Hello out there! Thank you for being here. I hope you’ve been rooting for fall as hard as I have. Everything winds down, we bundle up, the melancholia sets in. The title of this post is shamelessly poached from adrienne marie brown’s ode to autumn, Murmurations: A Spell for the Fall Equinox.
Curling up with a book and a blanket is a year-long affair for me but when the air gets crisp, there’s nothing better to guard against the darkness. I’ve been lingering on the last pages of Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel because I’m not ready to let it go quite yet. I’m seeing how long I can trickle it out, but it’s down to the final pages over here. There is nothing this woman can write that I won’t read. This latest one is about plagues, time travel, and how making art means you get to live forever. The construction is exquisite, and it makes for a bit of a nesting Russian doll with her last novel The Glass Hotel. Some characters are carried over, but it’s not quite a sequel so you can read them independently of each other.
I’m loving writers building their own multiverses, with side characters getting their own stories. Elizabeth Strout’s last book Oh William! follows a similar pattern. Her novels create a fuller universe, “more like the next row of stitches in a knitted blanket; new patterns arise, but the overall effect is of a world filling in, growing at once larger and more intricate.”
15-ish years into living in New York, the failed rat war is one of the things that still fills me with wonder. The latest policy was announced with bonkers swagger by Eric Adams, who literally opened with “"Everyone who knows me knows one thing: I hate rats. When we started killing them in Borough Hall, some of the same folks are criticizing us now called me a murderer because I was killing rats. Well, you know what? We're going to kill rats."
Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch stated “I want to be clear, the rats are absolutely going to hate this announcement.” The new rule? Trash will be put out at 8p instead of 4p so rats can have dinner a whole four hours later. This process will begin in six months. Maybe. The whole transcript of the press conference is pure camp. The rats continue to feast.
Meanwhile coyotes are taking over the Bronx. NYC Microseasons is one of my favorite newsletters, “a weekly witness to the natural and unnatural shifts” of our fine city.
Early voting starts on the 29th and there are lots of midterm monsters out there. Soft Power has put together one hell of a spreadsheet to help figure out how to vote in this coming election. I’ll be phonebanking this Friday from 4-6P for U.S. Senate Candidate John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. It’ll be run by Indivisible and the hosts of one of my all-time favorite podcasts, Gaslit Nation.
“Don’t let anybody know that your brain is touching wires.” My friend Ucheoma Onwutuebe’s latest essay “A Nigerian Attempts Therapy” will pierce you.
My Halloween costume research has begun in earnest. I hope the following provide some inspiration…
Last but not last, anything William Cobbing makes would be stellar to recreate, but very messy.
Till next time,
ASK