Photo: Daniel Barlow

For Eve Ewing, a blank canvas is more than an opportunity, it’s a threat. Calling from her Chicago home, she explains that the hardest part of any project is the beginning. “A blank canvas is like having a rattlesnake in your house, right? You don’t get to look for the rattlesnake while watching 90 Day Fiance. It’s all hands on deck.” The 31-year-old Chicagoan has an almost superhuman range of talents: educator, sociologist, visual artist, essayist, and most recently, poet. Her work ethic has culminated in Electric Arches, her debut collection of poetry out today via Haymarket Books. The book is a reflection on African-American girlhood and womanhood that feels personal and intimate, yet astoundingly precise. Despite the poems’ slippery relationship with time and space, their truth is rooted firmly in the America of 2017. It’s no wonder that Chicago Magazine warns, “Ignore Eve Ewing at your own intellectual, political, and cultural peril.”

It is surprising to learn that her publisher was not initially looking for poetry at all. At the same time that Ewing was submitting a poetry compilation to contests and publishers, a piece about a Chicago school closing published on a site she co-founded led to essays for The New Yorker, The New Republic, and more. Haymarket approached her, hoping to publish a book of essays. “I was like ‘Well, I don’t want to do that, but how about you provide a home for this collection of poetry that needs some love?’” Ewing credits a long conversation with editor Julie Fain for bringing the theme of the collection into focus. “We had one of those iterative conversations,” she says. “It’s kind of like when you ask somebody for advice and then in talking to them you realize you already know what you’re supposed to do. I suddenly realized the book is about this. I reconstructed the book with this theme in my head, ‘This is an Afrofuturist Black feminist book about coming of age and growing up in the city.’”

Image: DrHobo via Flickr

Pinsker: This is probably not something that your eyes go to, but when I was flipping through the magazine as a first-time reader, what jumped out at me was the advertisements for a lot of sophisticated-looking equipment. It made me wonder how much work on a plant floor these days is actually done by humans.

Keefe: Yeah, that equipment is really, really sophisticated—I’m a little bit of a factory geek, and I think it’s really cool. Increasingly, they’re using robots that are laser-guided—there’s a company in Wisconsin and they do mostly portion-controlled pork chops, for hospitals and things like that, so it has to be exactly 3 ounces, and not 3.1 ounces, and it has to be x-amount thick, because it goes through a standardized cooking process. You freeze the pork cut that you get the chops from, and this laser knife goes through and cuts those things the exact same way every single time. And it does at least 25 of these in a minute. A human doing that would take much longer, and there would be a lot more disparity between the slices. So there’s a tremendous amount of automation.

This interview with the editor of the Chicago-based trade publication, Meatingplace, is pretty wild: come for the pork chop slicers and corn-dog assemblers, but stay for the line about how the meat industry just refuses to talk about the ethical quandaries of meat-eating for the tautological reasoning that it has never had to before.

A re-recording of George Best, the Wedding Present’s 1987 debut, is coming out in October to mark the album’s 30th anniversary, even though the re-recording was done (with Steve Albini) nine years ago, because why should anything matter or make sense anymore? Also, think about how miserable you were nine years ago (or even back in 1987, should you be someone to whom that time frame applies) and then think about how quickly you would return to that era if given the option today. The person making the deal wouldn’t even be finished talking before you said, “Done.” Unfortunately that is not what’s on offer, and the only thing you’ve got coming up on the calendar is a steady stream of sadness, anger and disgust. Anyway, enjoy.

★★★★★ A chill clung to clothes worn in from outside in the early morning. The trick was to be out of the warm and blinding sun but also out of the cold breeze, so that everything hung in balance. The shin of a metallic Michael Jordan logo flashed from the front of a cap. A man turned his head and whistled as a line of bare tanned legs walked away from him. Fresh, damp horse droppings were piled in the shade of the bike line. Someone was unloading a boogie board from a car, though it was hard to imagine using it. The five-year-old took a few dutiful laps on his two-wheeled scooter, then switched to speeding and swerving around the plaza on the old three-wheeler. Now and then he would switch back, and back again. A few leaves, mostly green but scorched with brown, skidded a short ways on the bricks and then stopped. Nearly everyone going out or coming in paused and lingered. Scooters and strollers multiplied. For a while there were too many children for the children to ride scooters through—children in moods of tearfulness or challenge or eagerness or sleepiness. The crowd thinned and the scooters sped up again. Parents poured wine into plastic cups. The subway was crowded with riders, thickly overseen by police. After dinner, it seemed better to walk not quite a mile down Amsterdam in the cool oncoming twilight than to go back down into the heat and struggle. The five-year-old, who had insisted on wearing shorts and had scootered his legs into fatigue, disagreed, but he had been disagreeing about a lot of things, and in the end he went along.

Those pictures don’t do it justice, because they look like they’re normal-sized plates but they’re actually cake-sized, like what you’d use for cake at a children’s birthday party. They’re small, tiny little slivers of pizza.”

What is this, a pizza festival for rats?

Image: Tony Fischer via Flickr

“I’m a liberal Democrat. Should I be mad at Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Barack Obama or just mad at myself?” —Liberal Louie

It’s been a great year for finger-pointing. Assigning blame is one of the things our society does best and devotes so much of its energy toward. The entire internet is basically a delivery system for porn and outrage. And outrage porn. But after last year’s election, we’ve taken it up a notch. Someone is to blame for the outcomes of that election. All the bad policies and all the terrible governmental decisions that have followed. And it certainly isn’t us or our friends or whoever we voted for.

Thankfully, Hillary Clinton has written a post-mortem on her experiences during the election. They are a bit colored by the fact that she lost in surprising fashion to Donald Trump. Ever since, we’ve had to endure the endless ball-spiking of seemingly moronic people that Only They Saw This Coming. Somehow, Trump’s advisors have become prescient truth-seers in a world full of incredulous doubters. Which suggests we might have to reassess whether the sky is actually blue or not.

On this week’s episode, Mike Dang and Dan Nosowitz join us to talk about watching, following, and playing tennis, particularly in New York City, where everything is more expensive. Playing tennis recreationally is harder than you think, but it’s also easier: a private lesson will vastly improve your game. Professional tennis is a year-round affair, and getting ranked is like a video game where you rack up points.

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.

★★★★★ The showers had cleared away ahead of schedule, leaving everything open and bright. There was sun enough that it didn’t matter that no one had grabbed a hoodie on the way out for school. Enough thin clouds appeared to keep the noon mild. By school’s end, there was dappled light on the sidewalk under the lines of waiting adults and a breeze stirring the leaves above. The clouds developed ruffled edges and moved on. Electric lights burned warm and brilliant through the pristine night air.