Today is my niece’s fifth birthday.

We celebrated this past weekend (part of the reason this newsletter is a day “late,” since so much of my prime reading-and-writing time was given over to the drive between Missouri and Tennessee). I’m still paying for the celebration, not monetarily but physically.

It was held at a gymnastics-facilty-turned-fun-zone. Unable to resist the reality of being the tallest one on the floor with the other 5-year-olds and in full control of my body (unlike their wobbly, untrustworthy sausage casings), I decided to jump on the massive trampoline.

“Look how high I can jump,” I seemed to yell at them without ever saying a word.

Then my back gave out. Or collapsed. Or slipped a disc. Or broke. I don’t know, medically, what happened to me, but I do know that it hurt and I was a fool for even stepping onto that trampoline and feeling my weight sink in.

I bring this up because it’s become a sort of norm for me to comment on my own aging by cataloging the degree to which things break down when they didn’t used to—innocuous-seeming tasks actually are injuries lying in wait. Physical activity maintains a lackluster and mediocre degree of “fitness,” but the body clearly isn’t as responsive as it once was to exercise while becoming overly responsive to, say, a raised portion of sidewalk into which a stubbed toe used to be a mild nuisance and now carries concern of a fracture. This, as sad as it may sound, feels normal to me.

But it’s a weird thing to mark the passage of time by someone else’s birthday. Parents, I’m sure, notice this early on, and perhaps they never stop being aware of it. I remember asking something to the effect of “How does it feel to have not one but all three of your kiddos in their 30s?” to my mom last year when my brother entered his third decade.

But being childless myself, my niece provides one of the few times I give thought to someone else’s trip around the sun as it relates to my position in time and space.

Goodness, the amount of things that have happened in these five years. She was born into the midst of the pandemic, though we didn’t quite know that just yet. She slept and nursed her way through the entirety of that ordeal, while not yet understanding (like the rest of us still don’t fully comprehend) all the ways in which that event might shape her life.

In the comedown from her party, she said, “That was the best birthday party ever.” Her mom and I looked at each other with fondness and satisfaction that we’d been a small part of that. But my mind traveled back to when I last remembered her saying that: after her third birthday party. The last one that my dad was able to attend. That day lives on for us, perhaps more than it otherwise would, because it was so well photographed. (Admittedly, we are not good at photographing big events, like birthdays and Christmases; after the party on Saturday, I looked at my sister and said, “You know what we didn’t do?” And immediately she knew: get a picture of the whole family together. “What’s wrong with us?” she asked.)

One of my most cherished photographs is of my dad and brother and me at that party. Dad was not one for photos, and it felt that, much like we’d known our sister was able to cut through his sometimes gruff exterior in only the way his baby girl could do, there was nothing he wouldn’t do when in the presence of his granddaughter. Without a second thought, he was standing between us and mugging for the camera.

That photo, owing to its rare status, adorns spaces in my house, her uncle’s house, her granny’s house, and her house. She remembers that time and place, and I like to think her papaw was part of what made it so special, the best ever, for so long.

As much as I loved that declaration from her this go ‘round, a little part of me broke inside. I want that third birthday to remain the best ever for her, too. I think there was an unspoken degree to which we all sort of quietly agreed: That was the best. Not because of the party itself, but just for a time it seemed to signal in our lives, when we thought things would carry on just like that, adding year over year, us growing older and more decrepit and her growing into herself.

Thanks to her young age, much like her experience of COVID-19, she’s been largely oblivious to the biggest shocks and upheavals in our lives. Her papaw’s sudden diagnosis and rapid decline. Her granny’s own cancer diagnosis. Yet another cancer diagnosis of her nearest and dearest great-aunt. In some respects, I envy her that obliviousness.

Because, much like I’ve taken to chronicling my own advancing age with the catalog of what breaks too easily, I’ve relied on “months/years since” as my most consistent marker of time. I don’t consciously remember thinking, as I was running around with the kids and giving chase as the Big Bad, “I wish Dad were here.” I thought it before and afterwards, and the remembering made me sad: not just at his absence but because I didn’t think about it in the moment. I don’t know; maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe that’s what healing looks like.

But if I can psychologize with parents for a second, my guess for why it’s hard to watch kids grow up is, in part, not their aging but our own. It’s just the way the timing of these things has to work out: As they get older, so do we, except our years carry a little more weight behind them because we’ve lived so many already. This remains true for uncles as well, I suppose, and in my particular case, I don’t stress so much over my own race toward obsolesce but rather the memory of my dad. I don’t want that sharp pain-in-my-chest freshness that came for me right after he passed. But I also don’t want that slippage that healing can bring, for me or his granddaughter. What I want, I realize, is something I can’t have. I want us to all be here, laughing and eating cake that we should probably avoid for health reasons, feeling our ages as we watch her rejoice in hers. I want what we’d expected it to be.

Ultimately, this is me just yelling at the clouds, as is my right as I become an old man. The weekend and party were lovely. My dad, for sure, would have loved it. And my niece did love it. That’s all that matters. But it’s easy to lose sight of all that amid the hubbub. The hubbub is the point, though, and hopefully I’ll be caught up in it again this time next year. Maybe I’ll have learned a thing or two in that time, and it will feel a little better, even if my old body is even a little more worse for wear.

Ten Worth Your Time

1. Did I need 6,000-plus words on the capybara? No; no, I did not. But that’s kind of why I recommend this story. It’s a celebration of a throwback to the days when magazines could assign stories just because. The New Yorker is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, and it’s a testament (and small miracle) that it can still assign a writer (not, like, one of its serious reporters) to go hang out with one of the cutest animals on the internet. You know, sometimes I read a New Yorker story and wonder, “How did they do that? How did they get access to that person? How did they get that quote?” But none of that is present with this story. I feel confident I could have done the magazine proud (as proud as Gary Shteyngart did) if given this assignment. It’s delightful: A sweet man hangs out with a sweet animal.
2. A laugh-out-loud funny essay on one writer’s all-too-relatable struggle to quit sugar. Caity Weaver absolutely kills me. I thoroughly loved this even though I laughed in such a way that was actually coded finger-wagging at myself because honestly, I could stand to quit sugar, too.
3. Here’s a funny story but not in the laugh-out-loud way. It’s all about golf matches proceeding at a slow and languid pace. Isn’t that funny? It just seems like a silly complaint. Like, sure, it’s not exactly an NBA game, but what are people really expecting? I know it’s not entirely due to the emergence of TGL and its indoor, team golf (LIV lite) concept that includes a shot clock, but the league is referenced quite a few times in this article, which just saddens me, because while it may be a bit swifter, it’s a lot lamer in terms of the golf of it all.
4. More funny things: AI diehards panicking. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you’ve definitely heard of the Chinese AI miracle known as DeepSeek. It’s not really a miracle; it just does all same AI things that ChatGPT does for a fraction of the cost. (Perhaps it is miraculous that the developers, after a truly impressive work of engineering, decided to make the whole thing open-source.) This episode of On the Media is hilarious to me, not just because of the subject matter I’ve laid out, but because of the truly acerbic and incredulous AI skeptic commenting on the whole thing. He is scornful of the whole thing (and especially Sam Altman and OpenAI), and it’s truly fun to listen to him go off. (If you like that, he’s got his own podcast and did two episodes that are incredibly in the weeds—harder to follow at times but his outrage is turned up fully to 11.)
5. OK, moving away from funny to just regular ol’ AI stories that infuriate me. Small towns all across the country are getting their news needs filled by mysterious newsletters that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Turns out, on closer inspection by NiemanLab, when you check out some of the “random” users’ comments that the same person, same descriptor, is saying the same thing in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and Bentonville, Arkansas, and 45 other states. Even closer inspection reveals the whole operation is run by one man and his AI technology that scrapes the works and words of local publications and repackages them as a newsletter.
6. Things have not been good for The Washington Post lately. The fallout over Bezos blocking the editorial board’s decision to endorse Kamala Harris last year. Tons of subscribers leaving as a result. Refusing to run a sharp editorial cartoon because it was critical of Bezos, and the artist resigning. Other lost reporting talent. But they were the paper of record in many respects during the aftermath of the terrible crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter near Reagan National Airport. And in reading this one of the many follow-on stories, I was reminded of how even the big papers can feel like a small-town one. This piece on how travelers were feeling the day after was just the kind of assignment an editor at a smaller paper would assign: Go see how it’s affecting people. This passage about the bartender felt like you could see the germ of an idea bloom, and I wondered if it was the one that prompted the story in the first place: Do the airport bartenders notice people drinking more in the aftermath?

Despite the broadcasts and the bar’s proximity to the accident site, the scene was eerily normal. A woman ordered a lemon drop martini. Other travelers nursed beers. The bartender didn’t think the patrons were drinking more than usual. “It’s the same,” she said.

7. Though we’re admonished from speaking ill of them and many of us tread lightly and carefully around cemeteries to avoid disturbing the graves, there is precious little by way of actual rights conferred to dead bodies. This is an interesting little essay in The Dial that grapples whether that should change, whether we should enshrine something in international law specifically honoring the rights of dead bodies. On the one hand, it sounds like the most natural thing in the world. On the other, it sounds cumbersome and hard to implement. But the stories in the piece make it seem like maybe this is one of those times when things should be slow and cumbersome and painstaking in order to give the living some sense of closure.
8. A dear friend sent me The Ocean’s Trilogy on physical media. Giddy at receiving mail and having zero patience, I threw the first disc in and hit play. I’ve seen the film about a million times now, so I opted for the director’s commentary, and Steven Soderbergh, watching the scene early in the film as a newly cleaned-up Danny Ocean (George Clooney) rides up an escalator, says something to the effect of “George should have to pay me for that because I think that’s a pretty good movie-star entrance.” And everybody who’s ever seen the film knows that shot and how true Soderbergh’s statement is: It just looks so cool. The star’s handsome face and sharp suits make the grimy work of thieving seem elegant. But reading this real-life account of a thief, who was no less meticulous and organized than Danny Ocean, just struck me as sad. *The Atlantic* told a wonderful story its February print edition about the guy who stole, among other things, Yogi Berra’s World Series rings, and maybe it was the sports fan in me that attached some significance to the items or Berra’s old age at the time of the thefts or who knows what else, but the reading of the story was accompanied by this constant disappointed shaking of the head.
9. California finally was able to stop the fires that had ravaged so much of the Los Angeles area. The state couldn’t have done it without the help of many prisoners who work for next to nothing. It’s a far cry from the orange-jumpsuited men walking up and down the highways picking up trash, though it’s in the same vein. It’s in a completely different league from the rodeo madness of Louisiana’s Angola, which serves no greater purpose to the state other than a kind of perverse entertainment for onlookers. This piece from The New Republic explores the size and scope of the state’s incarnated firefighter program, which accounts for nearly a third of all the firefighters in California. And they make less than a dollar a day.
10. I alluded to my enjoyment of The Brutalist in last week’s newsletter, and I shared an episode of The Big Picture in which Sean Fennessey and Adam Nayman discussed it thoughtfully. Now, Fennessey has discussed it in depth with the show’s cohost Amanda Dobbins, and I just love a piece of art that allows such rich examination and conversation. This is why I go to the movies: to listen to, and better yet, have conversations just like this. Spoiler warning: The episode will discuss the entirety of the film and all its plot points, so if you haven’t seen it, this perhaps isn’t the episode for you (but you should definitely check out the one I shared last week).

More From Me

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

James Fallows On the Washington, D.C. Plane-Helicopter Crash

WWII-Era Field Manual on Sabotage Is Suddenly One of the Internet's Most Popular Downloads

Bookshop Goes Digital

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.

1/27: Twin Peaks: The Return (Paramount+)

1/28: Twin Peaks: The Return (Paramount+)

1/29:

1/30: Twin Peaks: The Return (4) (Paramount+)

1/31: Twin Peaks: The Return (1) (Paramount+); The Maidens, Alex Michaelides (audiobook)

2/1:

2/2: Call for the Dead, John le Carré (audiobook); Prime Target (AppleTV+)