of the above titles are more seminar-reads than beach-reads. It’s disorienting, for example, to come across the first “Camera Eye” chapter in the U.S.A. trilogy — these contain autobiographical stream-of-consciousness writing — but by the third or fourth, they’re old hat. Difficulty decreases as familiarity increases, so I encountered less resistance, on the whole, reading U.S.A. part II (1919) than part I (The 42nd Parallel).

If instead of reading the U.S.A. trilogy I’d read three books by three of Dos Passos’ contemporaries, I would have had to expend far more intellectual energy.

It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with laziness. In my humble opinion, sloth was always the oddest of the seven deadly sins, and since our culture now shrugs off even the more obviously capital of the capital vices (greed, hubristic pride, lust etc.), idleness is surely no big deal. Besides, we’re busy, so it makes sense that we stick to what we know we like instead of taking the time — and doing the work — to try something new. Another, kinder word for our laziness is efficiency.

Please and thank you.

Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

16. BATMAN SOUNDTRACK 5,938 copies

63. JETHRO TULL AQUALUNG 2,033 copies

70. SUMMER*DONNA ON THE RADIO 1,955 copies

80. SANTANA PLAYLIST: THE VERY BEST OF SANTANA 1,803 copies

100. DAVIS*MILES KIND OF BLUE 1,625 copies

107. DENVER*JOHN BEST OF JOHN DENVER LIVE 1,582 copies

144. DR. DRE CHRONIC 1,363 copies

166. LOPEZ*JENNIFER DANCE AGAIN…THE HITS 1,236 copies

Just so we’re all clear, the Batman soundtrack is a Prince album, and this is what spots 1–13 look like:

(Previously.)

Jittery but not anxiety-inducing. Enjoy.