Gather ye rosebuds
Springing forward
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
- “To The Virgins, Make Much of Time”, Robert Herrick
New York City was resplendent this weekend. Of late, I’ve not slept. Our time to relax and recreate is so brief, it feels wasteful to sleep in, as much as I’d like to. Two weekend days - days where work so often intrudes - just don’t feel like enough time for anyone to just fuck around; and people need time to fuck around, if they’re going to be their best selves.
So I woke early on Saturday, and headed to Manhattan. I had no purpose; I just needed to be around people, to be outside, to, well, fuck around. With the plague’s shadow casting about, it was time to gather rosebuds. I needed to be outside politics, outside news. This whole week - like every other damned week of this particularly damned year - I found myself clenching my jaw in habit, grinding my teeth, sighing in resigned frustration as I rode to my house on the subway.
Enough. To Central Park, I went; to a bookstore; to the supermarket, where people aren’t yet buying irrationally, but where there is a certain mood of tension hanging just outside of perception. The Atlantic estimates only 1,895 people tested for coronavirus in the U.S. By comparison, South Korea tested over 66,000 people within a week of its first case of community transmission. We know there’s more sick people out there; this weekend, they diagnosed someone in Far Rockaway, Queens. Do you know how hard it is to get to Far Rockaway? If it’s there, surely, the contagion is widespread. It lies among us imperceptibly, like the invisible mice our cats stare at in corners.
Sunday, the melancholy of losing an hour so precious to Daylight Saving Time struck deep. It feels unjust; I’ve surrendered so much of my time already, I’ve got to give up another hour? I couldn’t sleep Saturday, tossing and turning; my exhaustion kept me sunk in bed until roughly the eleventh hour, when finally I rose. I washed, dressed, walked outside.
And then I sat to write this newsletter. I was tired of writing about sad things and grave things, so I’m kicking the week off writing about light things.
So: Hi. I’m Raf. This is The Miscellanies. It’s a biweekly email newsletter sent Mondays and Fridays. It’s about science and sports and interesting links and mostly things I’m thinking about. Thank you for reading it. If you want to sign up, click on the button below.
The madness of March begins
The consolation of Daylight Saving Time’s arrival is that it marks the arrival of the best time in college basketball - March Madness. In case you didn’t know, this is the nickname for the men’s NCAA Division I basketball tournament. 68 teams play, and it’s a one-and-done tournament. But the preceding conference basketball tournaments (whose winners receive one each, respectively, of the automatic bids - there’s one bid from each of the 32 Division I conferences) can be equally captivating.
This weekend saw the first few champions crowned. Utah State stunned overwhelming favorites San Diego State (who’d started the season 26-0) with a last second three-point basket. The tournaments will continue through this week, with the bigger conferences (like the Big East, the Big Ten, the ACC, and others) crowning their tournament champions later in the week.
As a kid, I remember feeling the stakes were so high. They are, and they aren’t, particularly in a time like this. This is why watching games this weekend was a tonic; I could convince myself that nothing mattered more than Valparaiso knocking off Loyola of Chicago. Or that surely, if there was any justice in this world, then Belmont would finally beat Murray State. Starting Saturday, I flitted from game to game - landing on a taut Kentucky-Florida game for a few minutes, then switching to Villanova-Georgetown for another stretch. The only resemblance the latter bore to their 1985 title clash was Patrick Ewing’s presence in both; he is now Georgetown’s coach. But it, too, was a fiercely fought game, with Villanova edging the Hoyas by a single point.
Watching all these games distracted me from the melancholy I was sinking into this past week; I’m hoping this coming week’s slate of games lift my spirits, or at least provide distraction enough from the misery without.
OK, link time!
I’m going to kick off asking all of you for a favor. One of the blessings I’ve had this past decade is getting to know film critic Matt Zoller Seitz. You might know him as the lead critic at Roger Ebert’s site. He also wrote The Sopranos’ Sessions and Mad Men Carousel, among other books. But this isn’t about him; it’s about his wife, Nancy Dawson.
Nancy runs a phenomenal charity in Cincinnati named transformcincy. This is a free closet for trans and gender non-conforming youth in Cincinnati. Places like this are a blessing for people who are experiencing a lot at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives.
Can you take a moment and donate? It would mean so much. Thank you.
Imagine a world without YouTube. The Verge’s Adi Robertson did, and wrote about it.
Here's an in-browser fluid dynamics emulator that you can click and drag on to watch beautiful fluid dynamics patterns. Just enough of a toy to distract you when you need a brief distraction.
The New Republic eviscerates Cenk Uygur, last seen abjectly losing a congressional race, in The Myth of the Progressive Boss — “Cenk Uygur talked a good game about The Young Turks being the premier progressive media outlet. Then his staff tried to unionize.”
The Guardian reports that despite progress in closing the equality gap, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights, according to a new Gender Social Norms Index that contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 percent of the world’s population.
From Boston Review: “Millions of debtors, isolated, are owned by the banks. But if you’re part of a collective that owes $14.15 trillion, you all own the banks.“ Debtors of the World, Unite! Debt’s ubiquity is a burden, but also an opportunity.
The minimum wage machine, by Blake Conroy, allows anybody to work for minimum wage.
Fuck your gender norms: how Western colonisation brought unwanted binaries to Igbo culture “The concept of women as market sellers, political leaders and successful entrepreneurs was foreign to the British colonisers. With their arrival, they brought a rigid gender binary which was deeply embedded into the fabric of the colonial empire [...] In examining sex and gender in Igbo society today, it is evident that colonisation was not just an event.” I found this fascinating.
"Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she’s in trouble with 0 percent. These aren’t poll numbers for the U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Instead, they reflect which candidates were able to consistently land in Gmail’s primary inbox in a simple test." - how Google determines which candidate’s emails land in your primary inbox.
OK, I think that will do it. I love all of you; I hope you had an excellent, restful weekend. Nolite illegitimi carborundorum — don’t let the bastards get you down. I’m here for you if you need anything; if you want to talk, if you want a shoulder to lean on. Just reply to this email.