June 6, 2024 On Sports Undisputed: Fury vs. Usyk By Declan Ryan Screenshot of match highlights from DAZN Boxing. At about 1 A.M. local time in Riyadh, on a Saturday in late May, Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk met in the center of the ring for the chance to become the “undisputed” heavyweight champion of the world. It was the first time in twenty-five years—since the Brit Lennox Lewis beat the American Evander Holyfield—that boxing would be able to call one man its sole heavyweight champion due to the money-spinning, head-scratching antics of its various governing bodies. Tyson Fury is a six-foot-nine behemoth and gift to nominative determinism. He has become arguably the most “notorious” fighter—in his era thanks in large part to his size, but also to his unlikely resurrection story. Having beaten the man who was then at the top of the business, the Ukrainian Wladimir Klitschko, in 2015, Fury looked to have announced himself as the new head of the heavies before unraveling completely into substance abuse and morbid obesity, spiraling to a point where he seemed lost to boxing, and almost to life. In 2018, he lost most of the unhelpful proportion of his bulk to come back and face off against Deontay Wilder, a whip-cracking American heavyweight who had knocked most of his rivals cold. (The result was a split-decision draw, but he beat Wilder in 2020.) He’s since spoken of having made a suicide attempt at his lowest, and has become something of an advocate for mental health awareness, as well as the star of a Netflix reality TV series, large portions of which involve him driving to the local dump in a Volkswagen Passat. Fury—the self-proclaimed “Gypsy King”—is of Irish Traveller heritage and tends to give tabloid journalists profanity-laden, libel-baiting copy. Bald, love-handled, with spindly legs, a Brobdingnagian among the citizenry, he is fleet-footed and elegant in the ring, like some big-game beast suddenly streamlined within its proper element. He had seemed cocksure as ever going into the weekend, having previously called Usyk, who is much smaller, a “rabbit” and a “sausage,” among other slightly feudal insults. Unlike in every other weight division, where ounces are a matter of debate and contract law, in the heavyweight division there is no upper limit. Usyk has had other, even bigger things on his mind. Usyk is Ukrainian and had, following Russia’s invasion, for a time been on the front line. Usyk was urged to return to the ring to give his nation’s beleaguered but resolute populace something to cheer, so he brought a steely purpose, albeit a divided attention, to the clash. He formerly operated in the weight division below heavy, cruiserweight, and had been an undisputed champion there before bulking up to enter the more lucrative land of the giants. Impeccably well drilled and increasingly squat and solid, having grown into his new big-man status, Usyk seemed unmoved by Fury’s usual erratic rants. He also seemed unmoved when Fury’s father headbutted a member of Usyk’s entourage on the Monday of fight week, serving only to bloody his own head in the process. Read More
June 5, 2024 First Person I Cannot By Lucy Schiller Licensed under CCO 4.0, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Last year, a formal tone that sounded nothing like my speaking voice started to sputter out from my cursor and onto the page: “I cannot think about it now,” “I journeyed back to my abode.” Words elongated, and phrasings—strange ones—appeared. I watched the sentences extend, and noticed they were saying very little, but that they were saying this little in very mannered ways. “At the shore, attempting to reel in my kayak amidst the smooth stones and locally famous sea glass, I suffered a gigantic spasm of the muscles in my back, so painful I could not speak but to scream,” I wrote—not a terrible sentence, and not describing nothing, but when have I ever spoken the formulation “could not __ but to ___”? Or the word “amidst”? When, last year, I saw in my prose that falseness and false formality, I wondered where it had come from. I seemed to be a few minutes away from using whence. I seemed to be searching for a rhythm that wouldn’t come, and reading over tatters of drafts later, I realized I was attempting to write prose in what was basically iambic pentameter, as if this classic formal constraint contained within it the key, the one key, to a sense of writing well, a sense so rare that year for me to find at all. From whence this sense of language-pressed-through-sieve? From where did it first flow, that impulse toward the cannot instead of the can’t, I wondered, and the immediate answer that occurred to me was, strangely but also obviously, the internet, which supplies phrases like “I am deceased” and “I simply cannot.” I thought to myself that I do not, anymore, use the internet to read very deeply. Read More
June 4, 2024 Dinner Parties Top Three Rivers By Christopher Chang The Nile River. Photograph by Vyacheslav Argenberg. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0. “Top three rivers. Go.” I wasn’t even sure I could name three rivers, let alone rank them, until Ruthie started rattling off her favorites. For most of dinner she had kept her twelve-year-old head buried in a stack of printer paper, only surfacing for the occasional bite of food. Her hair had grown into a long bob near her shoulders with a curtain of bangs that parted to reveal her face, resulting in us calling her Joey Ramone until her pleas of “Stoppppp” weighed more sincere than playful. She has since cut her hair. There were eight of us in total: Ruthie, her parents, another couple, a gallerist and one of her artists, and me. It was a cold night in January, and we enjoyed a hearty meal of risotto, roasted vegetables, and salad. I had come to New York from Los Angeles to use a free companion flight certificate that was due to expire, and I was ten, maybe fifteen minutes late, prompting the low-hanging chorus of “Well, he came all the way from California!” Read More
May 31, 2024 Dispatch Dorm Room Art?: At the Biennale By Camille Jacobson Walton Ford, Culpabilis, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York. Photograph by Charlie Rubin. I touch down at Marco Polo on Wednesday afternoon, one among the many who have come for the preopening days of the Venice Biennale. The airport—with its series of moving walkways shepherding passengers toward the dock—will turn out to be the only place in the city where I manage not to get lost. The line for the water-bus into the city is easy to spot, and as we wait for the next boat to arrive I count fifteen Rimowas, five pairs of Tabis, and several head-to-toe outfits of Issey Miyake. The boat ride, unaccountably, takes an hour. I alternate between fending off seasickness and watching the Instagram Story of a microinfluencer who’d been on my flight and is already flying down the Grand Canal in a private water taxi. Read More
May 30, 2024 First Person Feral Goblin: Hospital Diary By Kate Riley Hospital corridor. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public domain. When I entered the emergency room at 3 A.M., I knew only that the fragment of crab shell in my throat could not be swallowed, extracted, or solved with marshmallows (the glottal escorts recommended online). The actual solution was morphine and emergency surgery; up until I recovered consciousness, my visit to the hospital represented some of the most pleasant hours of 2024. When I woke, it was to a body with several new ports of entry, established so that my most tender innards could be tethered directly to the hospital bed. My gown was essentially a garrote with modesty bib attached, and mysterious things had been taped to my arms and legs; a tube to nowhere emerged from one nostril. I spent what felt like multiple twilit days wriggling up and down the bed, orienting myself by proximity to beeps, until my exovascular system got so tangled the nurses (themselves attracted to beeps) came running. I had been out of surgery half an hour. The nurses unwound me, retrussed me, and stupefied me with fentanyl just as a pack of surgeons materialized to deliver complex and consequential information about my health. A total of six surgeons comprised my “team,” and all six could have played background Kens in the Barbie movie. I remember humming to myself to drown out their talking; I do not remember repeatedly whispering “I’m asleep” while making eye contact with the lead surgeon, but I defer to his sober account. They summarized our morning: After extracting the fragment of crab shell in my throat, they found several smaller shards in my stomach, which they took for good measure. Then they glued shut the centimeter-long tear, as esophageal tissue is too fragile for stitches. They had pictures on their phones. Read More
May 29, 2024 On Books Anne Elliot Is Twenty-Seven By B. D. McClay Hugh Thomson, engraving for chapter 23 of Persuasion, 1987: “He drew out a letter from under the scattered paper, placed it before Anne with eyes of glowing entreaty fixed on her for a time.” Public domain. Anne Elliot is twenty-seven. She’s been twenty-seven since 1817, the year Jane Austen’s Persuasion was published. I, meanwhile, was somewhere around sixteen when I first read the book in my old childhood bedroom, with its green walls and arboreal wallpaper. I left the book alone after that, for almost twenty years, because it made me too sad. But when I turned twenty-seven I felt Anne Elliot slide into place alongside me. And when I turned twenty-eight, I felt her fall behind me. Persuasion starts after the end of a love story: Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth were briefly engaged eight years prior to the book’s beginning. Under pressure from an older family friend, Lady Russell, who did not view Wentworth as a suitable social match, Anne jilted him. But the years pass by, and the two are unexpectedly reunited. Anne has never stopped loving him; Wentworth, now a captain in the navy, has never forgiven her. “She had used him ill,” Wentworth broods to himself, “deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure.” He’s done with her, he tells himself after they see each other again: “Her power with him was gone for ever.” Of course, he’s wrong. Over the course of Persuasion, he falls back in love with her (or maybe just admits he’s never stopped loving her) and she proves her steadfastness. They forgive each other—he for her weakness and she for his hardness—and Wentworth will eventually throw himself on Anne’s mercy in one of Austen’s most romantic scenes, proclaiming himself “half agony, half hope.” She takes him back, they marry, and all is happily ever after. Why did this story, which is so happy, make me so sad? Why did I forget so many details of Persuasion’s story over the years, but unfailingly remember that Anne Elliot is twenty-seven? When I was twenty-eight, I told a friend that I was in limbo between Anne and Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, who is twenty-nine. Now my Lily Bart year, too, has come and gone. Read More