July 19, 2024 First Person Driving with O. J. Simpson By Harmony Holiday O. J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Sydney Simpson at the Kahala Hilton Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, February 1986. Photograph by Alan Light. Via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC0 2.0. My father and O. J. Simpson were passing ships in red Corvettes in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Circa 1977, the sunroofs of their nearly identical luxury cars open for maximum exposure, they would wave to one another like carnival jesters, my sister in the back seat squeamish at the irony, their white wives occupying the front seats in a Siamese dream, twin stars in the fantasy no one is aware of until it arrives in images. Such gestures were the requisite scenic signifiers for that era of post–New Negro black entertainers faced with the hedonism of psychedelia, blaxploitation, and the amphetamined economy of the Reagan years. They were transitioning from taboos to tabloids to well-adjusted, literal tokens, having made it to some sense of after all or ever after in a fairy tale blurring the wasteland upheld by the lucky-bland amusements of almost-suburbanites. Unkempt and illicit ambitions were their freedom and retribution. Read More
July 18, 2024 Dispatch Costco in Cancún By Simon Wu Photograph courtesy of the author. When we arrive at the Paradisus, I worry I have made the first of many mistakes. Has Costco failed us? A bland remix of Ed Sheeran wafts up from the swim-up bar in the central courtyard into the lobby. My parents do not drink. They do not like to swim. I worry that Ed Sheeran will follow us to our room. I continue to worry. Three months ago, I called Ramona, a Costco Travel representative, and asked her a question. What is the most popular and well-reviewed of the all-inclusive vacations offered by Costco Travel? Mexico, she said. And then she qualified: Costco members have many different tastes, but most have unanimously enjoyed a stay at the Paradisus La Perla (Adults Only) in Riviera Maya, Mexico. Compared to other Latin American countries, Ramona said, many Americans reported that the Mexican resort felt “worth it.” I was hesitant to join the crowds of U.S. Americans descending on the Caribbean, but Ramona maintained that Paradisus was the best option for my needs: parents who never vacation, mostly shop at Costco, and harbor a fundamental dislike of restaurants and an extremely low tolerance for what they determine is not worth their money. Read More
July 17, 2024 Arts & Culture Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing By Polly Dickson Some doodles by George Washington. Page from Everybody’s Pixillated: A Book of Doodles by Russell M. Arundel, 1937. Photograph by Polly Dickson. Doodling today is not what it was. Or is it? Google “doodle” and you’ll find the Google Doodle—what Google calls a “fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous” transformation of its logo by a team of dedicated Doodlers to commemorate significant, and not so significant, days: from the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank’s diary to “Chilaquiles day.” You will also find a long list of apps that take Doodle as their name, including the ubiquitous scheduling tool. This recasting of the word in the age of the internet takes us far from the freewheeling squiggles, squirls, and whirls decorating the margins of telephone books and notepads—which is, perhaps, what doodling once was, in some near-unimaginable bygone era, when we worked with pens and pencils on paper, and when our attention and our hands wandered in different ways. Read More
July 15, 2024 Dispatch At the Five Hundred Ponies Sale By Alyse Burnside Photograph by Alyse Burnside. I arrived in New Holland, Pennsylvania early, around 7 A .M., and drove down the main street, taking in the produce stands, machine repair shops, and country stores that bear Mennonite names: Yoder, Yoacum, Yost. Cattle graze in unpeopled fields, and in one, three Staffordshire Draft horses stood obediently, harnessed to a plow, as though posing for a painting. Lancaster County is home to many auctions, but the New Holland Sales Stables have been a mainstay of the Amish and Mennonite communities since 1920, and boast the largest horse auction this side of the Mississippi. The sale barn auctions more than 150 horses, ponies, mules, and donkeys beginning at 10 A.M. sharp every Monday, rain or shine, regardless of season, and even on holidays. The barn opened at 8 A.M., so I made my way across the patchwork of Lancaster County’s small towns, through East Earl Township, Blue Ball, and Goodville, past a Christian playground manufacturer with replicas of Noah’s ark, a taxidermy shoppe called Nature’s Accent, Shaker furniture showrooms, saddleries, dozens of churches, and hand-painted signs advertising asparagus, tulips, watermelon, raw milk, whole milk, lemonade, onions, potatoes, homemade berry pies, salvation. Read More
July 12, 2024 The Review’s Review Sad People Who Smoke: On Mary Robison By Adam Wilson ROBISON, HER DOG, AND, CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT, HER BROTHERS, LOUIS, TOMMY, MICHAEL, DONALD, AND ARTHUR, 1982. PHOTOGRAPH BY JEAN MOSS-WEINTRAUB, COURTESY OF MURRAY MOSS, FRANKLIN GETCHELL, AND ESQUIRE MAGAZINE. Mary Robison was interviewed by Rebecca Bengal for the new Summer issue of The Paris Review. I am reading Mary Robison and thinking about smoking. Specifically, I’m rereading Robison’s 1979 debut, Days, a collection of short stories about sad people who smoke. There’s Charlie Nunn, the retired teacher who smokes while supine on the rug, letting ash accumulate on his unshaven chin. There’s Guidry, the alcoholic who rests the day’s first cigarette on his sink’s soap caddy as he shaves. There’s Gail, the bride whose father strikes a match on his trouser fly to offer her a light. These characters don’t smoke because they’re sad; they smoke because it’s the seventies. Still, I’m tempted to read all the smoking as symptomatic of a condition that afflicts characters across Robison’s oeuvre: a near pathological refusal to consider any moment but the present one. When I first read Robison, I was also a sad person who smoked. That was seventeen years ago. I was an M.F.A. student living in my first New York apartment, a sixth-floor junior one bedroom ($1,300 a month!) just south of 125th Street on Manhattan’s West Side. I’d take my Camel Lights onto the fire escape, which offered a view of the shimmering Hudson. Unlike the characters in Robison’s stories, whose default mode is passive resignation, I was romantic; sadness and smoking were aspects of the “young writer” persona I hoped to cultivate. I’m embarrassed to admit that I once defended my habit to a girlfriend by explaining that cigarettes were my friends before she was around and that they’d comfort me after our inevitable breakup. All this is not to say that I wasn’t sad, or that I didn’t love smoking, but that both were integral to my conception of self. Read More
July 11, 2024 A Letter from the Editor The Ringo Starr of the Haiku Pantheon By Srikanth Reddy If you attended school in the U.S. like I did, the first poem you wrote as a child was, more likely than not, some version of the Japanese haiku. As a grown-up, you may have gone on to read the haiku masters Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson—the Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison of Edo-period Japan. But most Western readers have yet to twig on to Masaoka Shiki, the Ringo Starr of the haiku pantheon. Born more than two hundred years after Basho, this latecomer to the declining literary form launched a haiku revival in late-nineteenth-century Japan, writing haiku about modern subjects like baseball (“dandelions / the baseball rolled / through them”) and penning a memorable little essay titled “Haiku on Shit.” By the time of his death from tuberculosis at thirty-four, Shiki had written nearly twenty thousand verses and founded a new school of haiku poetry with its own literary magazine, Hototogisu, which continues to publish haiku today. Read More