Lena!

I see you, Colin

None of this happens without “Hotel California”

I resent that I don’t know what I should be advising you about

Reporting this

A real honor, Ken. My wife (who’s a journalist and also a big fan of your work) can attest that I kept setting down the book to ask her how you two could have gotten the college football world so disturbingly right.

No list like this is complete without #Exley's A FAN'S NOTES. The narrator is fame-fetishizing, misogynistic, homophobic, and racist, not to mention a prime beneficiary of American abundance who nevertheless rants about being excluded from the American Dream. 6/6

@bykenarmstrong.bsky.social and Nick Perry's SCOREBOARD BABY is a masterpiece. A compassionate-yet-unflinching depiction of how wealthy institutions and their billionaire and millionaire backers are fundamentally parasites feeding on this country's most marginalized communities. 5/6

Gumbrecht's CROWDS is a deeply stimulating crash course on how we've come to associate crowds with mob violence (a la 1/6). But his great achievement is showing how crowds can also be an engine for ecstasy--and maybe the signal means we have of pushing back against the coming depredations. 4/6

#Krakauer's WHERE MEN WIN GLORY should be required reading for anyone who wants to begin understanding where we went wrong with masculinity. I'd write an entire essay on his discussion of how Pashtunwali is indistinguishable from the rites + rituals of high school football culture. 3/6

#DeLillo's END ZONE, in addition to being maybe his funniest novel, is also where he began to successfully work out his unmistakable tone--the same voice of despairing, disassociated irony that has become the default way we've confronted the last few months. 2/6