Where Did All My Muscles Go? |
There are pieces of my body missing. Well, technically they're still there, but I can't see or feel them anymore. Anyone who's taken months off from the gym or spent time in recovery from an injury, particularly after years of exercising, can relate. Your legs feel weaker, muscles on your shoulders have seemingly vanished, and your abdominals have retreated behind an expanding layer of fat. To use a medical term, it sucks. A few months ago, after pushing through a lower back injury and an abdominal tear on ibuprofen and denial alone, I finally took a sabbatical from lifting weights and running. The changes in my body have started to set in. I still mostly look like myself, just a slightly softer version. At first it was almost fascinating, like a science experiment where you leave a moldy vegetable out for a few months to see what gross new shapes it can mutate into. But the novelty quickly faded. |
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To Us, He Was James Baldwin. To Them, He Was Uncle Jimmy. |
In late 1962, James Baldwin wrote an open letter to his fifteen-year-old nephew, James, that was published in Progressive magazine and later included in The Fire Next Time, his third collection of essays. The oldest of nine children, Baldwin had previously used his family as an inspiration for his semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. On his first reporting trip to the South in the late fifties, he had witnessed the impact of racism on Black children who were subjected to white mobs during the fight for public-school integration. Now, in "A Letter to My Nephew," he warned little James, his brother Wilmer's son, that he "could only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n****r." Baldwin would educate his young namesake about the costs of being Black in America, and the low expectations that white people would have for his life simply because of the color of his skin. Yet he was also hopeful. "It will be hard," he told his nephew, "but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity." |
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Inside Kim Jong-un's Bloody Scramble to Kill Off His Family |
Kim Jong Un may be the world's youngest sitting dictator. But with his nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, he's already among the most dangerous. On July Fourth, he gave what he gloated was an Independence Day "gift" to the "American bastards": the successful test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile designed to obliterate American cities. Once his nuclear scientists get a warhead small enough to fit on the Hwasong-14 missile, he'll have a weapon capable of wreaking unimaginable destruction. While Kim stares down his enemies abroad, it's easy to forget that he's also fighting a battle from within his own borders: to survive at all costs. Like any autocratic leader, he's under constant pressure to maintain order and allegiance. But his youth and inexperience make staying in power that much more of a challenge, which in turn requires absolute control. Opposition must be eliminated. No one is safe, not even his own family. |
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Can the New Sonos Ace Headphones Unseat the AirPods Max? An Editor's Review |
Just when I thought we'd hit capacity on mid-tier consumer headphones, Sonos made its long-awaited entrance. We've already got classic brands like Apple, Beats, Bose, Marshall, and Sony. We've got luxury plays from Bowers & Wilkins, Bang & Olufsen, and most recently Dyson. Consumer headphones are a multibillion-dollar industry (Statista values it at $2.4 billion domestically and $18 billion globally), so there's a lot of money to be made off our active-noise-canceling obsession, and there have been a lot of shitty attempts to enter the market. So, did Sonos do it right? Do the brand-new Sonos Ace headphones move me in any way? Surprisingly, yes. After a couple months of testing, I think these are some of the best headphones available. At $449, they're good for music listening and travel, but they're best in class for at-home TV watching. |
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The Best Books of 2024 (So Far) |
It's time to check in: How's the year in books coming along for you, dear reader? Halfway through 2024, we're enjoying an embarrassment of literary riches—and now we're here to spread the gospel about our favorites. The best books of the year (so far) are taking us to dazzling new frontiers. In the fiction landscape, a spate of new novels offers visions of humanity from unlikely narrators, including robots, aliens, and the undead. Meanwhile, it's shaping up to be an outstanding year for memoirs; new outings from luminaries like Leslie Jamison, Sloane Crosley, and Lucy Sante will grab you by the heartstrings and refuse to let go. In the nonfiction space, some of our finest intellectuals have released titles that help us make sense of our changing world, from the culture-flattening force of algorithms to the future of work. Here are the Best Books of 2024 (so far). Watch this space—we'll continue adding to our list as the year progresses. |
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An Entirely Serious Investigation into Kamala Harris's Cookbooks |
It has been only a week since Kamala Harris stepped up to replace Joe Biden as the (presumptive) Democratic nominee for president. Already, every choice the vice president has ever made—what she wears, what she listens to, what she likes to drink—is being mined for meme potential and semiotic relevance. It's not Kremlinology; it's Kamalalogy. And so far the signs have been, I have to say, positive. Coconut trees. Beyoncé. Brat. But nothing has instilled more, well—to use a historically freighted word—hope than a recently surfaced photograph of a stack of Kamala's cookbooks. Because this image comes not from her official campaign but rather from a private citizen's shelfie snapping, it seems like an intimate glimpse that demands instant analysis. They're cookbooks, but they're more than cookbooks. So can we dissect them? Yes, we can. Harris's passion for cooking is well-documented, by herself and others. She religiously makes Sunday dinner. (Bolognese is her specialty.) She has a cooking show on YouTube. So the height of that kitchen stack shouldn't surprise us. It's the titles themselves that tell you—us, as in we the people—about the contours and catholicity of her interest in the culinary arts. Here is a person whose horizons are broad but whose focus is pragmatic. What is immediately clear is that, if these cookbooks are indicators of an overall umwelt, Harris values the restorative powers of cooking—not individually but as part of a community. In other words, she cooks not just for herself but for others. She understands food not simply as caloric intake but as identity. It would be a stretch to think that anyone could glean a lot about a candidate from a pile of books, so let's give it a try. Her library, at least as much as is visible here, can be neatly divided into a few discrete categories. Each tells us something about where Kamala Harris is coming from. |
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