It’s going to be summer again tomorrow and then maybe we will finally settle in to fall for a while. Also it’s Friday. In the time before these would not be things that were worthy of celebration, or even much acknowledgment, but given where we are now they are more than I had hoped for. The fact that there is also good music this morning is an added element of pleasant surprise. Enjoy.

★★★★ Clouds spread over the once-clear morning, splitting the remaining empty spaces into drastically different shades of blue. Within a handspan or two, the openings went from a watery near-white below the clouds to a deep sapphire in a rift. Then came an unbroken field of smooth, undulating gray, then a smoother gray, as the clouds rearranged and re-rearranged themselves. There was no consistency to the light, but the air was steadily cool and clean. Though it would have been unremarkable in terms of what October used to be, after the lingering miasma and swamp-rot of the broken seasons, it felt like a holy visitation. At sundown pink clouds ran right along the middle of the sky. Luminosity seethed through Lower Manhattan, and the buildings uptown were terracotta.

Image: Dave Parker via Flickr

10/26 8:25 ET At Baltimore -3 Miami

Now that Jay Cutler
Is injured the Dolphins seem
Fishy once again

PICK: DOLPHINS

10/29 9:30 AM Minnesota -9.5 Cleveland (At London)

The Browns should go to
London and never come back.
Tally ho, Cleveland!

PICK: VIKINGS

10/29 1:00 ET At New Orleans -9 Chicago

The Saints’ stout defense
Could keep Emeril out of
The frigging gumbo

PICK: BEARS

An unrelated German farm, which will also probably be sold to the state soon anyway. Photo: Flamenc/Wikimedia Commons.

Someone must have been fucking with Georg E.—for having done nothing wrong, he was taken from his bed and arrested one fine morning. All right, that’s not entirely true. Georg E. isn’t his real name, and he’s not been arrested in bed (yet)—but the entire government of his unnamed German city most certainly fucking with him. Whether or not he’s done nothing wrong? Up for debate.

Like Franz Kafka’s Josef K., Georg E. is embroiled in a legal battle; like K.’s, Georg E.’s juridical entanglements have consumed his life, and will almost surely do so until he dies. Unlike Kafka’s Trial, however, whose parameters are never made clear, the particularities of Georg E.’s particulars are readily apparent. They’re just fucking bananas. Indeed, this longform investigative piece in Die Zeit, by German journalist Sophie Rohrmeier, details the 30-year fight between Georg—whose full name and exact location we never learn—and the local authorities. At issue: the rights to his family farm, which the city has wanted to buy out and develop into subsidized apartments since before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or, as Rohrmeier summarizes his view of things: “The city in which he lives wants to steal his farm from him.”

The Allies Prepare Politely

All the men go a day without women
All the men pick up a Chore Boy® and scrub the pans
All the men wash and rinse and dry and know cycles
All the men notice subtle cues
All the men ask follow-up questions with curiosity
All the men smize while handing us a glass
All the men knew to buy a peachy rosé
All the men apologize when they walk in our paths
All the men keep their knees togetherish on the train
All the men admit their salaries
All the men sit with their softness
All the men nod their heads knowingly
All the men feel u
All the men take back what was taken from them
All the men breathe before cursing
All the men walk away before throwing something
All the men point to faces with feelings on laminated sheets
All the men open up to all the other men
All the men stop and wonder about privilege
All the men do all these things without ever mentioning them at all
All the men head to bed with the humble glow of care

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016) and LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010). She was the 2017 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and is currently coediting, with Arielle Greenberg, the multimedia anthology Electric Gurlesque. 

The Poetry Section is edited by Mark Bibbins.

Yes.

★ The only brightness in the view of the city was the sky reflected in the rain-sheeted corners of the concrete slabs sticking out from the face of the fancy apartment building. The air was heavy and dead in the side street but clouds were racing near the building tops, and out on Broadway, gusts were shaking loose the golden leaflets of the honeylocusts. Downtown there was just enough time to notice the sun was out before a cloud threw itself over it. A walk out for a sandwich, before the line of storms on the radar arrived, led into wild buffeting wind on the corner of Union Square. The downpour came and then went away in time for a late afternoon errand. Late eerie light came through in the west and the clouds glowed amber, with blue gaps between them and dark shreds attending their passage. The ones in the distance acquired lumps and shadows as the nearer ones lost their light and became translucent gray. Concealed by the dark, the rain returned.

Illustration by Amy Jean Porter

Fall is for squirrels, who scamper past at top speed. The light refracting through their fuzzy tails lends an ethereal glow. I saw one around 5am. It was bright white in the car lights, a ghostly reminder of squirrels past. Years ago when I was in college walking quickly across campus I met a squirrel running perpendicular to me. We collided and the squirrel jumped off my knee with a perfect arabesque before continuing in stride along its path. I stopped and literally spun around. Watching gray squirrels is an American pastime. The squirrels chase each other up trees and around stumps. They sit on rocks and eat acorns, leaving a mess of broken husks. I once saw a squirrel eating a bagel in our driveway. I’m not sure where it found a bagel, but it might have stopped for one on the way to work. They climb with exceeding grace and squeak from the treetops above our home. They nest in the hollows and make dormitories of leaves. They pause in the margins one paw tucked up, one down and ready. We see them out of the corners of our eyes, industrious little flashes. They move through life a little faster knowing there is one path from fall to winter. The acorns only come once a year.

Amy Jean Porter is an artist based in Connecticut.

Theories of evolution of acceptable male behavior.

In the eight million years since The New York Times and The New Yorker published bombshell investigations into Harvey Weinstein’s inappropriate sexual behavior with young actresses, models, and producers, approximately seven thousand more men have been named or alluded to as sexual harassers by women and men embracing the waves of #MeToo confessions, in what some are calling “The Weinstein Effect.” (I don’t love the idea of giving Weinstein any credit for this trend, and I wish we could give it instead to the women who spoke up and went on the record, and to the publications that stood behind them.) It’s been just two weeks since the Shitty Media Men list was first circulated, and already Vox Media parted ways with Lockhart Steele last Thursday over code of conduct violations, and yesterday Politico and The New York Times reported that Leon Wieseltier’s new magazine venture with Laurene Powell Jobs has been mothballed (why you’d have a 65-year-old man start a new magazine in 2017 is a question for another day!) for similar reasons.

So yes, the floodgates are open, and not just in media, because literally every industry has its Harvey Weinstein (again with the credit, oy!), because every industry has a powerful man who faces little to no consequences for his boundary-crossing behavior (academia, where u at?). In the food world, celebrity chef John Besh stepped down from his New Orleans-based restaurant group after 25 of his former employees accused him of fostering a culture of harassment and assault. After an LA Times investigation revealed that 38 women came forward to accuse the director James Toback of sexual misconduct, 193 (yes) more women contacted the reporter after that story came out. (The number has definitely grown since then.) Not even the untouchables are immune from the finger pointing—a holocaust survivor and a former U.S. president. have been accused of (and in the latter case, admitted to) grabassery.