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☆ The Debate Over January
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-20 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Winter friends — those who, contrary to all hedonic and circadian sense, love dark days and black ice — have been forwarding the story to me, triumphant, as if once and for all it’s been settled, the pointless, perennial battle of the seasons. Everyone just wants to feel better, I get it, but resisting their campaign is a twisted part of coping with the season. I spent the week exchanging snapshots with friends in Mississippi, their mutt cavorting in the snow-covered yard (look how cozy! Another friend asked if I didn’t find the cold and snowfall moody and melancholy, in a good way. It’s a case that the poets have been making for eons: “Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold,” Shakespeare wrote.

Persons: Steven Kurutz’s, mutt cavorting, ”, Stu, Roz Chast’s, Shakespeare, what’s Locations: Mississippi, New

☆ Behind the Book Review’s Best Books List
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-25 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Some people come with prepared speeches in support of the book they’re nominating. By the conclusion of each meeting, it’s clear which books are garnering support and which are losing steam. “There’s sometimes an assumption that we are trying to send a statement with the list,” Gilbert said. But both he and Tina were adamant that the list is not political, and the only statement they’re making is “these are the best books of the year and you should read them.”“We’re not engineering the list in any way,” Tina clarified. “We’re not saying, ‘Oh, gosh, at least three of the books on the fiction list need to be by women.’”

Persons: ” Gilbert, “, Gilbert, Tina, ” “, “ We’re, ’

☆ Our Merch, Ourselves
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-11 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Why do we buy merch, or shy away from it? What does the merch you wear say about who you are, what you believe in? Carrying the bag in your own city seemed too boosterish, too earnest for a New Yorker, whereas outside the city, the local merch telegraphs your hometown pride and N.Y.C. Once you leave the place, the merch becomes a souvenir, a nostalgic keepsake. Debating the laws of merch is a diversion, an amusing exercise in questioning our own pieties.

Persons: Spaeny, “ Priscilla, ”, It’s, Hannah, Priscilla, Priscilla Presley, Priscilla ”, Sofia Coppola, ” “, it’s, leashes, I’d, Justin Bieber Organizations: tote, telegraphs, Los Angeles Dodgers, American Locations: rhinestones, New York, Brooklyn, New, L.A

☆ Running for Our Lives
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-21 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The obvious answer is that we run to be healthy, to improve our cardiovascular systems and our moods, to become fitter and stronger. But sometimes it feels like the real reason that I run is to get better at running. But running in particular seems intricately linked to questions of endurance, of grit and commitment and even moral rectitude. “Running is more than a sport or a form of exercise, a passion or a pastime. I started running because I wanted to reclaim the practice from my elementary school days, when the Presidential Fitness Test — and its crowning glory, the mile run — was accepted as a meaningful measure of a child’s worth.

Persons: We’ve, it’s Organizations: American College of Cardiology

☆ The National Book Awards Longlist
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-16 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

One of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever received was a stack of four or five books, all published the year I was born. I hadn’t read John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” but now I felt a connection to it; we’d both come into being at roughly the same time. The all-you-can-read buffet of books available begs a reader, especially a slow reader like me, to develop a strategy. This week, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2023 National Book Awards, presenting a crop of books on which a hungry reader could happily feast from now through the end of the year. (“Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and “Fire Weather,” by John Vaillant just moved to the top of my list.)

Persons: I’ve, John le Carré’s, ”, Ursula K, Le Guin, I’m, ’, Nana Kwame Adjei, John Vaillant Organizations: Book Foundation

☆ Your Fall Movie Preview
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-09 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Searching for something to look forward to in the last light of summer, the fall movie schedule beckons. When the sun sets too early, what better refuge than the movies, where Annette Bening is playing Diana Nyad (October), Colman Domingo plays Bayard Rustin (November) and Timothée Chalamet is Willy Wonka (December)? Some studios pushed their big theatrical releases to 2024 while the ongoing actors’ strike prevents stars from promoting films. Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei star in Rebecca Miller’s romantic comedy “She Came to Me,” about a composer who’s having trouble composing. That one’s set in my neighborhood, so I’m presold on it.

Persons: Annette Bening, Diana Nyad, Colman Domingo, Bayard Rustin, Chalamet, Willy Wonka, I’m, “ Dicks, ”, Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, Larry Charles, Kristen Roupenian’s, Nicholas Braun, Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway, Marisa Tomei, Rebecca Miller’s, who’s

☆ Summer’s Not Over Yet
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-02 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

This weekend, while you’re working the grill or attending a parade or sitting in traffic, conversation will turn, inevitably, to the end of summer. Labor Day, nominally a holiday celebrating the industriousness of the American worker, also serves to remind the worker that they haven’t been quite as industrious as they might have been these past three months. In his eulogy for summer’s lazy days in The Times today, my colleague Stephen Kurutz mourns the vestiges of truly unmonitored working from home that this fall seems to augur: “Will we forget the small pleasure of sitting on a porch and looking at the yard?” he writes. Of trading the daily commute for an aimless drive?”Why must there be such an austere demarcation between before Labor Day and after, between summer and not-summer, between enjoying our lives and enduring them? Why have we so internalized the back-to-school dread of childhood that it’s become a permanent feature of adulthood?

Persons: You’ll, Stephen Kurutz, it’s Organizations: Labor, The Times Locations: The

☆ Can Errands Be Enjoyable Exercise?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-26 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

We’re on again off again, depending on the latest study (10,000? When I’ve missed a run or skipped leg day, I’m much more attentive to my step count. Before you remind me that I do not need any more stuff, I will tell you I was there really just out of curiosity. Biking 11 miles to and from Costco with a trailer of groceries, as Andrew Leonard has been doing since his car broke down three years ago? Leonard has found errand-running to be his ideal form of exercise: a healthy routine that’s intrinsically motivated by his love of cycling and his love of getting things done.

Persons: I’ve, it’s, I’d, Andrew Leonard, Leonard Organizations: Costco Locations: New York City

☆ The Post-Vacation Clarity
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-19 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

If you’re lucky, you might get out of your home and your head, take some time off and away. ), as I was recently, with that post-vacation clarity, whereby the excesses of one’s everyday life seem gaudy, nearly intolerable. A week spent living out of a suitcase and the concept of owning more than one sweatshirt seems silly. It’s not the stuff itself — having enough stuff is a privilege — but the complications that accompany the stuff. You spend time in a new environment, on a different schedule, maybe eating different things, trying on other ways of living.

☆ The Dave Matthews Band, Reconsidered
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-29 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Dave Matthews Band is on tour, as they have been every summer, except 2020, for the past 30-odd years. Like the Grateful Dead and Phish, so-called jam bands with which it’s often lumped together, Dave Matthews has a deliriously passionate fan base that follows the band from city to city, reuniting with fellow disciples at preshow tailgates, showing off devotional tattoos, trading live recordings. In the early ’90s, when I arrived for my first year at the University of Virginia, Dave Matthews was a local celebrity. It would be years before the stereotype of Dave Matthews fans as “pot-smoking, tie-dye-touting former frat bros fawning over craft beers in parking lots between cornhole games,” as Perri Ormont Blumberg puts it, would become a widely understood social designation. We spent the next four years not going to Dave Matthews Band shows together.

Persons: Dave Matthews, preshow, ”, Perri Ormont Blumberg, ” Ben Sisario Organizations: University of Virginia, The Times Locations: Virginia

☆ Welcome to Barbenheimer Weekend
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-22 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Start the day with the darker fare: Christopher Nolan’s moody “Oppenheimer,” about the physicist who ran the Los Alamos Laboratory during the development of the atomic bomb. The movie industry hopes so. Ticket sales for the year in the U.S. and Canada are down about 20 percent from the same period in 2019. Analysts predict that “Barbie” could take in $100 million domestically through Sunday; “Oppenheimer” around $50 million. “These are not the tried-and-true safe bets that are the hallmark of the summer movie season,” he said.

Persons: Christopher Nolan’s, Oppenheimer, ”, Milk, Greta Gerwig’s “, fantasia, ” “ Barbie, ” “ Barbie ”, “ Oppenheimer, “, ‘ Oppenheimer, Barbie ’, Will Barbenheimer, Barbie ”, Paul Dergarabedian Organizations: Los Alamos Laboratory, Alamo, Times Locations: Chicago, U.S, Canada

☆ Reconsidering the Staycation
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-15 | by ( Melissa Kirsch | More About Melissa Kirsch | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

I’ve always been skeptical of the staycation. So I was intrigued to discover, thanks to my colleague Catherine Pearson, that I have been staycationing all wrong. Evidently, my tendency to stumble into time off without a plan is unlikely to produce a restorative effect. This weekend, you could, for instance, seek out some vegan ice cream that doesn’t taste terrible. You could try running in a pool, which is easier on the joints but as effective as running on land.

Persons: I’ve, van, Catherine Pearson, Jaime Kurtz, “, ”, we’re Organizations: James Madison University

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