Maybe this is, in the end, why I’ve been reading about airports. In reading, as in traveling, I want to be transported—not physically, but into a deeper engagement with the world and the people around me. Absent of the kind of traveling I’d like to do, reading has been its own kind of portal. Iyer and Jamison shuttle me back into the world of public travel, which can be both boring or luminous depending on my capacity to give attention to strangers.
The earliest dinner I remember: pasta. My dorm kitchen, boxers and a tee shirt. I kept quiet. I chopped vegetables. Did the work. Anna was my first serious girlfriend, my first girlfriend at all. The way food and gender and family all swirled together for me, she didn’t know any of that yet. She only knew I said I could cook pasta and there I was.
It sounds like the premise for one of those classic screwball comedies of the 1930s: Thousands of out-of-work writers are hired by the United States government to collaborate on books. What could possibly go wrong?
But as Scott Borchert reveals in his new book, Republic of Detours, the amazing thing about the Federal Writers' Project was just how much went right.
Marzorati has written a deep, satisfying meditation on Serena’s path through an unsatisfying year. But she’s still the greatest tennis player ever, and it’s instructive to watch her become a Madison Avenue darling after being rejected by so many white fans early in her career; it says a Black person can eventually win ’em over if she’s a winner and she’s sympathetic and she’s nonthreatening. Serena may be fearsome on the court, but her apolitical nature means she’s not going to challenge white supremacy in ways that make fans feel uncomfortable, while her personal triumph gives them a chance to feel good about rooting for a Black woman who’s risen up from Compton.