It’s no fun to be bad at things. I think we can all agree on that. But there is a moment where being bad at something is both natural and expected: when we’re a beginner. With that expectation comes freedom, an allowance to be bad, and if we can stay in the right headspace, it can open up the world.

Doesn’t matter what it is—a new job or a new hobby or whatever—there’s a learning curve. But in those early days there’s the least amount of stigma for bailing on something entirely. Indeed, wise folks might say it’s best to jump off before you’ve invested too much time into something that won’t go your way. “Why waste your time?”they’d say.

The counterpoint comes in the form of those whose conventional wisdom would suggest that if you bail out early, you never give yourself a chance to improve. “You have to learn to walk before you can run,” they’d say. The logic seems unassailable.

So both can’t be true, yet both are true. For different people, different circumstances, different stakes.

I find myself, by inclination, veering from and giving wide berth to experiences in which I will look like an idiot. Which, in my warped way of thinking, is the only way I could look as a try to master a new skill. If anyone were to see me, I think, they wouldn’t see me as I am, a beginner and complete neophyte. No, they’d assume 1) I’d been doing this for a long time and 2) I’m just terrible at it. It’s at once a terribly self-centered and conceited view of the world (to warrant thinking a merit anybody’s attention) mixed with a crippling degree of insecurity (to warrant worrying so much about what a stranger might think). That’s a tough needle to thread, yet here I am, threading it like I’ve spent more than 10,000 hours at the task.

Despite the neuroses, I’m loving trying (and mostly failing) at tennis as a latecomer to the sport. Am I good at it? No. Should I be good at it? It feels like I should. Does that matter? Absolutely not.

Fun fact: Tennis is incredibly hard. Yeah, I know; who would have guessed it from watching it on TV. It reminds me of golf in the sense that professionals make it look deceptively easy, like, infuriatingly so, if you think about it.

With golf, it’s the static nature of things: the ball is just sitting there. Teed up, we’d say, which is, consequently, the same phrase we use to refer to something that’s shouldn’t be missed (“That argument was teed up perfectly for her response.”). As in, it’s easy. (Perhaps that comes from tee-ball, too, but the point is the same.) Without fail, a person who, full of smarm, remarks how easy it should be to hit a golf ball (perhaps they were a former baseball or hockey player, where the object they’re used to hitting is on the move) is brought up quickly by 1) the difficulty to just make contact (for some) and 2) the ability to control where and how it flies. Golf is hard.

With tennis, the static thing is out the window; things are never static. Even when you get to serve, which is where you have all the advantage (unless you’re 1) me or 2) playing me, since your return-of-serve games are cakewalks of likely very little exertion on your part), you have to toss the ball and hit at a very particular point and a very particular angle in a very particular direction. Hard.

No, it’s not static that makes a poorly informed person think it shouldn’t be that hard; it’s the size of the racquet head. “Look at this thing!” they’ll say. “Who could miss with it?” (Again, probably baseball and hockey players thinking only about the much smaller surface area of their hitting implements.) To simply touch the ball in tennis is but a fraction of your concerns. One might say it’s at the point of contact where your concerns actually begin, except even that would be incorrect because a few thousand steps had to be put in place to bring your racquet to that point in space and time.

Here’s the thing: The ball can (and will) go anywhere! It doesn’t on TV because everyone on TV is insanely good, and the relative back-and-forth nature of tennis is a direction function of them being insanely good, not simply “the way tennis happens.” Indeed, if a person thinks they will get out on a tennis court for the first time and, with another person of equally little talent for the game, expect to just have extended rallies, they likely are sorely mistaken.

If the other person does have some experience and talent, and isn’t particular concerned with your feelings about wanting to rally, they can make you look like the idiot I so worry I look like.

Courtney is that way. Most of the time, she’s incredibly kind to me, sacrificing her natural competitive streak (which is extreme) to simply bat the ball around with me, much slower and more aimlessly than she would otherwise. But every now and then, whether it’s to alleviate her boredom or shut up my incessant talking or simply because she forgets that she’s voluntarily been puttering along in first gear, she’ll rip a cross-court winner that perhaps an actual tennis player could have 1) seen coming and 2) reached and 3) hit a return, but not this guy. Most times I’ll just stand and put my hands on my hips and look at her like, “Why’d you have to go and do that?” as if she’d just blocked a three-year-old’s pointless-but-sincere shot at a basketball goal.

But still I persist. That’s not because of anything special in me, except the sincere joy I feel playing the game. I can’t help but wonder how many great things I’ve missed out on by being a dog who learned this trick so late in life. It’s a treat to learn something new. It’s even better to step outside of your comfort zone. It’s admirable to even try. What have I been doing all these years? What was I so afraid of?

But most of all, it’s controllable. It’s on purpose. Sure, it renders me humble, but I can choose how much to care about that. And how much to “fix” it, were I so inclined to practicing more and more, I could get better, faster. This all matters to me as of late because it’s been a trying time. (If you’ve read me at all in the past year and a half, when haven’t I been saying something was a hard time?) My family has had even more bad news on the cancer front, as if a dam somewhere broke and now we’re awash in the stuff. And my job is teetering on the edge of going away, with layoffs all but certain. Those are humbling things in a life. Those have the power to reduce a person, to lay waste to any sense of comfort of stability. Those are not touched by what I choose to do about them; they just are.

So yeah, to choose my particular flavor of humble pie is a treat, and if I get to have a blast while getting my ass whipped 6-0, 6-0, 6-0, all games at 40-love, well then I’ll take that drubbing every time.

Ten Worth Your Time

1. What a beautiful idea The Washington Post had with its “Who is Government” series. I was utterly captivated by Dave Eggers going inside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to find out more not just about its work but of the remarkable people that do that work. Whether they considered the reality that 1) it’s an election year and 2) people’s perception, at least in an election year, is to associate the race with “the government,” I don’t know, but it’s a great time to remind people of countless dedicated, often lifelong civil servants that toil away in relative obscurity doing incredible things.
2. Even better was the entry (a bit older now, by a couple of weeks) by Michael Lewis on coal mine safety. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to grab you, but I swear to you, it’s un-put-downable.
3. Wright Thompson is undeniably a great writer. One of the best to do it in the world of sports journalism. His latest book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, expands his reach into nonfiction more generally, or specifically into the realm of history. It’s a deep dive into the history, both known and unknown, surrounding the murder of Emmitt Till. He’s already stretched from pure sports journalism with his book on Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, and he’s even previewed some of the revelations in this forthcoming book as much as a year ago in The Atlantic. He’s back in the magazine’s pages this month with an excerpt from The Barn, where he travels to Spain in search of the very first map ever drawn of Mississippi. I think it bodes well for the rest of the book, and I’m looking forward to buying it.
4. Jodi Kantor is perhaps one of our best investigative journalists working, full stop. Her exploits are well documented in the book, She Said, which she co-wrote with fellow New York Times reporter Megan Twohey on the crimes and various misdeeds of Harvey Weinstein, and then it was dramatized further in a good film by the same name. But perhaps even more impressive is her apparent ability to cultivate sources in the historically tight-lipped world of the Supreme Court. This piece, co-written with the Times’ Supreme Court mainstay Adam Liptak, dives into how Chief Justice John Roberts actually isn’t this institutionalist moderate in the conservative camp; he’s a chief architect of some of the biggest victories for former president Donald Trump in the aftermath of January 6. (FREE GIFT ARTICLE)
5. I greatly admired this response to Kantor’s and Liptak’s story from Dhalia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern over at Slate. They confess admiration for the type of investigative reporting that truly appears to be Kantor’s addition to the Times’ Supreme Court coverage: “This is what Supreme Court reporting needs to become: less credulous academic translating of a handful of judicial opinions and more cultivation of inside sources, procuring of confidential memos, and production of massive scoops.” But they then cop to helping propel a false narrative about the Chief Justice: “We have long said that Roberts had a keen eye for the public mood, a sense of the fragility of the court’s legitimacy, and a profound belief that his obligation to history would be to steer a course away from everything Trumpism represents, including vigilante violence and contempt for the rule of law. We saw these traits in some of Roberts’ earlier compromise rulings, like his opinion to save Obamacare when it was at its greatest peril and his decision to bar the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the census that could have devastated blue-state representation.” But they were wrong, they conclude. It’s well worth a read.
6. Staying on the Supreme Court-adjacent beat just a bit longer, this Vanity Fair profile of Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar confirms that she is, quite possibly, the most interesting person in the world.
7. Now for some good old-fashioned media (read: magazine) beefs. I recently wrote about Scientific American endorsing a presidential candidate for only the second time in its long history (it’s the nation’s oldest continuously published magazine). In response, Tom Nichols of The Atlantic (one of America’s other oldest magazines in circulation) fired off a criticism, saying, essentially, the magazine should stick to science. In response to his response, Sequencer, a self-described “writer-owned popular science magazine,” called Nichols’s article a bunch of poppycock (subscription required to read all of the article, but can subscribe for free). It was just a fun bit of reading. Also, unrelated to Scientific American’s decision to endorse, here’s Current Affairs with a missile of an article aimed directly at The Atlantic, entitled "The Worst Magazine In America."
8. Sally Rooney is back with a new novel, and the literary world is aflutter. I enjoyed Dwight Garner’s warm review of the book, which acknowledged the doubters and the haters in a way that made me more inclined to pick up the book.
9. I perhaps should feel sheepish about my excitement at a new Malcolm Gladwell book, but I can’t help it. I will eagerly read this new book, which is more suited to one of the many lines of critique of against Gladwell’s style as “just writing the same book over and over” since it’s a revisiting of his monumental hit The Tipping Point. I know all of the criticisms against his work, and yet I still enjoy the process of reading (or more often now, listening to) them. But I was intrigued by this Airmail peek into the smaller stories (we all know the format by now) that will be told in the new book.
10. I’m not actually sure how either Rooney or Gladwell begin their work, but if someone told me it involved a Moleskine journal, I wouldn’t be surprised. I loved this excerpt from The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen, in The Walrus.

More From Me

Over on my blog, I’ve been writing about various topics of interest to me.

Lake Street Dive Meets The New Yorker

Zadie Smith Talks to Ezra Klein

'Scientific American' Endorses Kamala Harris

Incredible Ocean Photography From 2024

Slow Burn and the Birth of Fox News

R.I.P., Nelson DeMille

MLB 50-50 Club—Population: Shohei Ohtani

'S-Town's' Brian Reed Back With New Podcast Putting Journalists On The Hot Seat

Culture Diary

Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.

The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.

9/16:

9/17: Bad Monkey (AppleTv+); English Teacher (Hulu); Turning Points: The Bomb and The Cold War (3) (Netflix)

9/18:

9/19: Survivor, S47 (Paramount+)

9/20: Slow Horses, S4 (AppleTV+); Bad Monkey (AppleTV+); REBEL RIDGE (Netflix)

9/21: Only Murders in the Building, S4 (Hulu); OUT OF SIGHT (Criterion Channel); Tennessee Vols vs. Oklahoma Sooners (ESPN+)

9/22: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976) (Criterion Collection); Industry, S3 (Max); Bad Boys For Life (Hulu)