Welcome. I can’t cease fascinated about the elk with the tire round its neck:
“For more than two years, residents of Pine, a small town about 30 miles southwest of Denver, have been sending in reports to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife authorities whenever they saw an elk that had somehow shoved its head through a tire.”
How did this occur? Perhaps the tire was a part of some form of feeder, maybe it was a tire swing, Colorado wildlife officers mentioned. On Saturday night time, the elk was caught and tranquilized, his antlers sheared and the tire eliminated. The elk “stood, unsteadily at first, and wandered off into the dark.”
I’m making an attempt arduous to not see the elk as a broad metaphor — two years yoked, two years collared, lastly beginning to roam, nevertheless unsteadily — however I preserve slipping into it. As the poet Marie Howe as soon as mentioned, “To resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.” She’s proper. It’s powerful to take a look at almost two years of a pandemic head on, to explain precisely what occurred and is going on. To speak concerning the grief and loss and hope with out reaching for symbols, for comparisons that may confer some that means on all of it. The elk’s predicament (tire on neck) and its remediation (take away tire from neck) are interesting of their simplicity. Real life, after all, is sprawling, summary, unpredictable. It’s simpler to say “We are all the elk” than to reckon with the bewildering particulars of Covid, quarantine and after.
Changing the topic.
“Soul Train,” he defined, is his consolation meals, his shortcut to pleasure. He performs the episodes in a continuing loop on whichever display is closest to him. The first time we met in particular person, “Soul Train” was enjoying on each tv screens of his tour bus; the final time we talked by cellphone, he had simply arrived house from a visit and, earlier than even taking off his coat, had flipped on the present.
—From “The Passion of Questlove,” by Jazmine Hughes.
P.S.
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“Slack is where office culture is performed, codified and amplified, often through an ever-evolving lingua franca of custom emoji, inside jokes and hyper-specific references,” writes Ellen Cushing, within the very fascinating “Slackers of the World, Unite!,” in The Atlantic.
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Don’t miss “Nuclear Family,” Ry Russo-Young’s three-part documentary about her childhood and the custody case that had a substantial influence on it.
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If you’re searching for a e book of nonfiction to get misplaced in, I’m having fun with Matthew Specktor’s “Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California” very a lot.
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Send me your suggestions. What are you watching, studying, cooking or in any other case doing that you simply’d suggest different readers take a look at? Write to athome@nytimes.com. Be positive to incorporate your full identify and placement and we'd characteristic your response in a future publication. We’re At Home and Away. We’ll learn each letter despatched. As at all times, extra good concepts for passing the time seem under. I’ll be again on Friday.
