If there’s still a November it will see the release of the latest installment in Kompakt’s amazing Pop Ambient series. Other things happening in November: Thanksgiving, your apartment being unbearably stuffy because they haven’t figured out how to modulate the heat yet and the anniversary of the last presidential election. So really, Pop Ambient 2018 is the only thing you’ll want to stick around for. Enjoy.

★★★★★ Sky and air and temperature were flawless again. A worker played twin hoses over the plantings on the Broadway median. Within a block, facing into the sun, the six-year-old shed his hoodie. Within a few more blocks, it was time to veer off down Columbus, where the sun was less direct. On the way back uptown, after the checkup and the lollipop were finished, the watering truck had just arrived on Dante Square. In the late afternoon, lamps were glowing warmly in the deep shadows of the cross street, even as the sky was still bright. The expensive towers below the Park caught the sun but didn’t do anything interesting with it. Two police vehicles sped past the joggers, lights and sirens on, leaving a cloud of dust hanging in the ebbing light. By bedtime, the bathroom floor was cold underfoot.

In print, anyway, Pynchon has been more than generous and forthcoming with his life and coming of age in letters. Just read his very candid, self-deprecating introduction to Slow Learner: “I wasn’t the only writer then who felt the need to stretch, to step out.” I know more personal details about Pynchon from that essay than I do about most writers who do make appearances. Photographs and biographical details often don’t tell us anything. But the words, however: “What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.”

He’s been there, on your bookshelf, all along.

Depending on when and where you grew up, Tom Petty dying feels like America dying. While it’s easy to talk about what someone like Bowie or Prince meant because of the ground they broke and the perceptions they challenged, Petty was always just there, using the standard formula of rock as the foundation for a body of work that almost everyone had at least one or two favorites from. You never listened to Tom Petty and felt bad. Even the sad songs brought grace. (Of course, there was always more going on: These thoughts on the Confederate flag are a necessary read and probably will be for a long time, unfortunately.) Even when he was on the surface there was something also floating below the surface, and that is probably no small part of what made him so successful. Tom Petty was 66.

★★★★★ Little clouds—some dense and near-unmoving, some cottony and fraying as they went—occupied the west in groups. The six-year-old mostly vanished in his scooter, in the shade, against the sun-struck flank of a silver minivan. Some men were still committed to shorts, even if it required a hoodie or a puffy jacket. Berries and fattening seedpods hung inside the fence of Sherman Square. The shine on the metal curb was like a white stripe painted there. The sky was saturated with light; even with the blinds half-shut, the brightness swelled into the room. Out again in the irresistible afternoon, the six-year-old made his now-overmastered three-wheeled tot scooter bounce up and down on the sidewalk. Birthday balloons were up by the picnic tables on the playground but the rest of the yard was scarcely less crowded than the party. A baseball glinted as the top of its arc passed through a sunbeam. A girl clanked around on a pogo stick. Birds flew low through the space where the frisbee was going, as if they were more wayward pieces of sports equipment.

Shot (double):

Most of this research—and there have been several dozen peer-reviewed studies—punctures the idea that guns stop violence. In a 2015 study using data from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard University reported that firearm assaults were 6.8 times more common in the states with the most guns versus those with the least. Also in 2015 a combined analysis of 15 different studies found that people who had access to firearms at home were nearly twice as likely to be murdered as people who did not…

More than 30 peer-reviewed studies, focusing on individuals as well as populations, have been published that confirm what Kellermann’s studies suggested: that guns are associated with an increased risk for violence and homicide. “There is really uniform data to support the statement that access to firearms is associated with an increased risk of firearm-related death and injury,” Wintemute concludes. Gun advocates argue the causes are reversed: surges in violent crime lead people to buy guns, and weapons do not create the surge. But if that were true, gun purchases would increase in tandem with all kinds of violence. In reality, they do not.

Chaser: Congress has been strangling the CDC for years, preventing these types of studies from coming out.

Lot 1: Shockaholic  

Courtesy of Profiles in History

Carrie Fisher owned a creepy vintage shock therapy machine, and, now, one avid fan with $500 can have his or her turn with the felt-covered electrodes when Fisher’s collection goes to auction on October 7 in California. Readers of Fisher’s 2011 memoir, Shockaholic, will recall that she was a proponent of electroconvulsive therapy to treat depression. Probably not with this machine, though.

The three-day auction event features the collections of Fisher and her movie star mother, Debbie Reynolds, both eclectic collectors. Another fave is Fisher’s personal 1971 yearbook from her freshman year at Beverly Hills High, annotated by her and her friends, estimated at a mere $300-500. How was your yearbook photo? Hers is dreamy.  

Image: Kymberly Janisch via Flick

“I was thinking about getting a tattoo! I’m nervous! What do you think?” —Tina Wants a Tattoo

I have a few tattoos. I got them a while ago, and do not think of them very often. They’re both on my left arm, between the shoulder and the elbow. One I got because I was curious what it was like to get a tattoo. The other I got because a friend was getting a tattoo and I thought “Why not?” They exist now as tips-of-the-cap to my youthful not very wild youth. Ancient hieroglyphs to a forgotten world seemingly a lifetime ago. But I would definitely get a tattoo if you don’t have one and think you’d like to get one. It is definitely an experience worth allegedly having.

And it’s good to be nervous. When you get a tattoo, someone is literally attacking your arm with a bunch of needles. You are being stabbed over and over again. Blood is coming up to the surface. It’s kind of hard to sit still for it. It’s like OK OK pain OK OK pain. Every 3rd poke or so feels bad. I’ve built my entire existence around avoiding being stabbed or bleeding at all. I am definitely a flight man in the fight or flight scenario. But sitting still is pretty key during the entire tattooing process. And having to put up with all the bleeding is a big part of it.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.