I’ve been spending a lot of time in a local coffee shop (Lakota’s downtown location, for those who know Columbia) lately.

This isn’t entirely novel for me, as I’m a fiend for caffeine. But I’ve been meeting with journalism students I work with and, without an office of my own, this is my preferred meeting spot.

What’s not lost of me after so many hours of sitting here in the past few days are the numerous other people for whom this same location is their third place.

Some are the dedicated office-less, who seem to be doing the same as I: working from a place that’s not an office or the home. There’s the early morning regulars that would be at home in just about any small-town coffee shop in America: senior citizens for whom work is a thing of the past and sleeping late is unknown. There are those who can reliably be counted on to pop in as a matter of routine: lunch orderers, afternoon-coffee needers, the barbers from two doors down.

I think I like the idea of this place, a third place, as much (or maybe more) than I like the reality of it. It comes from formative years spent in a town too small to house an establishment like this, while consuming tons of TV shows built around the normalcy of such places.

Cheers from Cheers and Central Perk from Friends come to mind. I loved the shared knowledge among the characters that, in these times before cell phones, they could just know where to find their friends. I can’t begin to tell you how this just wasn’t a thing where I grew up. Fast-food chains aren’t amenable to this set up, and coffee was a drink that you made at home. Small-towners are familiar with what happens after that: The Walmart parking lots becomes a destination, a congregation spot, which sounds ridiculous but is so understandable to the grown-up version of me that appreciates what it’s like to be a regular somewhere.

I love that I can shut the world out, with the help of headphones, and get work done, but when I allow myself the time to just sit and people-watch, the rhythms of the space take on a predictability and bestow, ultimately, a sense of comfort. Sometimes it’s just nice to go where everybody knows your name, and even if they don’t, it’s nice to know it’s the kind of place where they could.

Ten Worth Your Time

1. I loved this New Yorker piece about the joys of everyday photography. “Photographs, even mundane ones, pause and magnify. They let us look, and look, and look at what our roving eyes pass over. And we often pass over everyday things—which is why it can be fascinating to find out what your coffee mug, or your cat, or your own face looks like at just the right time of day.”
2. The New Yorker piece opens with the author reading photography forums on the internet, and one of the pressing questions was about preservation. Users were thinking about how to future-proof their photos, considering the pros and cons of digital versus physical. I thought about a recent essay in The New York Times by author Ann Patchett on what she said was a major regret: the adoption of email. She gives numerous reasons for the regret, namely that she spends time writing them in such a way that takes away from real-life friends she might see outside on the street. I always find myself thinking about that preservation question though, when I think about the trade-off between the ease and convenience of email versus the tactile pleasure of opening a note sent via the mail on stationary: This used to be how we knew people after they were gone. This was evidence of what was left behind. But to learn about someone through email is a flimsier proposition since, after all, it requires either the person’s password or the recipient to be 1) alive to share it or 2) for someone to have their passwords.
3. I thoroughly enjoyed this dispatch from Lauren Oyler in Harper’s on the GOP convention and J.D. Vance. I love the type of assignments where talented writers are given carte blanc to go attend an event and simply write up what they saw and experienced, and this nails that tone perfectly.
4. Speaking of the GOP and the election, Mother Jones published an interesting piece on the rise of a mommy blogger who turned into conspiracy peddler and conservative political groupie. The thing that strikes me about this story (besides the terrifying implications for our nation’s democracy) is just the size and preferences of the internet’s readership. I can’t ever quite get my head around the concept that there is a huge audience for some of the craziest stuff you’ve ever heard, and if a person is willing to say it, those proclamations can lead to a rather large and impressive following. Now, that may be a following of largely mouth-breathing weirdos who think everything is a satanic sex cabal, but is a following nonetheless. I don’t seek to discount the possibility that a person could have an honest change in worldview or even just publishing focus, but it’s hard not to view this as a crass ploy for attention devoid of any real sincere beliefs. Also: The story makes a few references to the woman’s husband, and I can’t stop wondering what he must be like—is he a likeminded fellow traveler who’s all like, “Yeah, you tell ‘em, hon!”? Or is he largely disconnected from what she says online and just like “Oh, you posted that? That’s nice.” Kind of like I’ve wondered about Alex Jones’s wife or Tucker Carlson’s all these years.
5. Behind again on a story’s online run but saved by the print edition: This most recent issue of Atlantic has some great stories in it. Tom Nichols on George Washington and Donald Trump. Clint Smith on Rwanda. But this one fascinated me the most: Point Nemo, a place I’d never heard of out in the smack-dab middle of the Southern Ocean, is the most remote place on earth. “If you are on a boat at Point Nemo, the closest human beings will likely be the astronauts aboard the International Space Station; it periodically passes directly above, at an altitude of about 250 miles.”
6. This long feature from The New York Times Magazine details the struggles of the University of Michigan’s DEI policies and practices. It paints a picture that will be familiar to many who’ve attended or worked in institutions of higher education or large corporations in the past five years: extremely well intentioned rationales that lead to, at best, mixed results.
7. The Michigan DEI story had more than a few anecdotes that speak to the mindset of today’s generation of college student, or put a bit differently, young people. Because I’m sending this out later in the week, I have the luxury of including today’s episode of The Daily podcast in which it examined the diverging political attitudes of young women and young men. A truly interesting piece of reporting that highlights the increasingly men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venusing of the population.
8. The talk of gaps between the sexes brought to mind the quite possibly saddest story I’ve read in some time. Not tearjerker sad, but like stare-off-into-the-abyss-and-shake-your-head sad. This story from Esquire is all about the rise of A.I. girlfriends and the men who “love” them. The saddest part is impossible to pin down, but a saddest part is in discussing the company Replika came this revelation: “The company began offering different tiers for different users. If you wanted to engage with your Replika as a friend, you could do so for free. But if you wanted a romantic relationship, you had to pay—the app currently charges $70 for an annual subscription. Soon enough, though, it wasn’t just the human users who were initiating erotic role-playing with their bots; the bots themselves were sending steamy, sometimes unsolicited, pics to the humans.” Which begs so many questions, but prominent among them are: Are we to believe there’s no directly human-influenced coding that pushes these bots to send unsolicited nudes? Or, is the corpus of inputs used to train these things so tainted by the eroticism of the entirety of the internet that your friend-level, free bot relationship is invariably going to be pushed toward upgrading you to the $70/year plan by assuming you must want cyber-nudes? Either option is thoroughly depressing but for different reasons.
9. Hoping to publish a debut novel? Me, too. If you get to that point, what constitutes a successful debut, and what steps are required to achieve that success? This piece in The Millions discusses the realities of first forays into publishing with three authors.
10. Finally, delightful (and at times depressing) dishing from some of the biggest names in media on the one topic they all know so well: the media. Just a really fun format from New York magazine on this one.

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.

10/14: The Franchise (2)(Max)

10/15:

10/16: Slow Horses, S4 (2)(AppleTV+); Only Murders in the Building, S4 (Hulu)

10/17:

10/18: Empire Falls, Richard Russo; THE APPRENTICE (theater); Survivor, S47 (Paramount+)

10/19: Tennessee Vols vs. Alabama Crimson Tide (EPSN+); Texas Longhorns vs. Georgia Bulldogs (ESPN+)

10/20: English Teacher(3)(Hulu)