Parks and recreation: Nicolas McKelvie, formerly The Harper Review’s lanternfly correspondent, returns with another dispatch from New York City. Summer is on the horizon and the city’s second-largest park is back in business—over the past quarter century, more than $500 million in public and private funds were poured into the stretch of greenery that spans nearly a third of Manhattan’s western shoreline. Walking its length, McKelvie juxtaposes Hudson River Park’s sanitized narrative of redevelopment against the waterfront’s history as a site for artistic and activist experimentation. “This is a space that does not require someone to dream of other possibilities,” he writes. “The dream has been dreamt.” Park goers can simply sleepwalk through it or, like McKelvie, encounter a rude awakening.
Emily Sun, assistant editor
Sensational sauntering: A narrative peddled by followers of a wistful conservatism posits that the internet age is a torrent of decline and that more productive generations had it better. Faced with the reality that the term “brainrot” was coined by Thoreau in 1854, this narrative weakens. Thoreau’s era was no more intellectually stimulating nor more serious than our own, and as Betsy Kellem reports in JSTOR Daily, was “more than willing to pay admission to watch athletes walk in circles.” The popular fad of “pedestrianism” (literally, competitive walking) gripped an America obsessed with fitness, manliness, and spectacles of rubbishy entertainment (sound familiar?) and transformed men with a quotidian talent into instant celebrities.
Scientists, showmen, and temperance activists attached themselves to “celebrated pedestrians” to profit from their connections to celebrity athletes, and the wistful conservatives of the day lamented the loss of “walk[ing] for walking’s sake.” Pedestrianism was not a refined or well-behaved sport. A lucrative gambling industry developed around its major figures; one walker had his stool preserved in a ploy to get out of debt; a certain competition kept walkers going with “electric shocks and judicious doses of milk punch and brandy.” Despite the sensationalism and decidedly lowbrow presentation of the fad, serious America could not resist either. Thoreau himself found “genius” in “sauntering,” and prints of noted pedestrians sold quite well. Now, as some bemoan the internet’s addictions to tradwives and talking toilets, may we be grateful that, instead of watching debtors walk in circles, we can amuse ourselves otherwise.
Scientists, showmen, and temperance activists attached themselves to “celebrated pedestrians” to profit from their connections to celebrity athletes, and the wistful conservatives of the day lamented the loss of “walk[ing] for walking’s sake.” Pedestrianism was not a refined or well-behaved sport. A lucrative gambling industry developed around its major figures; one walker had his stool preserved in a ploy to get out of debt; a certain competition kept walkers going with “electric shocks and judicious doses of milk punch and brandy.” Despite the sensationalism and decidedly lowbrow presentation of the fad, serious America could not resist either. Thoreau himself found “genius” in “sauntering,” and prints of noted pedestrians sold quite well. Now, as some bemoan the internet’s addictions to tradwives and talking toilets, may we be grateful that, instead of watching debtors walk in circles, we can amuse ourselves otherwise.
Brady Santoro, assistant editor
Comedy of errors: A couple of weeks ago, I went to Ziwe’s live show. The eponymous comedian is best known for her celebrity interviews, where she deftly employs leading questions and ridiculous hypotheticals to lure her guests into committing racial faux pas. As an exercise in highlighting the absurdities and hypocrisies that accompany celebrity attempts to enter social justice discourse, Ziwe’s brand of humor relies on a steady stream of good interviewees. Watching media eccentrics try to wriggle their way out of her verbal traps gives her interviews their key source of humor. In one such clip, Ziwe chastises comedian Adam Pally as he balks at her request to reenact a monologue from The Color Purple. “I feel like it’s not really written in my voice,” he pleads, playing up his discomfort. Ziwe quips: “You’re an actor, aren’t you?”
On stage without tone-deaf celebrities or in-on-the-joke performers to skewer, Ziwe fell flat. Almost all her material came from earlier monologues or Black Friend: Essays, her 2023 collection of cultural commentary. She occasionally selected members of the audience to undergo the same sort of scrutiny that she gives interviewees, but anonymous Chicagoans make far less exciting targets than celebrities with public reputations to maintain. I still wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Ziwe’s video interviews to anyone remotely literate in online celebrity culture, but I’d stay away from her live endeavors.
On stage without tone-deaf celebrities or in-on-the-joke performers to skewer, Ziwe fell flat. Almost all her material came from earlier monologues or Black Friend: Essays, her 2023 collection of cultural commentary. She occasionally selected members of the audience to undergo the same sort of scrutiny that she gives interviewees, but anonymous Chicagoans make far less exciting targets than celebrities with public reputations to maintain. I still wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Ziwe’s video interviews to anyone remotely literate in online celebrity culture, but I’d stay away from her live endeavors.
Will Moursund, contributing editor
Run for your life: On the fifth anniversary of COVID-19 shutting down the United States, it felt fitting to return to The New York Times’ Decameron Project. During the height of the pandemic, when art, literature, and music largely disappeared from the public eye, The New York Times brought together 29 authors to memorialize the times we were stumbling through. Novelist Tommy Orange’s contribution, “The Team,” is brief and the narrative arc hazy.
Through a meditation on half-marathon training with “the team,” Orange’s character reckons with what team membership was and what it became, as the pandemic reshaped communal boundaries: “The new Team was the new future, which was yet to be determined, which seemed to be decided by individual communities and whether they believed in the number of lives lost and how it related to them.”
The lucid prose characteristic of Orange’s writing lends itself well to the delirium of early lockdown days. In the isolation of quarantine, things that once seemed to matter a lot mattered very little. The character’s half-marathon, work promotion, and relationships with his coworkers are eclipsed by closer concerns—his family, front line workers, and the whole human race. “The Team” is about running, and yet it has nothing to do with running.
Through a meditation on half-marathon training with “the team,” Orange’s character reckons with what team membership was and what it became, as the pandemic reshaped communal boundaries: “The new Team was the new future, which was yet to be determined, which seemed to be decided by individual communities and whether they believed in the number of lives lost and how it related to them.”
The lucid prose characteristic of Orange’s writing lends itself well to the delirium of early lockdown days. In the isolation of quarantine, things that once seemed to matter a lot mattered very little. The character’s half-marathon, work promotion, and relationships with his coworkers are eclipsed by closer concerns—his family, front line workers, and the whole human race. “The Team” is about running, and yet it has nothing to do with running.
Nora Holmes, contributing editor
Image: Winslow Homer,The Gulf Stream, oil on canvas, 1899-1906 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).