I’m on a boat! I’m on a boat! Everybody look at me, ’cause I’m sailing on a boat! — The Lonely Island (ft. T-Pain), “I’m on a Boat”
For years, it was an inside joke.
If anyone at dinner mentioned a boat, a beach, a cruise, or even a puddle, I knew what was coming: the Poop Cruise story. Parisa would describe a Carnival cruise she took where, on the way back to port, the ship’s engines caught on fire and they ended up drifting — turning a four-day vacation into a ten-day nightmare. She’d talk about the toilets not working, the biohazard bags, the tent cities on deck, and the general unraveling of civilization. She’d even describe how she spent days wearing a hotel bathrobe because they had no clean clothes left, a detail so iconic that it actually made The New York Times. (“Parisa Safarzadeh … packed mostly bikinis and sarongs,” the reporter wrote, “anticipating sunny Cozumel, Mexico. Instead, she found herself wrapped tightly in a bathrobe as night temperatures dropped below 40 degrees.”) It became one of her greatest hits, told with the same rhythm and detail every time. At this point, I’d heard the story so often I felt like an honorary survivor minus the trauma and the bathrobe.
Admittedly, I always thought it was strange that she called it the Poop Cruise. I figured it was just her nickname for the story. A little gross-out flourish added for dramatic effect. Then, this summer, the Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Poop Cruise dropped, and I realized everyone called it that. Apparently, “Poop Cruise” wasn’t her invention; it was the official, crowd-sourced title of the whole ordeal. Which, in hindsight, says a lot about both humanity and branding. Suddenly, it wasn’t just one of Parisa’s dinner-party stories; it was part of the national dialogue. Everyone was talking about it. Even Bill Simmons devoted a segment to it on The Rewatchables (“You couldn’t script this — it’s Titanic meets Survivor meets Jackass”). That’s when it hit me: she hadn’t been embellishing; she’d been under-selling it.
For those of you that didn’t watch the Netflix documentary, the story still boggles the mind. The Carnival Triumph left Galveston in February 2013 for a four-day pleasure cruise to Mexico. But when an engine fire knocked out the ship’s power, everything collapsed — air conditioning, plumbing, refrigeration, navigation. The vessel drifted for nearly a week, turning into a slow-motion sociology experiment: 4,200 people marooned in the Gulf of Mexico, improvising new rules for hygiene and sanity. The show captures it all: the gallows humor, the on-deck tent cities (no AC), and the Coast Guard patrolling the waters for submarine pirates. It’s grotesque and human and oddly moving.
For the inaugural watch party, we invited a dozen or so friends over for the viewing, and in honor of the occasion, everyone showed up wearing bathrobes and captain’s hats. It started as a bit — a kitschy watch party for the story I’d heard a hundred times — but within minutes I was riveted. And then, there was Parisa on the lido deck of the ship wearing the infamous bathrobe, hair blowing in the wind as she and the other passengers stared at the smoke billowing from the back of the ship. A reluctant extra in a real-life disaster movie. Her friend Nick, apparently the only person aboard with both foresight and a GoPro, had filmed everything once the power went out. His footage of the crowds camping on deck, the dark hallways, and the surreal camaraderie, became the backbone of the film. Which means the story I’d heard a hundred times was suddenly playing out on my TV, but this time, the ending came with closing credits.
We’re all in the same boat, stayin’ afloat, for the moment. — Ben Harper, “Same Boat Now”
As we watched the chaos unfold, I realized there was a Pulitzer novel hiding in there somewhere. Not a Titanic-style tragedy, but something messier and more philosophical. Something like Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow’s 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner — a novel that begins with an artist’s death and unravels into a meditation on spiritual decay, ego, and the desperate human need to find meaning amid absurdity. It’s part satire, part elegy, and part existential meltdown which is, also, a fair description of the Poop Cruise.
At its core, Humboldt’s Gift follows Charlie Citrine, a middle-aged writer who’s somehow both successful and falling apart. His mentor, the brilliant but self-destructive poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, has died broke and bitter, leaving Charlie with a box of letters and a lifetime of guilt. Charlie’s rich from a Broadway play he wrote about Humboldt — the kind of commercial hit that would’ve made his old friend roll over in his grave — but he’s stuck in lawsuits, alimony battles, and a relationship with a girlfriend who treats affection like a business transaction. Meanwhile, a wannabe gangster named Cantabile keeps showing up, dragging Charlie into situations that would be funny if they weren’t also slightly terrifying. Through it all, Charlie can’t stop philosophizing about art, death, and the possibility of a soul, trying to find meaning while his life (and his checking account) steadily collapse around him.
Charlie wanders through this collapsing world with a kind of wounded idealism, trying to honor Humboldt’s belief that art could rescue civilization even as everything around him suggests otherwise. Bellow’s writing mirrors that tension and at times can be exasperating with long, restless paragraphs that bounce between humor, frustration, philosophy, and slapstick. Chicago in the mid-1970s becomes a carnival of lawsuits, hustlers, gangsters, and spiritual noise, and Charlie can’t decide whether to rise above it or sink into it. The novel jumps from metaphysics to mobsters, from art theory to alimony payments, all driven by the same underlying question: what if genius, beauty, and moral seriousness no longer matter in a world increasingly shaped by convenience and spectacle? It’s funny and exhausting and very American. Swap the Midwest for the Gulf of Mexico and you’ve got the Carnival Triumph: a floating microcosm of people trying to maintain dignity while the civilized world, quite literally, breaks down around them.
When the power died, the Triumph became a Bellowesque metaphor come to life — a luxury liner stripped to its existential core. The air stopped circulating, the toilets overflowed, and the hierarchy of comfort collapsed. The same people who had argued over dinner reservations on Day One were sharing cigarettes and rations by flashlight on Day Five. Civilization, it turns out, is mostly plumbing and Wi-Fi.
In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow writes, “Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.” By that definition, it’s hard to argue that finding humor in the horror of the Poop Cruise — the actual event, not just the documentary — doesn’t qualify as art. It’s the instinct to impose meaning, to spin narrative, to salvage a little dignity from disaster. And as I often joke with my daughter Macy, that’s the beauty of art — the way it gives shape to the messy, the absurd, and the unmanageable. Nick’s GoPro footage is chaotic, gross, and occasionally beautiful, an unintentional masterpiece of American absurdity.
If Carol Shields’s The Stone Diariesfound grace in the quiet, ordinary patterns of life, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift chases meaning through chaos — talking faster, thinking harder, and refusing to accept that “ordinary” might be enough. The Triumph may have lost power, but it generated the one thing Bellow believed would outlast decay: story.
By the time the credits rolled at the viewing party, we were laughing and a little awed. Not because the story was funny (though it is, in a dark, Kafka-at-sea sort of way) but because she’d lived through it and still told it with humor. And maybe that’s the real Humboldt’s Gift: the ability to stand ankle-deep in chaos, recognize the absurdity, and still find something worth writing down.
Because sometimes, the only thing separating tragedy from comedy — or art from sewage — is a GoPro and a good Wi-Fi signal.
“You are at the center of a mystery. It is a mystery of love and of time. And it is the only story worth telling.”
-Andrew Sean Greer, Less
In March 2022—somewhere between “lockdown” and “return to office”—I found myself in San Juan, Puerto Rico, standing in front of a group of mostly strangers, giving an impromptu talk titled “How Woo Are You?” The setting was a co-living community. The event was called fake church. And while the speech itself is a story for another day, the real question is: how did I end up in that particular place, at that particular time, doing that particular thing.
It’s a journey story. And if you know me—or this blog—you know I love a good journey story.
This one started five and a half years earlier, in October 2015, when I left my job at OpenTable after nearly a decade. I had lined up my next role at Metromile, but I’d negotiated a three-month sabbatical in between. One of my goals was to write more (some things never change), so one sunny day during that break, I planned to take my laptop to a neighborhood café to do just that. Before heading out, however, I opened a piece of mail from my future employer that included a Metromile sticker and, without much thought, slapped it on my laptop.
The cafe was packed, but I snagged a four-top and settled in. A few minutes later, two women asked if they could sit down since no other tables were free. After quick intros, one of them, Andrea, noticed the recently placed Metromile sticker and asked if I worked there. Despite the fact that Metromile was still a fairly unknown startup, it turned out that coincidentally, she knew an executive there. That small-world moment sparked a conversation, and that conversation turned into a friendship.
Fast forward about a year, we were back at the same café catching up when Andrea said, “I went on the most amazing trip to Israel. You have to do it.” She explained that there was a nonprofit based in Oklahoma that organized ten trips each summer, taking groups of fifty people to Israel to learn more about the country. The trips were organized by interest, and one of them focused on tech—which is the one Andrea had gone on and the one she eventually convinced me to apply for.
Like many things in my life, I approached the application with a healthy dose of procrastination and a complete lack of expectation. I submitted it the night it was due, including a short essay and a barely thought-through video where I rambled about being curious, loving new experiences, and having absolutely no connection to Israel whatsoever. Miraculously, I got in.
So in the summer of 2017, I found myself at the Tel Aviv airport, boarding a bus with forty-nine strangers. (To be honest, at that moment I was questioning the intelligence of saying yes in this particular instance, but given a lack of viable alternatives, boarded the bus and took a seat.) A woman sat down next to me and introduced herself as Gillian. I have no idea what we talked about as we headed to our first activity (which, as an aside, was a goat and sheep herding competition), but that conversation turned into a friendship.
One of the things I learned about Gillian over time was that she had always dreamed of creating a co-living space—a big, shared house full of intentional community. Unlike most people, she actually did it. She moved to Puerto Rico shortly before the pandemic and established a co-living home in San Juan. So that is how, a few years later, with remote work still the norm, Parisa and I went to visit.
The house was busy—but in the best way. Ten people lived there full-time in seven bedrooms, with a few couples sharing rooms. There was a steady mix of short- and long-term guests, and the vibe was relaxed but thoughtful. People didn’t hang out constantly, but they genuinely liked each other. They’d share meals—usually loosely organized through WhatsApp—and they figured out logistics like bills, chores, and even car-sharing with remarkable efficiency. They also had a wide circle of friends who’d show up regularly for dinners, parties, and impromptu storytelling nights.
One of those storytelling nights was called fake church.
The idea came from a resident who said she wasn’t religious but missed the part of church where someone gave a heartfelt sermon or moral teaching. So the house created fake church: a rotating event where one person would share a story, ideally with a lesson or reflection, and then everyone would discuss. The first week in Puerto Rico, we sat in on one about a poet—Burke, I think—who specialized in the art of bleak realism. It was beautiful, surprisingly emotional, and completely different from any dinner party I’d ever been to.
Toward the end of our stay, they asked if I’d like to host a session. And—shocker—I said yes. Without (also shocker) thinking too much about it. Which is how I found myself in front of a group of people I mostly didn’t know, giving a talk titled “How Woo Are You?” in a tropical co-living house, because of a sticker I stuck on my laptop six years earlier.
“You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometimes, you just might find… / You get what you need.”
— The Rolling Stones
I’ve come to believe that saying yes—especially when it’s not part of the plan—increases your surface area for luck. That sticker on my laptop. That crowded café. That spur-of-the-moment application. That half-baked speech at fake church. None of it was strategic. But every one of those moments opened a door to something else: a person, a place, a perspective I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Which brings me to Arthur Less (finally).
Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, is about a man who also says yes without a ton of forethought—mostly as a way to avoid dealing with things head-on. Arthur Less is a middling novelist on the verge of turning fifty. His former boyfriend is getting married, and rather than decline the invitation (and appear bitter) or attend (and feel worse), he accepts every literary event, half-baked opportunity, and far-flung invitation he can find: a teaching gig in Germany, a book event in India, a writing retreat in the Sahara, a wedding in Japan. What follows is a round-the-world trip full of misadventure, mistranslation, and unexpected grace.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about saying yes. In my post about March, I complained—at length—about the novel’s protagonist, Peter March, who seemed constitutionally incapable of making an active decision. He wasn’t so much a character as a vessel of regret: a man who wandered into war, into marriage, into abolitionism, into fatherhood, and then wondered, decades later, how it had all turned out so badly. My frustration with March wasn’t just that the book felt inert—it was that its main character seemed allergic to agency.
Arthur Less is the opposite. He’s not exactly bold or decisive—he’s actually kind of anxious and bumbling—but he says yes. Not because he knows what he wants, but because he’s willing to find out. Less’s journey is made up of improbable moments – a misbooked hotel room, a shared cab ride, a stranger on a plane – that end up shaping his life. And his accidental yeses—clumsy, last-minute, sometimes entirely misinformed—end up opening his world in surprising ways. He connects with people he never would have otherwise. He discovers new dimensions of places and old relationships. And slowly, without meaning to, he begins to understand himself a little better. Not through reinvention, but through motion. Not through ambition, but through openness.
You’re not allowed to be fifty yet. That’s for people who have made their lives.”
— Less
At its core, Less is a comic novel about heartbreak, aging, and the quiet panic of irrelevance. Arthur Less is almost fifty, and he’s starting to feel like the world has moved on without him. His last book didn’t make much of a splash. His former lover is getting married. He’s invited to events where no one quite remembers who he is—or worse, they confuse him with someone else entirely. He worries he’s a footnote in the very life he’s still living.
Greer writes with a light touch, but there’s real sadness in Arthur’s self-doubt. He’s a man caught in that weird middle place between no longer young and not quite wise, unsure whether the choices he’s made have amounted to anything at all.
This isn’t a grand reinvention story. There’s no career triumph, no epiphany on a mountaintop. Instead, Less captures something far more honest: the low-stakes awkwardness of aging into your second act and realizing the only real solution is to keep moving forward. Or at least sideways.
In some ways it reminded me of The Stone Diaries, another Pulitzer winner steeped in the quiet tragedy of a life undervalued. But while Daisy Goodwill’s story was told in fragments, lost to history even as she lived it, Arthur Less’s story unfolds in real time—with all the confusion and comedy that midlife provides.
And of course, I couldn’t help but think back to A Visit from the Goon Squad—my post about time, memory, and the slow thievery of age. If Goon Squad was about how time steals, Less is about how time sometimes gives back. Not youth, not clarity—but perspective. And maybe that’s the better deal.
Time grabs you by the wrist / Directs you where to go.”
— Green Day, “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”
I think about that Metromile sticker a lot. About how easily I could’ve left it in the envelope, or sat at a different table, or avoided conversation altogether by putting on headphones like any normal café introvert. And then—no Andrea. No Israel trip. No Gillian. No Puerto Rico. No fake church. No sermon.
We make a thousand decisions every year that seem like nothing. We apply to things we’ll probably never get into. We say yes to a dinner that sounds sort of awkward. We get on a bus. We sit down next to someone. And those yeses—those tiny, throwaway, who-knows-maybe-it’ll-be-fine yeses—they’re what turn our lives into stories. Not always big stories. Not always neat ones. But real ones. And if we’re lucky, they bring us the people who make it all matter.
You don’t have to be certain. You don’t have to be fearless. You just have to be willing. Say yes, even when it’s awkward. Even when it doesn’t make sense on paper. Because sometimes, saying yes doesn’t just change your plans.
When Sweden gambled on a French general, it got 200 years of monarchy. When Alabama underestimated Abigail Howland, it got scorched earth.
I’ve played all my cards, and that’s what you’ve done too.
— ABBA, The Winner Takes It All
Parisa and I recently took a trip to Scandinavia—a few days in Copenhagen, a Swedish cruise, a train across Norway, and a solid amount of time marveling at how everything managed to be both efficient and cozy. While in Stockholm, the largest of the Nordic capitals, we joined a walking tour through Gamla Stan, the city’s old town. That part of Stockholm is especially stunning. The buildings look like pastel candy boxes, and the Swedes themselves are both impossibly beautiful and annoyingly well-dressed. As the tour wound through the cobblestone streets, we came across a statue right next to the Royal Palace of a man named Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte.
Now, I don’t claim to be a European history expert, but even I know “Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte” doesn’t sound particularly Swedish. And clearly, I wasn’t the first tourist to wonder why a French guy on a horse had such a prominent statue in the middle of Stockholm, because before I could say ursäkta mig, the guide stopped to tell us the tale. What followed was one of the most unexpected, wonderfully bizarre royal origin stories I’ve ever heard.
There’s not a soul out there / No one to hear my prayer.
–ABBA, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
Back in the early 1800s, Sweden was in a serious bind. They’d just lost Finland to Russia, their king had been overthrown, and the guy they installed in his place—Charles XIII—was elderly and childless, so not exactly brimming with heirs. With no viable successor and the monarchy teetering, the Swedish parliament did something bold, strange, and a little desperate: they offered the throne to a French general who was not only not royalty, but who also had never set foot in Sweden.
That general was Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a career soldier who rose through the ranks during the French Revolution and fought alongside Napoleon who, we might recall, was definitely against monarchies. But he was no fool. When a country you’ve never visited offers you a crown, you don’t pause to debate political philosophy—you say yes. He converted to Lutheranism, took the name Karl Johan, and—against all odds—turned out to be exactly what Sweden needed. He led them through the Napoleonic wars, brought political stability, and founded the House of Bernadotte.
And here’s the kicker: not only did this French general do the job well, but his descendants have now ruled Sweden for over 200 years. The monarchy he was never meant to inherit? Still going strong. Still French. In fact, the only person in the current royal family with an actual Swedish bloodline is Prince Daniel—the guy who used to be a personal trainer before marrying Crown Princess Victoria. Which means that the Swedish crown is, to this day, balanced on the broad shoulders of a man who probably once taught a spin class.
Take a chance on me
–ABBA, Take a Chance on Me
A wise man once told me that “desperation breeds creativity,” and the phrase has stuck with me. Standing there in Stockholm, hearing how an orphaned monarchy took a wild gamble on a French revolutionary and somehow ended up with 200 years of peaceful succession, it struck me as an odd decision—but not a wrong one. It also made me think about another unlikely heir: Abigail Howland, the steely protagonist of The Keepers of the House, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1965. Her story isn’t about thrones or crowns, but it is about what you do when history hands you something heavy—and you decide to carry it anyway.
Written by Shirley Ann Grau, the book is set in rural Alabama and centers on the Howland family, landed Southern aristocrats who have run the same plantation for seven generations. On the surface, it’s a story about inheritance, race, and the slow decay of old money in the modern South. But underneath, it’s about what happens when long-held secrets come to light, when polite society turns on its own, and when the people you underestimated decide they’ve had enough.
The Howlands are a fixture in their small Southern town: wealthy, respected, and just aloof enough to be mythologized. William Howland, the family patriarch, is a quiet man who keeps to himself, raises his granddaughter Abigail after her parents die, and maintains the land with a kind of grim, inherited duty. He also, as it turns out, lives for decades in a secret common-law marriage with Margaret, a Black woman, and fathers several children with her. Those children are sent away and erased from polite white society, but not from the family’s bloodline.
Abigail grows up sheltered from the scandal. But when William dies and she inherits the estate, the past begins to surface. At first, the townspeople still treat her with the same reverent distance they afforded her grandfather. But once his secret is exposed—and once she’s seen as the white woman who inherited not just the house but the stain of racial mixing—everything changes. Her fiancé, a rising segregationist politician, abandons her for political expediency. Her social circle vanishes. The town turns on her, not with torches and pitchforks, but with lawsuits, whispers, and slow-motion ostracism.
And then Abigail flips the script.
There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright…
— ABBA, Fernando
Rather than retreat or collapse under the weight of shame and betrayal, she leans in. Hard. She becomes the keeper of the house in the truest sense: not just maintaining the family name, but wielding it like a weapon. She uses her resources, her name, and the town’s own rules of inheritance and land ownership to dismantle the social order that rejected her. It’s not a redemption arc. It’s a power play. Cold. Calculated. Viciously effective.
I’ve complained before about the lack of intentionality in some Pulitzer-winning protagonists. Take Daisy Goodwill from The Stone Diaries, for example, who drifts through life while others quietly shape her story. Abigail is the antidote. She doesn’t just reclaim the narrative; she owns the ending. There’s no soft fade into memory, no quiet elegy. Abigail stays rooted in the house, in the town, in the blood-soaked legacy she’s chosen to defend. If Daisy’s life is a collection of photographs someone else left unlabeled, Abigail’s is a hand-scrawled manifesto in Sharpie on the front porch wall.
That said, The Keepers of the House isn’t a perfect novel. It moves slowly at times, with long stretches of atmosphere that veer into over-description. The racial dynamics, while central to the plot, are sometimes handled with the kind of distance that feels more convenient than courageous. And the character development outside Abigail and William can feel thin—people drift in and out of the story like background extras. It’s a book with sharp bones, but not always enough flesh.
If we’re still using the Scorsese framework I proposed back when reviewing Martin Dressler, this one probably lands in the Casino tier. Flawed, a little bloated, maybe not his best—but when it hits, it really hits. And like Casino, its final act is a ruthless, unexpected coda that lingers long after you close the book.
The history book on the shelf / Is always repeating itself.
— ABBA, Waterloo
But beyond structure or style, what lingers is the shape of the story—and who dares to shape it. Because that’s what these stories—Bernadotte’s, Abigail’s—are really about. The unexpected turns. The side doors. The idea that history isn’t always written by the boldest or the best prepared—but by the ones who said yes when no one else wanted the job. Whether it’s a French general grabbing a crown, or a Southern woman reclaiming a poisoned inheritance, the lesson is the same: desperation doesn’t just breed creativity—it sometimes creates legacies. Messy ones. Contested ones. But legacies nonetheless.
Sometimes the story isn’t passed down. It’s taken back.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time lately. Some of it is logistical: my youngest, Macy, just finished her freshman year at a prestigious performing arts boarding school, so the house has been (for the most part) kid-free for a while. Some of it is social: I’ve started to notice that I’m increasingly the oldest person in the room. (Recently, I met two recent UCSB grads—go Gauchos!—who were fascinated that I was in college when the Berlin Wall came down.)
But mostly, it’s Scott.
A few weeks ago, I was back in Arizona for my nephew’s—Scott’s son’s—high school graduation. After Scott received his initial cancer diagnosis back in 2021, I spent a lot of time flying back and forth to Phoenix, but this was the first time I’d been back since he passed away. (I wrote about him here, if you’re curious.) In his final months, Scott and I spent hours reminiscing about the past, which was wonderful. But we also talked about the future—specifically, the parts of it he wouldn’t get to experience. One of those was his son’s graduation.
As hard as those conversations were, the ones about missing specific milestones weren’t the hardest. No, the hardest moments were when he expressed regret: things he’d put off, assuming—as we all do—that there would be more time. Later is the most dangerous lie we tell ourselves.
A few months after he died, I read an interview with Anne Hathaway in the New York Times. She’d just turned forty, and the interviewer asked how she felt about “middle age.” Her reply: “I hesitate at calling things ‘middle age’ simply because I can be a semantic stickler and I could get hit by a car later today. We don’t know if this is middle age. We don’t know anything.”
For reasons I can’t quite explain, that quote has stuck with me. Maybe it’s because she’s right. Calling this “middle age” assumes we’re guaranteed an equal number of years on either side. But life doesn’t work like that. Time is not symmetrical. It’s not fair. And it’s not predictable. That idea—of how we talk about time, plan around it, and quietly pretend we understand it—has been rattling around in my head ever since.
“Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future.”
— “Fly Like an Eagle” by Steve Miller Band
All of which leads me to Jennifer Egan’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan’s novel is obsessed with time—not in a philosophical, abstract way, but in a deeply human one. Rather than telling a single, continuous story, Goon Squad unfolds as a kaleidoscope of loosely connected narratives, each centered on a different character—music executives, kleptomaniacs, washed-up rockers, PR agents, children, and more. Their lives intersect across decades and cities, sometimes only glancingly, but together they form a rich mosaic of experience, memory, and change. There is no true protagonist—just a web of people caught in the undertow of time.
One character puts it bluntly: “Time’s a goon, right?”
It’s a funny line until it isn’t. Because in Egan’s world, time isn’t just a backdrop—it’s an antagonist. The goon. The enforcer. The one that shows up late in the story and punches you in the gut with the realization that youth, relevance, possibility—they don’t last.
Time in this book isn’t linear. It loops, skips, fast-forwards, rewinds. It’s messy. It erodes memory, reshapes identity, and reorders the people we thought we were becoming. In one chapter, we meet a character in their prime; a few chapters later, we find them lost, sidelined, or forgotten. The chronology is scrambled, but the emotional progression is sharp and deliberate.
“Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”
— “Changes” by David Bowie
The characters in Goon Squad are all aging in their own way. Some go quietly, like Sasha, who gives up her impulsive, self-destructive tendencies to build a quieter life. Others rage against it—like Bennie Salazar, a record executive clinging to the ghosts of the punk scene and the gold flakes in his coffee. There’s a whole subplot about washed-up musicians trying to engineer a comeback through viral toddler stardom. It would be bleak if it weren’t so painfully familiar: a world where cool has an expiration date, and no one is quite ready to admit they’ve passed it.
Egan paints the aging process as both absurd and inevitable—especially in the context of a youth-obsessed culture like the music industry. One minute you’re at the center of everything, shaping taste and trend; the next, you’re a punchline at a digital marketing pitch meeting. Some characters try to reinvent themselves, others try to disappear, but most are left grappling with the slow realization that cultural relevance is fleeting, and personal identity isn’t immune to obsolescence.
Egan doesn’t treat aging with sentimentality, but she also doesn’t mock it. Instead, she captures that peculiar feeling of looking around one day and realizing the rooms have gotten younger while you’ve stayed the same. Or worse, realizing that you’re not the main character anymore—you’re someone else’s cautionary tale.
“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been.’”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
And then there’s regret. Goon Squad is full of it, though the word itself rarely appears. The most devastating moments are the quietest ones: when Sasha reflects on the trail of things she’s taken and the people she’s hurt. When Bennie revisits old recordings of bands he once believed in. When characters realize, too late, that what felt like detours were actually their lives.
Even the book’s structure reflects this sense of emotional aftermath—so many of the chapters take place years after the “main event.” Egan doesn’t show us the moment the marriage breaks, the career collapses, or the betrayal happens—she shows us the echo. The damage. The emptiness that lingers long after the decision is made. That narrative distance gives regret its full weight, reminding us that the things we walk away from don’t always stay behind us.
Regret in Egan’s novel is rarely loud. It’s ambient. It hums underneath the stories like a bassline you can’t quite tune out. You feel it in the silences, in the slide transitions of a PowerPoint created by Sasha’s daughter—yes, one chapter is told entirely through slides—chronicling the subtle rhythms of domestic life. It’s tender, inventive, and quietly heartbreaking. A reminder that the most meaningful parts of our lives often unfold in moments so small we don’t realize they’re worth noticing until they’re gone.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
Goon Squad reminds us that life doesn’t follow a clean tracklist. It’s more like a playlist on shuffle—disjointed, surprising, sometimes jarring, occasionally perfect. Moments you thought were throwaways become the ones you replay in your mind. And the songs you skipped too quickly—the people, the chances, the years—come back with a different weight the second time around. Egan’s novel doesn’t offer answers, just the raw material of living: time that slips, aging that humbles, and regret that lingers like a melody you can’t quite forget. It’s not always an easy listen, but it’s worth keeping on repeat.
A few weeks ago, sitting at my nephew’s graduation in the hot Arizona sun, I couldn’t help but feel the presence of someone missing. And yet, as his son walked across the stage, Scott was there too—in the past we shared, in the regrets we talked through, and in the reminders he left behind. Goon Squad hits hard because it echoes something I’ve been living: that time isn’t just something we lose—it’s something we carry. And the only thing more painful than looking back is imagining we had all the time in the world.
“[A] virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”
– Pulitzer Committee describing the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner for Music
“My left stroke just went viral.”
– Kendrick Lamar, the actual 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner for Music
I’m not exaggerating when I say I have been writing this post since 2018. Yes, you read that right. Six years. ‘How do you know?’ you might ask. Well, because the two quotes above describe Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., the 2018 Pulitzer winner in the Music category, and more importantly, they were the original inspiration for this post. Let me explain.
You see, back in 2018, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer for his album DAMN., making him not only the first hip-hop artist so honored, but also the first – and still the only – pop artist of any kind to receive the award. And not only did they surprisingly give the award to a rapper, they gave it to a rapper at the very top of his game. This was an inspired choice by the Pulitzer people and almost instantly upgraded the relevance of the award. Clap clap.
For those of you that have been around since the beginning of Pulitzer Schmulitzer!, “inspired choice” is not a phrase that I’ve used often for the Pulitzer Prize winners for Fiction. Granted, we’re still in the bottom half of the countdown, but as I’ve talked about before, sometimes the Pulitzer Prize pickers push puzzling picks that perplex prose purists. Try saying that three times fast. In fact, if we go way back to my very first post here, I discussed my least favorite Pulitzer decision – the seven times they looked at all the literature produced in that year and inexplicably determined that no novel was worthy of the prize. Although I don’t want to relive that one decision here, I can’t resist the urge to give a nod to my brother Scott and quote Geddy Lee from Rush: “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”
The 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: When (Almost) Everyone Wins
So what brought this six year old draft back to the forefront? Well, the kudos that I (almost) gave to the Pulitzer people back in 2018 I sadly must take back because I recently finished reading both of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners for Fiction, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingslover and Trust by Herman Diaz. You read that right; I said “both.” In an unprecedented move, these two novels shared last year’s prize. It was, literally, a tie, and the first time such a thing has happened since the Pulitzer was first awarded in 1918. I haven’t yet decided where each of these novels will show up in the countdown, but I am prepared, however, to lodge an official complaint about the result.
Last year’s decision to award a tie—a close cousin to the dreaded “no winner” years—left a similar bad taste in my mouth. Let’s be honest: no one likes a tie. Winston Churchill called it “a defeat for both sides,” John Wooden said it’s “a sign of mediocrity,” and Yogi Berra famously likened it to “kissing your sister.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a single quote praising a tie. Go ahead, I’ll wait. That’s why I’m adding this latest “tie” decision to my growing list of baffling Pulitzer moments.
Pulitzer Puzzlers: The Problem with Short Story Collections
It turns out that I have a third gripe with the Pulitzer Board’s decision process. In fact, this transgression eluded me for a while and only came to light as I wrestled where to put three books on the countdown: The Stories of John Cheever (1979), The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (1970), and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1966). You can see the connection; they are all collections of short stories.
I want to start by saying that I don’t have anything against collections of short stories per se. For example, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, is one of my favorite Pulitzer winners and will appear later on the countdown. But unlike these three works, Lahiri intentionally published her collection of stories together in the year that she was awarded the Pulitzer. There was a deliberate connection between the stories. It was supposed to be a book.
In contrast, the Cheever-Stafford-Porter collections contain stories published by each author years – and even decades – before their Pulitzer Prize. For example, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, was simply a meta-collection of three earlier published collections. And although she was awarded the Pulitzer in 1966, the earliest of these stories was written and published in the 1930s. Similarly, The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer in 1979, yet included stories from as early as 1946. These weren’t fresh, cohesive narratives meant to tell a larger story or explore a unified theme. They were reprints, however wonderful, of years’ worth of work. And yet, the Pulitzer committee treated this collection as the best “novel” of the year. So my beef with these choices isn’t that they contain short stories; it is that they are a collection of short stories chosen from decades of work that just happened to be released in a given year.
Greatest Hits Albums Are Just That – Hits
Imagine giving the Grammy for Best Album of the Year to a Greatest Hits collection. Sure, the songs are amazing, but does a curated set of old favorites deserve to stand alongside newly created works? That’s exactly what the Pulitzer Prize has done in the years when these collections won the prize. Should they have? I’m not convinced which is why these titles are ranked down here in the bottom half of the countdown.
I do actually have some specific opinions about the Cheever-Stafford-Porter collections, but before we go there, I would like to clarify that simply because I don’t think that a greatest hits collection should be considered the “best” of whatever it is in a given year does not mean that I think greatest hits collections have no value. I own plenty of them. Interestingly, I’ve found that the most valuable greatest hits collections are not for the iconic artists with storied catalogs, but instead for artists where their separate works don’t hold up on their own. You don’t want a greatest hits collection from The Beatles, Zeppelin, Springsteen or Pink Floyd. The same goes for Prince, Bowie, Radiohead and U2. Each of these acts has some sort of greatest hits album or albums, but they serve only as a gateway to delve deeper into the artist’s catalog. For example, The Essential Bruce Springsteen contains some of The Boss’ greatest tracks, but songs like “Thunder Road” and “The Promised Land” are so much more powerful when placed in the context of their respective albums.
That said, there are bands and singers whose greatest hits collections are all you need. This doesn’t necessarily mean that their albums are bad (although in some cases, they are). It’s just that they pale in comparison to their best-of releases. And since we’re big fans of lists here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer!, here is the definitive list of the 10 greatest greatest hits collections of all time.
The Top 10 Greatest Hits Albums (Because We Love Lists)
10. Aerosmith – Greatest Hits (1980)
This might be the oddest inclusion on my list because this greatest hits album doesn’t include a significant amount of Aeromith’s greatest hits. Released in 1980, this album captures Aerosmtih at their bluesy, dysfunctional best, right at a crossroads in their career. This version of Aerosmith scared me. And it’s hard to fathom now, but I do think there was a 57% chance that this band could have simply imploded given the volatile relationship between Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. But alas, it turns out this album instead paved the way for the massive commercial success that the band enjoyed later in the 1980s and well into the 1990s. So while you won’t get “Janie’s Got a Gun,” “Cryin’,” “Living on the Edge,” or “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” this album includes the classic-rock staples “Dream On,” “Sweet Emotion,” “Walk This Way,” and “Back in the Saddle.”
9. Madonna – The Immaculate Collection (1990)
If I was creating a list for the best name of a greatest hits collection, this would win hands down. Luckily, the songs on this album, covering the years 1983-1990 when Madonna rivaled Michael Jackson as the most influential musician in the world, match the greatness of the album’s title. Seventeen songs, 15 of which were Top 20s plus two new songs including the notorious “Justify My Love” which went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 but had its video notably banned (although really the song is just a backbeat with heavy breathing). Honestly, when Madonna first appeared on the scene, I assumed she would be a one hit wonder. I was wrong. From her first hit “Holiday,” to the teen pregnancy verse of “Papa Don’t Preach”, the Carmen Miranda infused “La Isla Bonita”, and the gospel inspired “Like a Prayer”, this collection reminded us how great her music had been up to that point.
8. Journey – Greatest Hits (1988)
Even though I lived through Journey’s late-70s/early 80s heyday (I was very, very young), I never ever purchased a single album. Not even after I saw them headline a show at the Phoenix Coliseum with Billy Squire opening (whose first two albums I did actually buy) while swilling Bacardi 151 and smoking menthol cigarettes (a horrible decision). Not even after I learned to play “Open Arms” on the piano because I thought musicians get all the girls (a much better decision).
Nonetheless, in the decades since, I’ve come around on Steve Perry who, I’ll now admit with a straight face, was one of rock n’ roll’s great voices. I’ve heard “Don’t Stop Believing” and Steve’s still confounding reference to “Streetlights people” a thousand times, and I enjoy it. But despite my coming around on Journey in general, there isn’t any essential Journey album to own, not even their 1981 blockbuster, Escape. Everything you could ever want or need from one of the cheesiest-yet-enjoyable bands of that era is in their 15x Platinum-selling Greatest Hits compilation.
7. Lynyrd Skynyrd – The Essential Lynyrd Skynyrd (1998)
My mom was from Huntsville, Alabama so growing up, I always felt a kinship to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” That said, I didn’t really take the band that seriously, partly because other southern rock bands like Molly Hatchet and 38 Special were kind of goofy, partly because concert goers calling out for “Free Bird” led to the song becoming the poster child of 70s album-rock excess, and partly because the band foreshadowed the trend of rock bands intentionally misspelling their names (see, e.g., Def Leppard). But over time, my admiration for the band (including “Free Bird”) has only grown, especially when you consider their catalog really spans only a four year period from the release of their first album in 1973 to the tragic plane crash in 1977 that killed singer Ronnie van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and back up singer Cassie Gaines. This collection distills the essence of their Southern rock sound, full of swagger, rebellion, and deep emotion.
6. Simon & Garfunkel – Greatest Hits (1972)
I feel like I didn’t really listen to Simon & Garfunkel until college when my freshman year dorm mate needed to play music to fall asleep so I spent many a night thinking about how “Bridge Over Troubled Water” could start off so quietly yet end at such uncomfortably loud volumes. The quality of their music as a sleeping aid aside, once you start listening to the duo, you can never stop. Simon & Garfunkel are like the cool, introspective cousins at your family reunion who’d rather hang out in the corner writing poetry than join the potato sack race. It’s like two melancholy troubadours just trying to bridge over troubled waters one introspective ballad at a time. One strums his guitar like he’s having an existential crisis, while the other harmonizes so angelically you forget they probably argued the entire car ride over. Their music is equal parts soothing and soul-searching, perfect for when you’re feeling both too intellectual for rock and roll and too sad to admit you just really want to listen to “The Sound of Silence” for the 10th time today.
5. Eagles – Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) (1976)
The Eagles’ 1979 album The Long Run was one of the first ten albums that I ever owned, yet even young me wasn’t totally sure what to think of this band. If TED Talks were around in the 1970s, The Eagles would totally be into them. They’ve got some wisdom to share, but sometimes you just want to scream, “Dude, it’s just a road trip, not the meaning of life!” For a band that sings about taking it easy, they sure seem to try really hard to convince you they’re musical philosophers. Between the meticulously crafted harmonies and the endless debates over what “Hotel California” even means, the pretentiousness can feel as thick as 1970s shag carpet.
But let’s be real—do you actually need their whole discography? Nah. Just grab their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) and call it a day. It’s got all the good stuff—“Take It Easy,” “Desperado,” “Already Gone”—without forcing you to endure the B-sides that didn’t make it past their metaphor-filter. It’s basically the CliffsNotes of classic rock: why slog through the deep cuts when you’ve got all the hits in one place? You’ll still be an Eagles fan, and you won’t need to pretend that The Long Run is your favorite album when we all know it’s not.
4. Elton John – Greatest Hits (1974)
Elton John is a glittering legend wrapped in rhinestones and rocket fuel and has been a rock star my entire life. In fact, Elton holds the record for the longest stretch between my first and last concert for any specific artist. I first saw Elton in 1982 on the “I’m Still Standing” tour when I was 14. I saw him last, 37 years later, in 2019 with my daughter Lily at the Chase Center in San Francisco. Yet, despite the fact that on both occasions I belted out “Rocket Man” at the top of my lungs, I just learned “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” on the piano, and he’s responsible for me wondering for years what a mohair suit was, I never owned a single Elton John album other than this greatest hits collection. Yes, because it is an early collection you aren’t going to get later hits like “Candle in the Wind,” “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues” or even “I’m Still Standing,” this album front to back may be perfect greatest hits collection.
3. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Legend (1984)
I’ll start with a couple of facts. First, Bob Marley’s Legend is the best-selling reggae album of all time, with over 28 million copies sold worldwide. Second, at 855 nonconsecutive weeks, Legend is the second longest charting album in this history of the Billboard 200 (surpassed only by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon). But numbers aside, Legend condenses into a single disc everything that propelled Marley to international stardom: his intricate songwriting, his astute political commentary, and, of course, the profound spirituality and universal appeal of tracks like “I Shot the Sheriff,” “No Woman, No Cry,” and “Redemption Song.”
And for the past 40 years, Bob Marley’s Legend has been as essential to dorm rooms as ramen noodles and IKEA furniture. Blame it on the iconic album cover, which seemingly captures everything about the man in one snapshot, or the string of must-have hits that comfort the soul over its 51 minutes, but Legend is tangible evidence that spirits do exist in music. Plus, it’s practically impossible to graduate without humming “Everything’s gonna be alright” at least once during finals week. I’ll leave you with one more Marley tidbit: I think that Bono’s speech inducting Marley into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 is one of my favorite tributes and not just because Bono is smoking a cigarette and keeps sniffing like he did a ton of blow beforehand. I urge you to watch the whole thing, but the end is beautiful: “Bob Marley didn’t choose or walk down the middle. He raced to the edges, embracing all extremes, creating a oneness. His oneness. One love. He Wanted everything at the same time. Prophet. Soul rebel. Rastaman. Herbsman. Wildman. A natural-mystic man. Lady’s man. Island man. Family man. Rita’s man. Soccer man. Showman. Shaman. Human. Jamaican!”
2. Queen – Greatest Hits (1981)
Queen was unquestionably one of rock’s great bands, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, none of their individual albums is a must own. Even A Night at the Opera, probably their most critically acclaimed work, has filler like “39” and “Sweet Lady.” So yes, as great as Queen was, I’m declaring them a greatest hits band, and you can get all of their essential material from one one of the many Greatest Hits compilations. I’d go with “Queen’s Greatest Hits,” a monumental album released in 1981, has sold over 25 million copies globally and remains a cornerstone of rock music history. With its recent re-release in 2021, featuring digitally remastered tracks, the album celebrates four decades of iconic hits from one of Britain’s greatest rock bands. As a gateway into Queen’s extensive repertoire, it captures the essence of their talent and musical diversity, from the grandeur of “Bohemian Rhapsody” to the infectious energy of “Don’t Stop Me Now.” (The two biggest omissions, “Radio Ga Ga” and “Under Pressure” (which is really a David Bowie song) can be found on both Greatest Hits II and Classic Queen if those are must haves for you.) Despite occasional criticisms about certain tracks aging less gracefully, the overall brilliance of Queen’s songwriting and musicianship shines through, making Greatest Hits a timeless treasure for fans old and new.
1. ABBA – Gold (1992)
ABBA gets a bad rap for no real reason. Until Mamma Mia! hit Broadway, even mentioning ABBA in a serious music discussion was considered a faux pas. Sure, their songs lean into the cheesy side, but of all the bands that face public disdain, ABBA deserves it the least. Their music, though undeniably tied to the disco era, is a cornerstone of modern pop. Enter ABBA: Gold, a greatest hits collection released nearly a decade after the band broke up that serves as both a time capsule of an important musical era and a testament to their enduring talent. From the iconic piano slide of “Dancing Queen” to the catchy rhythms of “Voulez-Vous” and “Take a Chance on Me,” the album strings together hit after hit. The contrasting melodies of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” and “One of Us” reveal the band’s versatility, while ballads like “Chiquitita” and “Fernando” prove that ABBA could do more than make you dance—they could tug at your heartstrings too.
While most artists throw together compilations mid-career or long after their prime, Gold benefits from hindsight. Released after ABBA had disbanded, the album is a refined selection of pop perfection, with no filler tracks. Each song remains a timeless pop gem, reflecting ABBA’s enduring appeal and knack for creating music that compels listeners to dance. The songs span nearly a decade, but they flow seamlessly, showcasing ABBA’s knack for timeless pop. And it’s the seamless flow of all nineteen tracks on “ABBA: Gold” that begs the question: is this the ultimate greatest hits compilation? Spoiler Alert: the answer is a resounding yes.
Can We Just Get Back to the Books?
The answer is also a resounding yes. I appreciate your patience but that is enough of our distraction and we can turn our attention back to the three short story collections starting with the earliest winner, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.
1.Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) was best known for her short stories, though she also wrote novels, essays, and journalism. Her life, marked by multiple marriages, financial instability, and international travels, infused her writing with a deep sense of human frailty and existential contemplation. After nearly dying in the 1918 influenza pandemic, Porter’s perspective on life and death shifted, a theme that surfaces prominently in her most famous work.
“Pale Horse, Pale Rider” is perhaps her defining story, set against the backdrop of World War I and the flu pandemic, where the protagonist’s brush with death becomes a haunting meditation on survival and loss. In “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Porter masterfully captures the inner turmoil of a dying woman reflecting on her life’s regrets and missed opportunities. And in “Flowering Judas,” Porter delves into political disillusionment, telling the story of a young woman caught between revolutionary ideals and personal moral conflict in post-revolutionary Mexico.
Porter’s prose is lyrical and deeply psychological, often tinged with a sense of doom. Her stories are layered with symbolism, and her characters grapple with the weight of betrayal, mortality, and the complexities of human relationships. While sometimes dense, her work is widely respected for its precision and depth, offering a timeless exploration of the darker sides of the human condition.
2.Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford (1915–1979) was known for her sharp psychological insight and finely crafted prose. Her difficult early life—marked by family struggles, mental health issues, and a near-fatal car accident that left her with lifelong scars—infused much of her writing. Stafford’s tumultuous marriage to poet Robert Lowell also shaped her later works, with themes of isolation, identity, and emotional hardship running through her stories.
One of her most celebrated pieces, “The Interior Castle,” delves into the psychological aftermath of a car accident, exploring the protagonist’s detached inner world and the pain of recovery. In “In the Zoo,” two orphaned sisters reflect on their abusive upbringing, a chilling meditation on cruelty and emotional survival. Meanwhile, “Bad Characters” examines childhood innocence lost, as Stafford taps into the darker side of growing up, where early experiences shape adult lives in irrevocable ways.
Stafford’s style, more formal and detached than Porter’s or Cheever’s, brings a cold realism to her stories. Her characters often wrestle with trauma, displacement, and the weight of societal pressures, making her work both emotionally charged and meticulously controlled.
3.John Cheever
John Cheever (1912–1982), often referred to as “the Chekhov of the suburbs,” masterfully captured the ennui of post-World War II middle-class America. His characters float through suburban life, their outward contentment masking deep inner disillusionment. Perhaps no story exemplifies this better than “The Swimmer,” where Neddy Merrill, an affluent suburbanite, embarks on a surreal journey, swimming through his neighbors’ pools only to discover that time and his life have slipped away from him. It’s a disarmingly simple premise that unravels into an exploration of aging, denial, and personal collapse.
Then there’s “The Enormous Radio,” where a couple’s new radio starts picking up their neighbors’ conversations, revealing the dark underbelly of seemingly perfect lives. It’s quintessential Cheever—deceptively domestic yet sinister, showing how easily the walls of normalcy can crumble.
And in “Goodbye, My Brother,” Cheever taps into the familial conflicts that simmer under the surface of respectability. The story’s narrator clashes with his pessimistic brother at a family reunion, reflecting Cheever’s recurring themes of nostalgia, guilt, and the desire for escape from the expectations of American life.
Cheever’s stories, with their delicate balance of humor, melancholy, and a touch of magical realism, stand apart for their vivid exploration of what lies beneath the surface of suburban dreams. They may be about cocktail parties, manicured lawns, and swimming pools, but they dig deep into the quiet despair that often accompanies them.
Despite their stylistic differences, Porter, Stafford, and Cheever are bound by shared thematic undercurrents. Isolation and alienation loom large in their work, as characters grapple with emotional disconnection from those around them, often feeling trapped by circumstances or societal norms. Memory and the weight of the past also shape much of their fiction—whether it’s trauma, regret, or longing, each author presents characters haunted by what they can’t change. Mortality is ever-present too, with death looming over these stories in different forms: quiet resignation for Cheever’s characters, deep psychological turmoil for Stafford’s, and philosophical contemplation for Porter’s. Gender dynamics and power struggles add another layer, as all three authors subtly critique the societal expectations that confine both women and men. And, of course, there’s the ever-present disillusionment with society itself—a deep-seated sense that the systems around them are failing, leaving their characters adrift.
This is all well and good, but do you have any actual opinions you’d like to share?
Once again, a resounding yes. Although I’m going to rank them all together, I do not like them all the same. So in keeping with the Pulitzer Schmuliitzer theme, I’ll give them to you in reverse order of how much I like them.
My least favorite is the collection of Jean Stafford’s stories. Her stories, while critically acclaimed in their time, are less accessible to today’s readers (like me). While her psychological acuity and precise prose were once highly regarded, modern tastes have leaned toward more visceral or stylistically innovative writing. Stafford’s stories feel dated, and I found them hard to read. Her deep character studies may appeal to readers interested in a more classical, realist tradition, but that isn’t me. And I don’t think I’m alone. Of the three authors, she has faded more than the others from public view and is arguably the least well-known today.
Although I’m putting Katherine Anne Porter’s collection next, I will admit that she likely garners the most literary respect in academic circles for her precision, historical depth, and explorations of morality and human frailty. Her work remains a staple of college syllabi, and she’s often cited as a key figure in American literary modernism. Her stories like “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” resonate with modern readers as a tale of illness, survival, and the fragility of life—a theme made even more poignant in today’s post-pandemic world. That said, her layered, often poetic prose and historical insight make her work feel timeless, though her sometimes dense, introspective style might not appeal to all readers. In other words, after a while I found a lot of her stories, well, boring.
Which leads me to my favorite, the stories of John Cheever. While Porter might be more respected in academic circles, Cheever is probably the most widely read today. His stories tap into a timeless sense of suburban discontent that remains relevant. His lyrical, sometimes surreal style (as in “The Swimmer”) has left a lasting imprint on contemporary American fiction. He’s often seen as a precursor to writers like Jonathan Franzen or Richard Ford, who continue to explore the contradictions of American middle-class life. For me, his stories about American suburban life are the most fun, and still resonate deeply, and the mix of humor, melancholy, and magical realism makes his work appealing across generations.
So, when it comes to short story collections, we’ve established that pulling a ‘Greatest Hits’ album from decades of work doesn’t quite compare to an album—or in this case, a novel—crafted with a single artistic vision. Sure, they’re classics. But should they really compete with fresh new narratives? In my opinion—and in the immortal words of Kendrick Lamar.—’Sit down. Be humble.’
[Editor’s Note: Pulitzer Schmulitzer! is where we count down our favorite Pulitzer Prize winning novels for fiction according to the unpredictable and arbitrary whims of yours truly. To learn how Pulitzer Schmulitzer! started and read about the methodology or complete lack thereof behind the rankings, look no further than right here. If you want to see what we’ve covered so far, here you go. Now, on to the countdown.]
Note to Readers: I originally posted this article last year with the intention of refreshing the list every year as needed. Lucky for me, Rhianna’s performance didn’t crack the Top 13 so the countdown remains in tact. At least for now.
I love football in general, but the Super Bowl is something else entirely. It is more than football. It is football plus. Football plus crazy expensive commercials. Football plus a million prop bets. Football plus gatherings with friends and five layer bean dip. And maybe most importantly, the Super Bowl is football plus a halftime show extravaganza.
It wasn’t always an extravaganza. During halftime of the first Super Bowl in 1967, the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching band performed “The Sound of Music” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” in the shape of the Liberty Bell. To be fair, the show, titled “Super Sounds from the Super Bowl,” also involved two guys flying around with jetpacks (how do we not all have these by now?) and a weirdly large number of pigeons. In subsequent years the halftime shows expanded, but were more quirky than star studded. One year, for example, had an Elvis Presley-impersonating magician named — obviously — Elvis Presto.
But it really wasn’t until 1993 when Michael Jackson made the halftime show the must-watch event that it is today. It was a match made in pigskin heaven; one of the world’s biggest stars on football’s biggest stage and the modern halftime show was born. How did we not think about this before? The halftime show was no longer filler. It was now a thing unto itself. And playing in the show became one of the greatest achievements you could have as a musician.
This year we get a semi-comeback of sorts from Rhianna. The 34-year-old “Umbrella” singer has been keeping a relatively low profile while parenting (she had a baby in May with boyfriend A$AP Rocky) and working on her clothing line. So not only am I excited for Rihanna’s return to the music stage, but I’m also excited about the aforementioned prop bets which have been extended to the halftime show. (“Diamonds” is currently the odds-on favorite for first song, but I’m betting on “Don’t Stop the Music.”)
Before we get there, however, it’s worthwhile to do a quick look back at the 13 greatest halftime performances. So without further ado…
It’s hard to believe that when Jennifer Lopez and Shakira took the stage in February 2020, we were mostly unaware (or uncaring) that a virus was quickly spreading around the world and that within a month would turn our lives upside down. We were relatively carefree, and this show was all about fun. Shakira played the guitar and J.Lo rode in on a stripper pole. There was dancing, crowd surfing, a nod to bondage, a lot of horns, a Led Zeppelin sample, and Bad Bunny. The main critique of the show was that it was “too sexual” even though Adam Levine from Maroon 5 pretty much took off all of his clothes the year before. Given the pandemic years we have now endured, it is nostalgic to think back to times when our biggest worry was whether Shakira and J-Lo were too sexy for national television.
Without a doubt, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s performance at Super Bowl XXXVIII remains one of the most memorable, although less for the performance itself and more for the “wardrobe malfunction” at the very end. But the show itself was pretty awesome. Janet and Justin were great, but what people don’t remember is that this show was full of guest appearances. Diddy appeared out of a haze of smoke, Nelly showed up in a small red car to sing “Hot in Here,” and most randomly of all, Kid Rock absolutely ripped through versions of “Bawitdaba” and “Cowboy.” In fact, I think if you look at time on stage, Kid Rock might have the longest set.
But all we remember now is that Timberlake “accidentally” ripped off Janet’s chest covering (I’m not sure what else to call it) as they wrapped the set. The debate of whether it truly was “accidental” continued for years since that show in Houston. There were FCC fines assessed that have been litigated forever, but maybe the most important discussion has centered around why Janet bore the brunt of the backlash while Justin’s reputation seemed unfazed. Regardless, it was an amazing show and it’s a shame that what most people remember is just the last two seconds.
Paul McCartney’s set the year following Janet and Justin’s performance was equally amazing but almost the polar opposite in terms of presentation. Supposedly, McCartney was considered a “safe choice” following the “nipplegate” controversy, and although his show was less of a spectacle, it included a set list that may remain unmatched to this day. On an X-shaped stage, the ex-Beatle kicked off his set with “Drive My Car.” He then followed up with “Get Back,” before trading his guitar for a piano during a fireworks-laden rendition of Wings’ James Bond theme, “Live and Let Die.” Saving his best for last, McCartney signed off with “Hey Jude,” during which the 84,000 in attendance at Jacksonville’s Alltel Stadium all joined in for the iconic coda. The performance was both nostalgic and energetic and signaled the transition from contemporary pop acts to classic rock legends performing at halftime.
SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, hosted Super Bowl LVI and if you’re going to be in Inglewood, then there is no better choice for halftime entertainment than Dr. Dre and friends. And the friends list was extensive. In addition to pre-announced performances from Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and Eminem, we were also treated to surprise appearances from 50 Cent (who rapped “In Da Club” upside down) and Anderson.Paak on the drums for Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” From the opening when Dre appeared to play “Still D.R.E.” to Mary J. singing “Family Affair” to Kendrick’s modern classic “Alright,” the performance was not only the best seen in years, but also went on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special (Live), marking a historic first win for the halftime show in the category.
I feel like the 1999 halftime show may be my most controversial pick because it looks so dated when compared to, for example, the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake show that was only 5 years later. Even the television production seems closer to the 1970s than the 2000s. But I love this one specifically because it is so 1999. I mean, what is more 1999 than starting the show with a ska and swing dancing set from Big Bad Voodoo Daddy? But that’s just the beginning. Then we also got a medley of Stevie Wonder hits, and an extreme tap dance from Savion Glover, which Stevie joined. And if that wasn’t enough, you can’t have a Super Bowl in Miami and not invite Gloria Estefan who came out singing in Spanish. This was one of those epic shows that reflected the time. The US in 1999 wasn’t in a war, and couldn’t foresee 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, social media, or a global pandemic. You could really have fun in 1999, and this show reflected that.
The best thing about The Boss is that no matter how many concerts he has done over his storied career, he always looks like he is having the most fun right now. So the 2009 halftime show was basically a regular Springsteen concert. Which, to be clear, is a very good thing. With Bruce, there isn’t a lot of spectacle, but this show did have some notable moments beginning with his admonition at the beginning to “step away from the guac” and “put the chicken fingers down.” He then tore through “Born to Run” and “Glory Days,” but the most iconic moment came when New Jersey’s favorite son slid crotch first into a TV camera during “10th Avenue Freeze Out.” And watch the end where Springsteen aggressively flings his guitar over his shoulder multiple times, does a back and forth comedy routine with a fake referee, and then closes by shouting, “I’m going to Disneyland.” Epic.
Honestly, I have a hard time ranking Michael Jackson’s performance at the Super Bowl in 1993. From a historical perspective, you probably can’t beat it (pun intended). This was the year the NFL decided they needed to up their game to keep people watching at halftime. Since the NFL doesn’t tend to go small, they tapped the King of Pop to put an end to the marching band era and set the bar for all future halftime shows.
That said, if you watch it, it is a weird performance. First off, like most Super Bowl sets, it’s only about 12 minutes long, but it takes MJ at least 3 minutes to get into the songs. In fact, when Jackson first shows up on stage, he stands there completely still for at least 45 seconds. Then, for someone with a catalog like Jackson’s, his song choices were odd. “Billie Jean” is great, but he kicked it off with “Jam,” and then played “Black and White,” part of “We Are the World” and then ended with “Heal the World” while a giant globe inflated in the middle of the field. And I’m pretty sure he lip-synched the whole thing. In the end, this one needs to be included because of the impact it had, but it just feels like it could have been so much more.
If you like spectacle in your halftime show, Katy Perry’s 2015 performance is hard to beat. Perry enters on the back of a giant Tiger (or Lion) and yells, “Super Bowl, are you ready to roar!” Unlike Michael Jackson’s song selection, Perry hit all the highlights with a set list that included “Roar,” “Dark Horse,” “I Kissed a Girl” with Lenny Kravitz, “Teenage Dream,” “California Girls,” “Get Your Freak On” and “Work It” with Missy Elliot. If that wasn’t enough, she ended the show strapped to a mechanical shooting star for “Firework.” And of course, there was Left Shark, whose interesting dance moves immediately went viral. This was 12 minutes of lights, color, special effects, and a lot of dancing in high heels. What more could you ask for?
I think you could make a reasonable argument that Beyoncé should just do all the Super Bowl halftime shows. Beyonce in 2013 was at the top of her game (arguably still is), and the production value of this show was off the charts. (At one point there was a guitar with fireworks shooting out of it.) And there were the songs. She went through some of her biggest hits like “Crazy in Love,” “Love on Top,” and “Baby Boy.”
And that was all beforeKelly Rowland and Michelle Williams shot out from underneath the stage for a long awaited Destiny’s Child reunion. Together, the trio performed “Bootylicious,” “Single Ladies” and “Independent Women.” The 2013 production was so extravagant that half the lights at the Superdome went out, creating a 33-minute, 55-second blackout shortly after. Mic drop.
Once the Super Bowl started tapping A-list artists, you knew it was only a matter of time before Madonna made an appearance. If you’re the type who wants your halftime show to be a little over the top, then this one was for you. Madonna arrived at Indianapolis dressed as a Greek goddess on a throne carried by Spartan soldiers. From there, we were treated to a graphic stage, slackline stunts, a Roman theme, Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., and Cee Lo Green. At one point, Madonna climbed on one of LMFAO’s shoulders.
Madonna’s song choice was on point. After her entrance, she launched into longtime favorite “Vogue” before being joined by LMFAO for a “Party Rock Anthem”/”Sexy And I Know It” infused take on her 2000 hit “Music.” We even got a little controversy when M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj joined her onstage for “Give Me All Your Luvin’” and M.I.A. gave the crowd the middle finger. However, Madonna’s epic “Like a Prayer” finale, aided by Cee Lo and a huge robed choir, ensured that the 12-minute spectacle ended with the focus right back on the music.
If anyone was going to match the anticipation of Madonna’s performance, it would surely be Lady Gaga. Gaga is one of the most eclectic artists in history, and everyone tuned in to see what her halftime performance would unveil. Truth be told, she played it relatively safe, but that didn’t take away from the fact that this was one of the most visually stunning and vocally impressive halftime shows in Super Bowl history.
She opened with a medley of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” from the roof of the Super Bowl stadium, and then launched herself from the heavens down onto the stage, singing dance-pop favorites “Poker Face,” “Born This Way,” “Just Dance,” “Telephone,” and “Bad Romance.” And to close, her stage exit is probably the best the show has ever seen: She mic dropped, caught a football toss and hopped off a staircase into nothingness. No bowing, no waving. That’s how you end a show.
U2’s Super Bowl XXXVI show deserves a high ranking not only because the performance was great, but also because of what the performance meant. Less than five months after 9/11, U2 brought the heart-shaped stage from their Elevation tour to the gridiron, and the Irish rock band found a way to make this performance both strong and emotional.
Janet Jackson was originally scheduled to perform, but after that World Trade Center attacks, the NFL decided that U2 would be a more appropriate choice. They did not disappoint. The band only played three songs: “Beautiful Day,” “MLK,” and “Where the Streets Have No Name.” During the latter two songs, the names of those who were killed in the attack were projected on a giant screen across the Superdome. At the end of the performance, Bono opened his jacket to reveal an American flag in the lining.
Although “best of” lists like this are inherently subjective, you’d be hard pressed to not acknowledge Prince’s 2007 as the best we’ve ever seen. It had it all. He powered through his own classics like “1999,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” and “Baby I’m a Star.” He did mashups of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and Foo Fighters’ “Best of You.” He was backed by a brass marching band, and wielded a purple guitar in ways only Prince could wield a guitar. He closed the performance with the most perfect rendition of Purple Rain that included an epic guitar solo in the rain while the stadium sang along in falsetto.
Prince didn’t need to enter on a tiger like Katy Perry or fall from the sky like Gaga. The story goes that in the 40 previous years of the Super Bowl, it had never rained. Whether it was divine intervention or dumb luck, Prince created his own spectacular.
We are young. Wandering the face of the Earth. Wondering what our dreams might be worth. Learning that we’re only immortal for a limited time.
Dreamline, by Rush
Scott (2nd from right) with his lifelong friend Bill meeting Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson from Rush
My younger brother, Scott Horton, passed away yesterday. We knew it was coming, he was surrounded by family and friends, it was peaceful, and he did it on his terms. I love all of that and I’m doing my best to keep that in mind, but today I can’t help but mourn for the loss of a great father, husband, brother, son, cousin, uncle, friend, neighbor, co-worker, concert-goer, sports enthusiast, artist, traveler, cat-lover, and overall human. (If you want to know why he’s a “Horton” and I’m an “Orta,” buy me a drink and I’ll tell you the story. I promise it will be worth your while.)
Giddy up! (Scott on right)
Scott and I were born only 20 months apart, so I don’t recall a time when he wasn’t around. Because we were so close in age, our childhood was filled with endless front yard football/basketball/baseball games, cap guns, model airplanes, green plastic army men, comic books and ninja throwing stars. We built bicycle ramps so that we could emulate Evil Knievel, waited in line to see all the Star Wars movies, and had “firework wars” where we would shoot roman candles and bottle rockets at each other. Thankfully, no one was (permanently) injured, but we did knock out a couple of teeth.
Come to think of it, a lot of the activities we did seemed completely normal in the 70s but would probably result in a call to Child Protective Services today. For example, it seemed that every kid in the neighborhood had a BB gun, the most popular choice being the Crossman air rifle that you could manually pump to build up air pressure. More pumps led to more pressure and more pressure led to faster BB velocity. So with that backdrop, we used to have BB gun wars where the rule was that you could only pump your rifle two times. Because we were 10-12 year old boys and said rule was only regulated by the honor system, it was inevitable that someone would get shot, it would hurt, they would scream “THAT WAS MORE THAN TWO PUMPS!” and a smallish scuffle would ensue. Good times.
Yet despite all of the things that we did together, we were polar opposites in many ways. He played the drums (loudly), I played the guitar (badly). (Note that neither of us wanted to play the piano, which was the instrument chosen by our parents.) While I ate whatever was put in front of me, Scott would eat only plain foods and his diet consisted primarily of hamburgers with no condiments, cheese pizza, pasta with no sauce, and grilled cheese sandwiches. (For the record, his taste palate increased significantly once he reached adulthood. Or maybe 30.)
We also could never agree on which sports team to support. He rooted for the Dodgers, while I rooted for the Reds. He rooted for the Dallas Cowboys, while I rooted for the Pittsburgh Steelers. (As an aside, this latter rivalry got so heated mid-game one year that he threw a pen at me tip first like a spear with such uncanny accuracy that it ended up in my ear. Don’t fret, no damage was done other than I flopped more than a Premier League soccer player in the penalty area which I recall resulted in a spanking and timeout for Scott. Sorry about that.) He loved to play hockey – both the ice and rollerblade variety – and I still don’t get it to this day.
Scott’s early skating skills at work.
And in music, although we found some common ground mainly in the classics (Zeppelin, Stones), our tastes were not generally aligned. When I was listening to punk bands like TSOL, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Social Distortion and X, Scott loved hard/progressive/jazz rock bands like Night Ranger, Steely Dan, Cheap Trick, Triumph, The Cult and Joe Satriani. But if you know Scott, you will also know that he loved one band above all others – Rush. I cannot stress this enough – he really, really loved Rush.
I will choose a path that’s clear. I will choose free will.
I’ve spent a lot of words here describing what Scott did, but it is a lot harder to describe who Scott was. Quiet individualist comes to mind, but I might be more successful in this endeavor if I simply told you a story that happened long ago, but that I only learned of very recently. The story takes place at church. At least that is what our Dad assumed.
Our mother died when I was 12 and Scott was 10. That is important for this story only because when we went to church on Sunday, Dad was now a single parent and had to play zone rather than man-to-man defense. Scott, recognizing this, began telling our dad that he preferred sitting in the balcony with the choir rather than on the main floor with us. In hindsight, this seems completely unbelievable. Nonetheless, the ruse appeared to work and before mass began, Scott would part ways with us and head up to the balcony. What 10 year old Scott failed to mention but 54 year old Scott fessed up to, however, was that as soon as the service started and we were all now facing forward, he would leave church, walk four blocks (across a major thoroughfare no less) to a local store/deli called AJ’s that served milk shakes and had a couple of video games, and then when he knew mass was ending, he’d head back just in time for the post-church donuts mixer.
When he told me this story – again, only recently – I was stunned, and not because (a) I never knew this story or (b) it seems inconceivable that 10 year olds in 1970s Phoenix could do this every week and not be murdered or have some other bad thing happen to them. No, what stunned me was how smart it was. Scott did the calculus: I hate church, I like video games, and I like donuts. Hence, what clearer path to choose than one he chose? I need to use the decision making framework more often.
Scott at his high school graduation from Brophy College Prep. In the background is the room that had the donut mixers post-church services.
Why are we here? Because we’re here, roll the bones.
Although we obviously spent a ton of time together early on, as kids are prone to do, we grew up, went to college, settled in different cities, got jobs and had kids. If that wasn’t enough, Scott, the overachiever, got a Ph.D. at the age of 45. We spoke less not for any reason other than life is busy. Then, nearly three years ago, he called to tell me that he was diagnosed with what turned out to be a rare brain cancer.
As crises often do, Scott’s diagnosis reminded us what – and who – is important in your life. From that moment until yesterday, we made the effort to spend a lot more time together. And from that moment until yesterday, I watched Scott battle cancer and battle it well. He had two surgeries, two rounds of radiation, one round of chemo, and countless doctor visits. Through it all, he remained both stoic and hopeful that he would ultimately prevail.
What is even more impressive than how he battled cancer, is how the kid who would walk from church to AJ’s and back for donuts lived his life when the cancer and associated treatments took a pause and he felt better. In the last year and a half alone he traveled to Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, the UK, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. He saw the sphere in Vegas and hiked in Zion. We saw The Cult while I was visiting Arizona. His will to live – to really live – consistently amazed me. Unfortunately, as it so often does, the cancer returned in August, and this time, there were no more treatments to be had.
Scott at the Coliseum in Rome
The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect; so hard to earn, so easily burned.
Between Thanksgiving and New Years as Scott’s condition began to worsen, I was lucky enough to spend a significant amount of time with Scott, his wife Carol, and their two incredible sons Deven and Ryan. Their support for Scott, and each other, throughout this ordeal never wavered. It was extraordinary yet I’ve been struggling today to write something that appropriately captured this love without sounding rote. Luckily for me, Deven did a far better job than I could ever do in this Instagram post.
I also got to witness the effect Scott had on the greater world. Every day seemed to bring another string of visitors to wish him well, most of whom I’d never met. Neighbors, co-workers, former students and friends, all came by with stories of how Scott had impacted their own journeys. And of this group, I was most impressed by the friends that he has known for a lifetime.
I’m fairly sociable, but of the people that I currently consider close friends, the earliest are probably from high school and most are people I met later in life. In this way, Scott and I also differ. Of his closest circle of friends, most have known Scott since he was 7 years old or younger. I was trying to figure out why and how this happened, and I think it is because Scott was always Scott. In his office at home, Scott showed me recently how over the years he had collected some of his favorite toys from childhood. At first I thought this was just nostalgia, but upon further reflection there was a simpler explanation: Scott has always known what he liked and who he liked (and who he didn’t like).
And on that note, I’ll end with one more story to bring the point home. I found this book report he did when he was seven years old on Roger Staubach: Running Cowboy. I love this because he only had to answer two questions. First, “Tell what the book was about” to which Scott responded: “But he’s six-four and weighs 250, someone said. What would you do with him in [a] back alley. Listen said Roger, I’ve got four years of hand-to-hand combat I never got to use.” I searched for this book on Amazon, sadly to no avail. Regardless, I’m not totally sure he understood the question, I’m pretty sure that isn’t what the book was about, and I’m 100% sure that I love the fact that Scott thought that this passage was cool.
The second question was a two parter: “Did you like the story?” and “Why?” To which Scott responded: “Yes” and “I like football”. If only he had added “dumbass” to the end.
Nearly 38 years after Scott received an “OK” on this book report, his Ph.D. dissertation titled “High Fidelity Virtual Environments: Does Shader Quality or Higher Polygon Count Models Increase Presence and Learning” was approved and published. Although I’m 100% sure that I don’t understand this paper, it is clear that Scott had come a long way from his “I like football” days. But what is even more telling and touching and apropos is what Scott included on the “Acknowledgement” page:
“As I officially end my time in college and this chapter of my life, while moving on to bigger and better things, I’d like to quote Neal Peart of Rush in saying:
Why try? I know why
The feeling inside me says it’s time I was gone
Clear head, new life ahead
I want to be king now not just one more pawn… “
The last thing I told my brother yesterday was that I loved him and I’m grateful for that. At the risk of taking this Rush thing too far, Scott, I bid you farewell my extraordinary brother, a “Freewill” spirit, we celebrate your “Tom Sawyer” adventures, the “Closer to the Heart” moments that we shared, leaving us with “Time Stand Still” memories. And as you embark on the “Limelight” of eternity, know that you will forever be “The Spirit of the Radio” in our hearts. You were, and always will be, a king.
The Acknowledgements page from Scott’s dissertation (December 2014)
One of my all-time favorite blog posts is this one by Tim Urban which discusses the passage of time, and in doing so, puts into clear focus the finite aspect of our lives. In particular, he lays out a lifespan not in the usual units of measurement such as minutes or hours or months or years, but instead by activities. For example, a presidential election only happens every four years. Assuming I live to be 90, therefore, I’m only going to punch the presidential ballot about another 10 times. Yikes.
That example, by the way, was intentional. The four-year cycle of presidential elections (or World Cups or Olympic Games) is apropos here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer because it has been just over four years since my last blog post. Another yikes. There are lots of reasons for this unintentional break, but suffice it to say that unlike presidential elections, the frequency of my writing is entirely in my control. And knowing that, I came to the patently obvious conclusion that I’m not going to finish this countdown unless I significantly pick up the pace here.
Why am I thinking about this now? Well, part of it is simply that fact that this is the time of year where “best of” lists abound as we look back on another loop about the sun. (Another part of it is that I had a COVID exposure so am self-isolating on New Year’s Eve and have some time on my hands.) On an individual level, it’s hard not to use this time to take stock of our accomplishments and failures and grade our past twelve months. More importantly, however, the end of the year also gives us an opportunity to think about the year ahead who we’d like to be. Granted, in reality New Year’s Day will just be like any other Saturday in our lives. But it feels different. It feels like we have a chance to close a chapter and start again with a blank slate. And not surprisingly, therefore, it is also time for New Year’s resolutions.
Historically, I’ve never been a huge proponent of either forming or following through on New Year’s resolutions. Part of this is certainly my fault, but most of the time my resolutions were either too vague, too small, too big, too numerous, or really, too stupid. As a result, I often forgot about them or ignored them or simply failed at them after a week or two.
At the start of 2021, however, I adopted an idea that my friend Gillian wrote about a few years back: instead of doing yearlong resolutions, set 12 one month resolutions. This structure helps in a couple of ways. First, you’re more likely to succeed (and success comes much quicker), with this shortened timeframe. Second, if you don’t succeed on any particular goal, you year isn’t shot; you simply start again the following month. So on this, the last day of 2021, here is my look back at my previous twelve months. With grades.
DRY JANUARY
Grade: B
Giving up alcohol in January certainly isn’t a novel idea, but honestly probably was (and probably still is) the most important one for me. The more I read about alcohol, the more I’m convinced that drinking is one of the worst things you can do to your body. The flip side, of course, is that drinking is super fun. (Or, as Kid Cudi put it, “All the crazy shit I did last night / Those will be the best memories”).
But at the start of 2021 we were a year into the pandemic, and if there is one thing I’ve learned from COVID is that pandemics are hard and a break from booze was sorely needed. I wasn’t perfect; I actually started on January 4th and had two other events that month where I drank, but 5 drinking days out of 31 was my best in a while. A long while.
WRITING FEBRUARY
Grade: F
February was supposed to be the month I kickstarted my writing. Specifically, I wanted to post two Pulitzer Schmultizer blog posts. It was a total fail. That said, the fact that I did set that goal gnawed at me periodically through the year, and may, in fact be another reason why I’m aiming to publish this piece in 2021. (Spoiler alert: I made it.)
READING MARCH
Grade: C
Given that I’m an avid reader, you would think the fact that I spend so much more time at home without a commute would have led to a significant increase in my reading time. You would be wrong. Turns out that the commute itself provides some built in reading time. Removing that time from my schedule also removed a fairly ingrained habit, and I didn’t find a suitable replacement.
So in March 2021, my goal was to read for an hour a day. I gave myself a C, but I consider this one a success; I was just over-zealous on my ambition. An hour a day is simply too much (or is simply too much for me), and I realized this fairly early on. What I also realized, however, was that a half-hour was doable, revised my goal accordingly, and was very successful reading that amount. So maybe a C with an asterisk.
VEGETARIAN APRIL
Grade: A
I love meat. But, like alcohol, the more I read about meat, and in particular the meat industry, the more I’m coming to believe that we’d all be better off as vegetarians. While this has been a slow realization for sure, over the years, I have cut out some specific things from my diet. I haven’t eaten veal in forever, for example. More recently, I decided that I won’t eat any of the top 10 smartest animals. Granted, most of these are fairly easy to avoid, but giving up octopus and, to a much greater extent, pork, has been a sacrifice. As noted above, I love meat and pork is very, very tasty.
Despite my love of meat, however, this one turned out to be relatively easy. My only slip up was a booze-fueled, unintentionally enthusiastic inhaling of a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick. (For Pulitzer Schmulitzer fans, you are aware of my weakness for KFC.) I will definitely do this one again.
OUTDOOR MAY
Grade: D
If you asked me at the start of the year which monthly resolution I thought would be the easiest to accomplish, I might have said this one. My goal for the month was simple: do two camping trips and take two hikes. What did I actually do? One hike and one night in a glamping tent at Safari West where I stayed up all night listening to two mating geese. I aspire to improve on this one in 2022.
BEACH BODY JUNE
Grade: A-
The goal for June was straightforward: do at least 30 minutes of exercise every single day. I already exercise a lot so this one wasn’t a huge stretch, but like with my reading, the COVID disruption to my schedule had somewhat surprisingly resulted in me being a little less disciplined with my work out routine. I missed maybe 1 or 2 days during June, but otherwise met this goal and, more importantly, re-established a much healthier routine.
LEARN SOMETHING NEW JULY
Grade: C
In hindsight, this goal – to “learn something new” – was frankly too vague. I did absolutely learn some new things. For example – and this is a little embarrassing – I actually barbecued for the first time in July. I’m not kidding. Not only that, but the grill had seen such little use that it wouldn’t light so I had to learn how to replace the igniter. But that wasn’t really what I had in mind at the start of 2021. In my head my goal for July was something more lofty like to take a course. As such, I gave myself a C with the real lesson here to be more specific with my objectives.
DELETE THE APPS AUGUST
Grade: A
If my reading time decreased during the pandemic, my time on social media increased in equal measure. As such, August’s goal was to delete Facebook, Instagram, Snap and TikTok from my phone. To be clear, I didn’t delete my accounts. But simply by removing them from my phone – especially from the home screen – it required me to be much more thoughtful and intentional about accessing them because it also required me to log in on desktop or through mobile web. This little bit of added friction, believe it or not, totally worked to decrease aimless scrolling and even more importantly the habit of opening them up at any moment of downtime. I loved this one and have never added any of the above back to my home screen.
DO SOME GOOD SEPTEMBER
Grade: F
September was supposed to be the month where I did a volunteer activity every Saturday. Again, like Outdoor May, I went into 2021 assuming that this would be a layup and again failed miserably. Didn’t do one thing. Yes, work was really busy this month, and yes, one Saturday I was actually at my first post-COVID wedding, but I believe I could have done more to make this happen. Of all of my 2021 resolutions, I may be most disappointed by this one.
ARTS OCTOBER
Grade: B+
At the start of 2021, vaccines were just around the corner and I assumed that by October life would be for the most part back to normal. As such, my goal for the month was to experience some of the things that I’ve missed the most these past few years and see one concert, one play, one museum exhibit and one art event of my choice. I was close. I went to two days of Outside Lands (I’m counting that as the concert and the event of my choice), and went to see an Orchestra performance of Anime hits on November 10th (nothing this elaborate mind you but this was one of the “hits”) and the Art of Banksy exhibit on November 24th. So technically I didn’t see the play and didn’t do it all in October, but technically COVID didn’t cooperate either because of the Delta variant so screw it, I’m giving myself a B+.
GIVE THANKS FOR YOUR STUFF NOVEMBER
Grade: A-
Similar to booze, the meat industry, and mindless social media consumption, I often struggle with how much stuff I consume. Because November is the time to give thanks, this month’s goal was simply to not buy anything new (food items excluded). Like Vegetarian April and Delete the Apps August, this one turned out to be relatively easy. I had to buy one tie and one dress shirt to wear for a business trip to New York, but other than those purchases I was the non-conspicuous consumer.
REACH OUT DECEMBER
Grade: B-
Last but certainly not least was one of my favorite goals of 2021: make a point to reach out to people that I adore but that I don’t get to see. My original thought was to do one reach out per day, so 31 in total. Ultimately, the reach outs were much more lumpy and I probably ended with about 20 so I’m giving myself a B-. Nonetheless, when I did do it the responses brought me a lot of joy. Makes you wonder why we don’t prioritize this more often. (Also, if you just read this paragraph and are mad that you weren’t one of the 20, don’t be. The other thing that this resolution taught me was that there are so many people that fall into this category. I’ll hit you up in 2022.)
So we’ve reached the end of this post and of 2021. I’ll get this posted right under the wire, and promise that this weekend I will work on my list for 2022. Some of these I will keep forever (Dry January is definitely needed), some I will keep because I failed at them last year (Writing February, Outdoor May and Do Good October), some I will improve on (Learn Something New July), and some I will drop because I don’t need them (Delete the Apps August). But most importantly, I resolve to pay more attention to Pulitzer Schmultizer and make some progress on my countdown. I hope you all keep me accountable.
In the meantime, I’m going to leave you with words from two people much more articulate and wise than I am. Both are about life and understanding that it is very finite. The first piece is from a commencement address the author Joan Didion – who just passed away last week – gave in 1975 at UC Riverside:
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
And the second is a poem called The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski:
your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you. (I love this poem and the only way it would be better would be to watch Tom Waits read it.)
So I made it. It is 11:13 on New Year’s Eve. Wishing you all the best in 2022.
[Editor’s Note: Pulitzer Schmulitzer! is where we count down our favorite Pulitzer Prize winning novels for fiction according to the unpredictable and arbitrary whims of yours truly. To learn how Pulitzer Schmulitzer! started and read about the methodology or complete lack thereof behind the rankings, look no further than right here. If you want to see what we’ve covered so far, here you go. Now, on to the countdown.]
“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.”
-Victor Hugo
“The face you have at age twenty-five is the face God gave you, but the face you have after fifty is the face you earned.”
-Cindy Crawford
Sometimes I find it tough to read my 7-year-old daughter Macy. She’s mostly happy to see me and I know she loves me, but as I often tell people when describing her, she skews happy. She loves everything. For example, she recently found a note pad where you could list five things that you love. Macy’s list, in order (and spell corrected):
Hugs!
Kisses!
Soccer!
Musicals!
Dinner!
Macy’s list of things she loves. “Dad” did not make the cut.
It is interesting to note that like us here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer!, Macy is a big fan of the exclamation point. And it is also interesting, maybe more so, to note that although “Dinner!” made the list, “Dad!” did not.
So I was very excited Sunday morning when Macy, after working very diligently on a drawing at the dining room table while I read the paper, handed said drawing to me and said, “I made you a card.” I was even more excited when I read it because it said: “Thank you for being a rock ★ parent! I’m going to miss you so so so so so so so so so much. Love Macy.”
Pride in my own parenting skills swelled within me. I looked at my youngest lovingly and we had the following interaction:
Me: That is so nice Macy. Thank you. (Quick hug ensued leading to more pride swelling). But why are you going to miss me?
Macy: What?
Me: (Showing her the note) You said you were going to miss me so so so so so much, but I’m not going anywhere.
Macy: (Taking a closer look at the card.) Oh, I forgot something.
At this point, Macy took the note back, grabbed a pen, and quickly started writing. It took only a few seconds before she handed me the now augmented note that read as follows: “Thank you for being a rock ★ parent! I’m going to miss you so so so so so so so so so much … when you die! Love Macy.”
Although I was still happy that she was going to miss me, I was understandably a tiny bit conflicted about the prerequisite. It was a little morbid. But in her defense, Macy has been a little preoccupied with death these last few months and I think I know why. First, she recently asked if she could have a fish tank. So, over my objections, we took her to a fish store and brought home a five-gallon fish tank, a miniature castle, some foliage, and three little guppies – Fire, Joey and Sparkle.
All was good with the world for about 16 hours until she woke up the next morning and found Joey lying dead behind the castle. Tears flew from her eyes immediately and she decided that Fire had killed him. I’m not totally sure what Sparkle’s alibi was, but Macy was convinced that Fire was a bad apple. She was inconsolable.
Actually, I take that back. She was somewhat consolable and started to pull it together until I retrieved Joey from the tank and headed to the bathroom to flush him down the toilet at which point we had the following interaction:
Macy: What are you doing with Joey?
Me: I’m going to flush him down the toilet.
Macy: NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! (Tears flying out of eyes once again. Now actually inconsolable.)
Me: What would you like to do with Joey?
Macy: BURY HIM!!!!!!
So shortly thereafter, Macy and I were standing outside in the yard holding a fish funeral for Joey. We buried Joey in a small Kleenex box, his little guppy body laying on a bed of tissues. We said a few words, which was hard given the limited time we knew each other, but it was sweet. And as the last spoonful of dirt covered Joey’s casket, Macy said: “Can we get another fish?”
The second reason Macy has been fascinated with death recently is that I turned 50 this summer. I can barely believe I’m that old, but to my seven-year-old, it is inconceivable. (And you just thought of ThePrincess Bride). She’s just learning to count that high. In her mind, the difference between 50 and the age of the universe is not that much. Like 20 years.
So because we had many celebrations around my birthday, she was acutely aware that I’m the oldest one in the family that means, of course, that I am going to be the first one to die. And my death will be followed by, in order, Gigi, Sam and Lily thereby leaving Macy the last one standing. The first time she told me this, I was trying to get a sense of whether this chain of events bothered her or comforted her. I’m still not totally sure. But what I was sure of was that I didn’t want her to think that was necessarily how things were going to turn out, so I said something to the effect of, “you never know what’s going to happen.”
I’ll get back to that story in a minute, but first we must detour to Foreign Affairs by Allison Lurie, the 1985 Pulitzer winner that comes in at #48 on our countdown. Foreign Affairs tells the story of Virginia Miner (Vinnie), a fifty-four-year-old spinsterish professor at Corinth University who specializes in children’s literature. She loves travel and is off to London (which she also loves) for a six-month research trip with plans to write a book about playground rhymes. Her mood, however, is a little soured because a critic named L. D. Zimmern recently trashed her work in a nationally circulated magazine.
Also bringing her down is Chuck Mumpson, a sanitary engineer from Tulsa, Oklahoma and her seatmate on what would otherwise be a pleasant flight, who proceeds to accost her conversationally. Although currently unmarried, Vinnie couldn’t be less interested. She’s had her share of affairs and even a brief marriage, but at this point in her life, Vinnie has stopped believing that falling or being in love is a good thing. So to silence Chuck, she gives him a copy of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Unfortunately, this plan ultimately backfires when the smoking, drinking and generally loudly American Chuck contacts her in London. It turns out he has been inspired by Little Lord Fauntleroy to want to trace his own family history. Vinnie slowly becomes involved with his project, and then with him.
Meanwhile, in a parallel story, one of Vinnie’s young colleagues, Fred Turner, has left his wife, Roo, at home for his own sabbatical in London, where he is researching John Gay. In chapters that alternate with those recounting Vinnie’s triumphs and tribulations, we learn that Fred and Roo have quarreled and he fears the marriage is over. He consoles himself with the affections of a beautiful and aristocratic television actress, Lady Rosemary Radley, who gives him the entree into London high life. The exquisite but not so young Rosemary has never managed to have a really successful love relationship—though she is not resigned to this, as Vinnie is. Ultimately, these two stories come together when, quite by accident and with the encouragement of Chuck, Vinnie becomes an emissary for Fred’s estranged wife. What makes this favor more challenging for Vinnie is that Roo’s father is none other than the nefarious critic L. D. Zimmern.
I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that Vinnie’s relationship with Chuck opens her eyes to the fact that she has many years to live and a lot to experience, including love. Literate by nature, Vinnie comes to the realization that literature may have unintentionally betrayed her. “In the world of classic British fiction,” she reflects, ”almost the entire population is under fifty, or even under forty – as was true of the real world when the novel was invented.” Even today, in most novels ”it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction.”
But in real life – or the “real” life of Vinnie – she has many years to live and much to experience. Why, therefore, she concludes, should she ”become a minor character in her own life? Why shouldn’t she imagine herself as an explorer standing on the edge of some landscape as yet unmapped by literature: interested, even excited – ready to be surprised?”
As one who is now near Vinnie’s age in the novel, I absolutely love this and appreciate what Alison Lurie as to say about getting older. Foreign Affairs offers a wry commentary on who we perceive ourselves as being and the sometimes jarring reality of who we are and how much we are constructed by other people’s perceptions of us. The book is witty, truthful (sometimes painfully so), intelligent, warm, humorous, and ultimately inspiring. Fast forward 30 years and I’ll probably suggest Macy read it.
However, it is currently above her reading level, so when Macy handed me back the updated note she had written, I did my best to translate the message. I told her that 50 isn’t that old and (fingers crossed) I have many years of life and living left to do. She didn’t need to miss me quite yet.
As an aside, what I really wanted to do but can’t because she is only seven, was go one level deeper and add that she shouldn’t be anti-death (although again I’m not sure she is). Death is in some ways in underrated. To be clear, I’m not talking about senseless death, or early death, or painful death; not the death of war, terror, cruelty, poverty, abuse, neglect, suicide, disease. But normal death is our admission fee for the privilege of life. It gives life urgency. It makes life worth living. And yes, graying hair and creaky joints are part of that fee. Our lives are finite — so, as we’ve discussed many times here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer!, we should live them with gusto.
But in the end that conversation didn’t happen and Macy’s takeaway focused on the uncertainly because “you never know what’s going to happen.” So I shouldn’t have been that surprised to find the following message scribbled a few days later on a pineapple note pad:
“Can we please get another dog. We only have two fish and who knows if there gonna die? Love Macy
[Editor’s Note: Pulitzer Schmulitzer! is where we count down our favorite Pulitzer Prize winning novels for fiction according to the unpredictable and arbitrary whims of yours truly. To learn how Pulitzer Schmulitzer! started and read about the methodology or complete lack thereof behind the rankings, look no further than right here. If you want to see what we’ve covered so far, here you go. Now, on to the countdown.]
So my very public promise to write more frequently was a total fail. But, in all honesty, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. I’ve just been having the hardest time with this post. Here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer!, my usual formula is to tell a personal story and then connect it (albeit very tenuously) to the book I’m reviewing. And if you know me, you also probably know that telling stories about myself is generally not an issue. Most of the time, writing about the book is the hardest part for me. Not so this time.
So we’re going to flip things around and start with the book: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner. Set in a small community on the coast of Maine, Olive Kitteridge is a “novel-in-stories,” a book-length collection of short stories that are interconnected. Think The Canterbury Tales, or, if you’re looking for more Pulitzer themed examples, Jennifer Egan’s 2011 Pulitzer Winner A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Junot Diaz’ non-Pulitzer winner but still popular This is Where You Lose Her (he did win the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)).
If the author can pull it off, I’m a fan of the novel-in-stories format. (Actually, I like the format in other mediums as well. For example, some of my favorite movies are very Olive Kitteridge-esque. The Player, Magnolia, Go, and of course the (relatively) new Christmas classic Love, Actually all follow the same formula.) Some complain that telling stories in this manner doesn’t leave room for nuanced character development. That may be true, but telling a story or stories in this manner has a ton of benefits as well.
Specifically, I like the idea that our stories don’t exist in a vacuum but instead are messily enmeshed. In real life, I like the idea of six degrees of separation and discovering random connections with strangers I meet. In fiction, I like the fact that these stories remind me that things aren’t always about me; a reminder I need surprisingly often. We’re all living in our little worlds but we’re doing it all together, and sometimes paths cross with less than optimal outcomes. But often those outcomes have less to do with the parties involved than with all the backstory – often unknown to the other party – that comes with them.
Turning specifically to Olive Kitteridge, Strout weaves together 13 different stories that encompass a wide range of experience. One story takes place at the funeral of a man whose wife has just learned he cheated on her. Another features a hostage-taking in a hospital. Elsewhere, an old lover surprises a lounge pianist, sending her reeling back into painful memories, and in another, an overbearing mother visits her wary son and his boisterous, pregnant wife. Most stories center on some kind of betrayal, and a few document delicate and unlikely romances.
And linking these stories together is the novel’s namesake, Olive Kitteridge, a seventh-grade math teacher and the wife of a pharmacist. Olive’s presence in each of the stories varies. In some she’s at the center, but in others she remains only on the fringe. (And for the record, the stories in which she appears the least are also often the least interesting). Through these interactions, we learn not only about Olive herself, but we also see the effect that she has on those around her.
Truth be told, I had a great story lined up to accompany this novel that involved me delivering Christmas trees. How I ended up in the situation is unimportant, but suffice it to say one rainy night a few weeks before Christmas I found myself driving a Ford F150 around the East Bay with three trees in the back and stranger by my side. As the night wore on, each delivery became a story unto itself. There were highs and there were lows. And with each stop I was getting a short but rather intimate look into strangers’ lives. It was an Olive Kitteridge experience. It was a cute story (at least in my head).
But despite knowing for over a month now that was my story, I just couldn’t pull it together. Given the current political environment, it seemed too light. I thought I could cure it by weaving in some humorous jabs at Donald Trump, but poking fun of him – although there really is so so much to poke fun at – came across as simultaneously petty, ineffective and unsatisfying. There are plenty of people far funnier than I am making fun of him all day long. I got so fed up I finally scrapped the whole idea and hoped I could find another connection to Olive Kitteridge. If our paths cross, I’d be happy to tell you of my Christmas tree adventures.
“Luckily,” it only took one week of Trump being President to figure out a new connection. You see, Olive, like Trump, comes across as an asshole. She is neither nice nor sympathetic. As one of the town’s older women notes, “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology.” That’s putting it nicely. Her son, in contrast, told her more bluntly, “You can make people feel terrible.” She dismisses people with words like “hellion” and “moron” and “flub-dub.” Sound familiar?
But as is true of most people, Olive is more complicated than she seems on the surface. She may hurl insults at her son, but she also loves him a lot. The same goes for her her husband who she also loves, although she has trouble expressing it. She’s definitely has her moods, but she also laughs spontaneously, and most importantly, she harbors a sense of compassion, even for strangers. In one story, for example, Olive bursts into tears when she meets an anorexic young woman. When Olive tells the girl that “I’m starving, too,” the girl takes one look at this large woman and says, “You’re not starving.” “Sure I am,” Olive says. “We all are.”
Olive may seem like an asshole, but through these stories, we learn that she also has a remarkable capacity for empathy, and it’s an empathy without sentimentality. She gets that life is lonely and unfair, and that it takes a lot of luck to experience blessings like a long marriage and a quick death. She knows she can be a shit; she has regrets. And because she has that self-awareness, she understands people’s failings — and, ultimately, their frail hopes. By the end of the novel, you may hate her brusqueness, her self-centeredness, and her difficulty accepting changes, but you admire her quiet strength, her forthrightness, her realistic views of life, and the fact that she controls her emotions.
And Kudos to Ms. Strout, because the novel-in-stories format is a perfect medium for capturing this complexity. Each story is presented from different viewpoints and shows Olive’s many sides as she interacts with family, neighbors and friends, as she experiences age, loneliness, grief and love. It’s through these stories that we discover a character infinitely richer than originally assumed.
You’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this. When Trump incomprehensively garnered enough electoral votes to secure the Presidency (I can’t bring myself to say “won”), I consoled myself in the weeks that followed by hoping that he had a little Olive Kitteridge in him. I told myself that once he was President, the importance of the office would temper his campaign promises. I wanted to believe the Republicans – who only weeks before refused to support him – when they suggested that we should give him a chance.
For example, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, was asked before the election what he thought about Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim entry into the United States. Although Thiel initially expressed misgivings about Trump’s language, he ultimately came to his defense by arguing that we – and specifically the media – shouldn’t take him literally. “[T]he media always has taken Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally.” In other words, Trump didn’t mean he wanted an actual ban. “I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally. And so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment or things like that, the question is not ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is ‘We’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.’”
Although his literally/seriously argument seemed far-fetched when applied to a man hoping to run the most powerful country on Earth, I hoped Thiel was right. Sadly, it took only all of one week of the Trump presidency to realize that he wasn’t, and that what Trump said on the campaign trail was exactly what he meant. He really does want to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take insurance coverage from 30 million people. He really does want to build a wall despite the fact that anything that impedes the inflow of tequila seems like a horrible idea to me. He really does hang out with and trust neo-nazis like Steve Bannon and thinks it is a good idea to add him to the National Security Council. And he really really doesn’t like Muslims.
As we all know by now (hopefully), last week he signed an Executive Order that halted refugee entry into the US for 120 days, and barred all citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – from entering the US for three months. Although supposedly done to protect Americans, this is pure security theater. How do I know? Well, I know it because of the number of people killed in the US by refugee terror attacks. Zero. I know this because “nobody in the counterterrorism community pushed for this.”
I know this because it doesn’t even target places that pose the largest threat. Not a single American was killed on U.S. soil by citizens of any of those countries between 1975 and 2015. Interestingly, nearly 3,000 Americans were killed by citizens from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirites and Egypt in the same time period, with the bulk of those being victims of the 9/11 attacks. Yet in those three countries, Trump has significant business interests. Hmmmm.
I know this because even putting aside refugee v. non-refugee or even the specific countries, enacting this Executive Order in the name of American safety is pure farce. Sadly, I stole the following chart from Kim Kardashian West, but I’m sure its directionally correct and more importantly it proves a (my) point.
If Trump were really concerned about the safety of American citizens, he should start with tackling our gun laws since guns are about 5,868 times more likely to kill you than an Islamic jihadist immigrant. Then, in order of operation, we should make everyone install bed rails, bolster bus and lawnmower regulation, wear rubber shoes and, of course, get some control over those pesky toddlers. But we won’t.
We won’t because this isn’t about protecting the American people. This is about divisiveness and hate. Which honestly doesn’t make that much sense as a strategy until you realize he’s doing this because he knows that he will never be able to tell his voters, “Your lives are better now.” He has no plan, so he’ll have to keep them scared, angry or both. For four years. This is literally his only play.
And again, there are people that are a lot smarter than me that are writing far better articles about the situation we find ourselves in at the moment. You should read them. But I will say that on a personal level, of my eight great-grandparents, four came to this country from somewhere else. One from China, one from Denmark, one from Ireland and one from Mexico. And my immigrant great-grandparent tally may even be higher than that if I actually had a good handle on certain branches of my family tree (which is another story I’d be happy to share if our paths cross). America isn’t great despite immigrants. America is great because of immigrants.
Thankfully, the response to Trump’s Executive Order gives me hope. Over one weekend, the ACLU received $24 million in online donations, six times the amount is usually receives in a year. Starbucks announced plans to hire 10,000 refugees over 5 years in 75 countries. There are Google docs going around with every Senator’s stance on the Muslim Ban with telephone numbers. The Pope chimed in and said you can’t reject refugees and call yourself a Christian. Pretty sure he was talking about Paul Ryan. Even the acting US Attorney General told her staff that the Order was illegal and to not enforce it (at which point she was summarily canned).
But most importantly, people – normal people – have rallied. They showed up last week at the Women’s Marches and they showed up this week at airports. The bar for being a superhero is so low right now. You don’t need capes or karate. You just have to show compassion and empathy. You just need to funnel your inner Olive Kitteridge.
There is a quote I love from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, about an Irish immigrant family at the turn of the century: “There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.” This is true of Olive. By the end of the novel, we recognize not only Olive’s glaring flaws, but also her inherent nobility, and she reminds us that we are complicated and imperfect creatures. And reading a book like Olive Kitteridge reminds us that we need to try and understand people, even if we can’t stand them.
But we must also remember that although the number may be very few, there are actually bad people in this world. Sadly, it appears that one of those people is now the most powerful man on the planet. I wanted to believe that there was something deeper behind his angry rants. But as I’ve said before, we have to embrace the world that is, not the world we wished it were, or the world we thought it was. And in this world, Trump is seriously, literally, an asshole.
