The Longreads Blog

This Month in Books: ‘How Do We Stay the Right Distance Apart?’

Ladder on library bookcase
Julien McRoberts / Getty Images

Dear Reader,

At first glance, there’s a pretty stark divide in this month’s books newsletter.

In one corner, we have the isolationists. In her book The Art of the Wasted Day, Patricia Hampl writes about the Ladies of Llangollen, who became famous in the late 18th century for their intense desire to live a life of quiet “retirement” and “delicious seclusion.” They eschewed marriage, ran away from home, and, once they settled down, rarely traveled. They just wanted to be left alone. So too do the Patriot Movement-esque insurrectionists in Maxim Loskutoff’s new short story collection Come West and See, who rail against the federal government’s incursions.

In the other corner, we have the systematic thinkers, the big picture people, who are making impassioned calls for us to work — together — to change the system before the system’s collapse engulfs us all. Although, to be fair, William Vollmann, in an interview about his new book No Immediate Danger, tells us he’s pretty sure it’s already too late to stop climate change. The afrofuturist and activist adrienne maree brown, in an interview about her planet/self-help book Emergent Strategy, feels slightly more hopeful; she thinks it’s possible that we are on the cusp of a radical reckoning in self- and collective awareness. Through changes in perception and practice, her thinking goes, we will redirect our collective fate.

This same juxtaposition becomes the centerpiece of Rachel King’s review of two new books about the workplace: David Graeber, in his new book Bullshit Jobs, begs us to change the system, while Alison Green, in Ask a Manager, gives us sound advice about how to survive it.


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I think, though, that the two sides of this coin have a lot to offer one another. “I try not to have a schedule,” Vollmann tells us — useful advice for a polymath, but not so much for a regular person hoping to avert climate change, which, as adrienne maree brown rightly points out, likely requires us to engage in a new kind of “intentional” living. Meanwhile, the Ladies of Llangollen — oh, the Ladies! — lived by what they called “Our System,” managed down to the minute, exquisitely engineered to foster a productive life of the mind, healthful eating, and light exercise. For all their bourgeois moralizing (they were aghast at the French Revolution), their System was, unbeknownst to them, radically environmentalist, and, fully known to them, radically emotionally fulfilling.

And it turns out that Come West and See’s insurrectionists — or not the insurrectionists themselves, not the true believers, but rather those sympathetic to their protest — might be less interested in being left alone by the system than being recognized by it. Tori Telfer notices this in her review, pointing to the mother of one of the Cliven Bundy-like protesters, who insists, “We’re real people,” and to an angry young man envious of college athletes whom he thinks are destined to be become not only “bosses,” but “the boss’s bosses.” This is not a desire for freedom from a system, but a desire for inclusion within it.

Perhaps what I’m noticing is this: we can’t survive alone, not really. (Even the Ladies had a constant stream of visitors and volumes of correspondence. They also read books — which are, after all, just another way of talking to people.) But we won’t survive at all if we don’t each — individually — change how we live; if we don’t each become, in practice, survivalists. “This is what [we] learn from flocking,” adrienne maree brown says. “How do we stay the right distance apart and the right distance in touch with each other in order to actually move together as a unit and stay alive and make it as far as we can?”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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The Dying Days of the New West

Getty Images

Tori Telfer | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,912 words)

The American West brings out a hunger in people. I’ve felt it myself — an urge to disconnect from society, buy a horse, live next to a giant saguaro. My husband and I have talked for hours about moving to the town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, where we were invited to live by an elderly gay couple we met beside a Tucson, Arizona pool. They told us that houses were cheap and everyone was friends and they’d be our uncles; we took their business card home and spent nights looking at houses on Zillow, cooing over cacti. The destiny was almost made manifest, then real life intruded. Guess where we’re moving instead? New York City.

The urbane, European-inflected East Coast has looked at the West with a strange blend of envy and hope for most of United States history. While the United States was built partially on the idea that the West was our manifest destiny, an East/West rivalry has also been baked into our identity from the beginning; even the famous “Go west, young man!” dictum contained within it some eastward scorn. That cry came from an 1865 New York Times editorial, in which Horace Greeley, the newspaper’s editor, exclaimed that “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

In 1836, the writer Francis Grund speculated that westward expansion would only stop when some “physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress”; by the late 1800s, the ocean proved to be no such barrier, as America’s westward colonization encroached on the islands of the Pacific, reaching as far as the Philippines; in 2018, there is so little West left to discover that when we want to dream about the idea of the “frontier,” we look to Mars. Today’s West is a place of deep irony: lands that look wide-open to the naked eye but are actually choked by bureaucratic red tape. In fact, “the West” is more of a mirage than a reality, these days. But the hunger is still there. Read more…

The Roaring Girls of Queer London

Moll Cutpurse, 1611. (Getty)

Peter Ackroyd | Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day | Abrams Press | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,408 words)

The story of same-sex love among women was bequeathed another chapter with the rediscovery of the clitoris by anatomists of the mid sixteenth century. It had been known to the Greeks but then disappeared from view. It could not have come as a surprise to women themselves that some organ or other was capable of arousal, but finally it had been named. A medical compendium of 1615, Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia, announced that the clitoris “comes of an obscene word signifying contrectation [touching or fingering] but properly it is called the woman’s yard [penis]. It is a small production in the upper, forward . . . and middle fatty part of the share [genitals] in the top greater cleft where the Nymphs [labia] do meet and is answerable to the member of the man.” The member of the man need have nothing to do with it, however, and the reintroduction of the clitoris heralded the rise in public awareness of the tribade, the fricatrix, the rubster. These were the women who knew how to manipulate “the seat of women’s delight” with a hand, a dildo or a massively enlarged clitoris.

Helkiah Crooke himself remarked that “sometimes it grows to such a length that it hangs without the cleft like a man’s member, especially when it is fretted with the touch of the clothes, and so struts and grows to a rigidity as does the yard of a man. And this part it is which those wicked women do abuse called Tribades (often mentioned by many authors, and in some states worthily punished) to their mutual and unnatural lusts.” It is sometimes suggested that lesbianism was, before the twentieth century, an unmentioned and invisible act; in fact it has a historical identity arguably as long as that of love between men. Wherever there are bodies, there are lovers. It is found, for example, at the end of the twelfth century, in a vision of Edmund, a monk of Eynsham Abbey. He was taken to purgatory and led to that site where the souls of those guilty of same-sex love were consigned for their own particular suffering. To his astonishment, among them were a great number of women. He was surprised because he had not suspected women to be capable of such a deed. But there they were, suspended in woe and pain. Read more…

But a Novel Will Never Love You Like Your Children Do

(Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

Writing for GQ, four-time father Michael Chabon reconciles ignoring the advice of a great, un-named Southern writer who told him that having children would diminish his writerly productivity.

And those four “lost” novels predicted by the great man’s theory all those years ago? If I had followed the great man’s advice and never burdened myself with the gift of my children, or if I had never written any novels at all, in the long run the result would have been the same as the result will be for me here, having made the choice I made: I will die; and the world in its violence and serenity will roll on, through the endless indifference of space, and it will take only 100 of its circuits around the sun to turn the six of us, who loved each other, to dust, and consign to oblivion all but a scant few of the thousands upon thousands of novels and short stories written and published during our lifetimes. If none of my books turns out to be among that bright remnant because I allowed my children to steal my time, narrow my compass, and curtail my freedom, I’m all right with that. Once they’re written, my books, unlike my children, hold no wonder for me; no mystery resides in them. Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back. Anyway, if, 100 years hence, those books lie moldering and forgotten, I’ll never know. That’s the problem, in the end, with putting all your chips on posterity: You never stick around long enough to enjoy it.

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‘Like Floating Through a Library’: An Interview with Nick Paumgarten

Big Bend National Park (Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)

For a recent issue of The New Yorker, staff writer Nick Paumgarten floated the rugged canyons of the Rio Grande to witness the irreplaceable wilderness that Trump’s proposed border wall would destroy. A native New Yorker, Paumgarten fell in love with whitewater on Idaho’s Salmon River as a kid. Paumgarten’s feature, “Water and the Wall,” takes readers through the riparian heart of Big Bend National Park, in a flotilla that includes Teddy Roosevelt’s great-grandson and New Mexico Senator Tom Udall. Damming, diversion, pollution, and overpumping have long degraded the state of America’s rivers, reducing clean rushing waterways into canals with as much wildness as a pet store. Paumgarten’s story shows how heightened border enforcement poses a new environmental threat.

You mention you hadn’t given much thought to the Rio Grande before you began your reporting. Did that lack of knowledge vacuum hinder or help as you started examining the river? 

There’s something slightly Trumpian to the presumption that one’s own ignorance of a subject extends to the rest of the world. In this case, the knowledge vacuum lured me in, got me curious, and made the thing seem worth doing.

It’s always great to have people who know their way around a subject or a place and can fill you in. I was fortunate here to be on a trip with a handful of such people. It was because of them that I went on the trip, really. They had done the work so I wouldn’t have to. It was like floating through a library. I just had to pay attention and jot it all down in my waterproof notepad. (I learned pretty quick that it’s hard to take notes and steer a canoe at the same time.) On the other hand, I knew a little bit about rivers in general. I’d been on a bunch of float trips, paddled kayaks here and there, and had passed hours upon hours talking about rivers with other boaters. I’d read and loved Cadillac Desert and Desert Solitaire. So I brought something to this one. I usually like to have some point of contact, some toehold, when I set out to report a piece.

This boat trip let you return to the whitewater kayaking you did in your youth, and to make good on a promise you made to yourself about taking a rafting trip later in life This was a small personal thread in your article, but a powerful one. What was your logic for including a bit of the story of your life as a river runner?

No logic. Pure narcissism. Well, okay, maybe there’s a reason or two. As I said before, I like to have some kind of connection to a story. Sometimes that connection is personal. I read somewhere recently that John McPhee once tallied up all his stories and discovered that almost all of them had something to do with subjects he’d been interested in before he even went to college) This story was a mix of things and one of them was that it’s an ode to river-running.

A quiet theme here is that the impetus to protect rivers usually arises out of spending time on them. This seems true in a broader sense. (The demise of, say, the Great Barrier Reef is more painful to contemplate if you’ve been there to see it.) Many of the people in this story got religion on a river, and so maybe it made sense for me to describe how I had, too. Likewise, you can’t quite appreciate how absurd the idea of a wall is until you’ve spent some time in some of the places where one might go. Donald Trump and his cabinet ought to float the Rio Grande.

People need the chance to contemplate their existence in what you call nature’s “prehistoric hush,” to experience the cosmic out by a campfire. And yet, new sections of that absurd wall are being considered that would destroy that hush. How do you think of your role as a journalist to help stop these things?

I don’t really ever think of myself as an advocate for a point of view when I’m reporting and writing pieces. In this particular instance, that I think the wall’s a lousy idea. I also think rivers deserve as much protection as we can muster. But I didn’t take the assignment in order to advance those arguments.

Maybe I wound up doing it subconsciously, but my role, as I see it, is to bring things to light, and to present them in a way that makes you see those things in a new and different way. To the extent that there’s guile in the structure or in the emphasis, it may have more to do with keeping the reader interested, or maybe creating moments of insight and delight.

Did you read any classic river books before starting this trip? John Graves’ Goodbye to a River or Mary Morris’ The River Queen: A Memoir?

When I got out of college, I thought I’d be doing what we used to call “nature writing.” I’d been reading a lot of Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, John McPhee, Peter Matthiessen Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, Norman MacLean — all that stuff, which either was a thing in the early 1990s, or was a thing in the intermountain west, where I’d gone to live for a time.

Twenty-plus years back in New York City had beaten some of that out of me, or at least had caused me to forget that that’s what I was into. I have not read the two books you mention, though the Graves came up on the Rio. Add it to the list! To be honest, on this one, in the time allotted, I could barely take a big enough bite out of Paul Horgan’s history of the Rio Grande. I also had in mind my colleague Ben McGrath’s forthcoming book about Dick Conant, an itinerant vagabond canoeist and latter-day Huck Finn, which I’d seen some early chapters of. It captures a workaday riparian America that I hardly knew existed.

As a New York City native, what had urban life beaten out of you that the nature writing revived?

Returning to New York as an adult really just diverted me from thinking, writing, or reading about the outdoors, the American West, and the natural world. It was hard to get out.

I got a job at a weekly newspaper in Manhattan, the New York Observer. The focus was on people, the machinations and ploys of city dwellers. Culture, politics, business. The whole circus. Editors and readers generally didn’t seem to care much about timber rights or water flows or endangered species, or nights out under the stars. I got re-urbanized. I grew cynical about a certain kind of writing — overly poetic evocations of natural beauty, pat epiphanies out in the bush.

Meanwhile, as you get older, maybe you get more interested in questions of money and class, in the way generations rise and fall, who’s screwing over whom and how. But in the last couple of years, I’ve been on a few assignments and trips that have reminded me about what excited me when I was younger, and I’m sort of trying to figure out a way to get back to it. This Rio Grande trip was one of these.

Can you reconcile your interest in the West with your current location? How about a Talk of the Town department for a town on a trout stream?

Whenever I do the where-from-here math, I find that I still love this town, and for that matter the whole tidewater east. But who knows what tomorrow will bring. One thing it won’t bring me is new shoulders, so big-water kayaking ain’t in the cards.

O, Small-bany! Part 1: Spring

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,229 words)

They poisoned the water in the lake again. It’s actually more of an enormous pond. They poison it a few times a year. I’m not listening to music, for a change. My battery’s at 10%, anyway, and I want to eavesdrop. Washington Park’s full of people. Just like the Seurat painting, minus the class status and pointillism.

There’s a black man fishing with his tiny son crouching beside him. The man’s biceps are impressively built and inked. The boy says, “Tell me when you see a fish.” There’s a middle-aged white couple with a contented aura, walking a mid-sized grey mutt. There’s a very petite brown woman in tight blue athleisure berating a man who is pushing a baby in a stroller. Not a status stroller. Athleisure woman is on this man about something. He hadn’t been on time to pick her up. He is playing it cool (“Well, I came, didn’t I?”) but she is unrelenting (“Not when you said you would! Not til after you…”) and then they are out of earshot. There’s a young white mother from the nearby cult (I’m sorry: Intentional Community), holding a toddler’s hand. The Intentional Community manufactures the kind of old-fashioned wooden toys for which my bored mom friends and I go wild. They live and work in a huge brick mansion near the park. There’s free literature about their intentionality to be had in a little kiosk at the entrance to their driveway. Books about making peace with death and living in accordance with the laws of nature. When I was a new mother, I used to loiter around that kiosk. Should I join? They wear homemade clothing and raise children communally. I yearn deeply for the latter but I have a quasi-sexual weakness for fashion, and ultimately I’m not much of a joiner. The young mother in her homemade ankle-length skirt and bonnet is talking to a black man on a bench by the boathouse. He rests one arm on yet another stroller (not status), in which sits a toddler with a delightful head of tight, ombre ringlets. The man reaches out his hand to me.

“Hello!” he says, like we know each other; I don’t think we know each other.

“How are you?” he wonders.

I smile, nod: fine, fine, thank you, and you? I do this intuitive sort of bow, and continue on my way. The cult woman slightly glares at me from under her bonnet. Her glare (real? imagined?) trips some anxiety about running into people I’m not fond of, by which I mean people not fond of me. There’s this one woman in particular, your standard bad-vibes-in-small-town situation, and my nervous system goes insane every goddamn time.

***

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. Which can make it hard to take a walk sometimes. Small-bany, some call it. Shmalbany, I prefer. Albanality, a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out. There’s not that fantastically freeing anonymity of your big exciting status places. State capitals are often kind of weird places. It’s a small goddamn town. So much chit-chat always waiting to be had. Just around that bend? Just over this hill? Just past that tree? I arrange my face in a blank mask and bland smile, practicing. I catch myself doing so, catch my thoughts circling this dumb anxiety; shake it off. You are safe, I tell myself. My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you. I used to kind of seek out people with bad energy, try to make them like me, but that only makes them like you less. I learn slowly.

You are safe, I tell myself, and it works. I am safe. Relatively speaking. More often now I seek to avoid or minimize encounters with people who don’t like me, people who bring out the ugly. This is progress, according to the meditation teacher.

Isn’t this the kind of inner drama we all share? Useless, banal. Best kept to oneself, only then how are we to take comfort in the knowledge that we’re all the same!?

Read more…

Why Beyoncé Placed HBCU’s at the Center of American Life

(Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella)

When Beyoncé strolled onto Coachella’s desert stage like a drum major on the night of April 16, no one was prepared for the spectacle that was to come. There was, of course, the sheer magnitude of it: She wore a cape and crown of painstaking detail, bedazzled by Olivier Rousteing of Balmain, referencing the ageless black regality of Nefertiti and Michael Jackson. Dozens of monochromatically clad dancers joined Bey, along with a drumline with sousaphone and trombone players. It was an ocean of sound and color against the backdrop of bleachers. “‘Let’s do a homecoming,” she reportedly told her choreographers in early rehearsals.

Perhaps we should’ve been ready. Beyoncé, known for rigorous stagecraft, always promises a spectacle. She’s a pop star who sings soul, although she hasn’t ever tried to be earthy or minimalist like Erykah Badu or Jill Scott, two artists whose work I can tell she pays attention to. I’m sure Beyoncé could pull off a full-length, stripped down, acoustic album if she wanted, but she’s always seemed willfully extra. Her sound is emotive, melismatic, acrobatic, and her visuals are similarly bombastic — a lot of hair, plenty of ass and sweat, and more than a few wardrobe changes.

Yet some of my favorite moments of her career are when she’s focused on fundamentals. Keeping the beat on her lap while performing “Halo” at a children’s hospital, ad-libbing on Frank Ocean’s “Pink and White,” harmonizing on the relaxed, minor-note groove of Destiny’s Child deep cuts like “Get on the Bus,” and “Confessions”. You notice her ear for complex harmonies, the strength of her lower register, the sense of rhythm that makes the delivery of her hooks sticky, and the staccato of her cadences — along with everything else she’s capable of, she’s also more than competent as a rapper.

What I loved most about Bey at Coachella was how her performance drew out elements that have been important in her art for the past 20 years and took them to their logical conclusion — or rather, to their true beginning. She’s long had a brassiness in her voice and she’s always mined black, Southern ways of being for her work. When her sister’s meditative album A Seat at the Table climbed the charts alongside Lemonade in 2016, both of which explicitly pulsed with a brazen black consciousness, Solange told the public not to be surprised. “I’m really proud of my sister and I’m really proud of her record and her work and I’ve always been,” she said to Fader. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s always been an activist from the beginning of her career and she’s always been very, very black.”

If you’re black and from the South, it feels like the culture of HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) is in the ether. They are spaces you can’t ignore and wouldn’t want to. Beyoncé was born in Houston and her father graduated from Fisk University. When she was a child in the 1980s and 90s, Spike Lee joints came out almost every other year, and Lee never let us forget that he’d gone to Morehouse, the way Morehouse men are wont to do. The culture of HBCU’s and black Greek life was everywhere: Lee’s 1988 film School Daze and the 1987 TV series A Different World shared similar themes and a few principal cast members, including Jasmine Guy, who was head of the Gamma Ray sorority in the former and iconic B.A.P. Whitley Gilbert in the latter.

That Beyoncé chooses to highlight the specific culture of HBCUs and black Greek life shouldn’t really surprise us, either, and if it does, it feels to me as if we haven’t really been paying attention. A host of black artists have seen black college culture as ripe for the imaginary. At JSTOR Daily, Lavelle Porter reminds us that it was taken up by novelists Ralph Ellison and Nella Larsen at the beginning of the century, and later, by the creators of films and shows like Drumline, Stomp the Yard, and The Quad. To that list,we could add Janelle Monáe, who depicted HBCU life in her 2013 music video “Electric Lady,” as well as Kanye West, whose mother got degrees from Virginia Union and Atlanta University and was the head of the English department at Chicago State for six years.

Growing up, my older sister ran a small business selling Afrocentric gifts and black Greek paraphernalia at Classic ballgames and other events throughout the South. This was the early 90s, when Kenté cloth and Malcolm X fitted caps and medallions were everywhere. One of the T-shirts in our inventory read “The Blacker the College, the Sweeter the Knowledge,” a riff on an old saying about blackness and fecund soulfulness. At a well-attended event at Memphis’ Cook Convention Center, a customer looked me in the eyes and said she knew the future was secure since I’d been such an eloquent and competent salesperson for a fifth grader.

My sophomore year of high school, I visited a few Southern and East coast colleges, both HBCUs and PWIs, on a tour bus with a church group. Spelman felt like home in a way that I didn’t know a place of learning could. Missy Elliot videos played in a student center, women who looked and sounded like people I loved carried full backpacks, answered our questions. When we got to Howard, we were giddy. It was a Friday afternoon in the late spring, and we spent a long time out on the green, buzzing Yard.

Part of the reason I didn’t go to an HBCU was that I was so familiar with them. Now, I wonder what I could have been had I let myself bask in that kind of affirmation for a little bit longer. Nonetheless, I was pretty sure that who I was — a nerdy, bespectacled daughter of a poor-to-working class single mother, wouldn’t easily fit in at one those campuses.

My experiences with wealthier black families in Memphis — and watching Bill Cosby’s shows — made it clear that I needed to aspire to a pristine, black middle-class ideal. I think Cosby’s crimes have given us an opportunity to think about the limits of some of our sacred black spaces, how the pressure to be respectable can force you to abandon or question or edit yourself if you’re poor, or queer, or anything else. By associating herself with HBCUs, Beyoncé challenges those mores with her self-avowed feminist, queer-loving and blatantly sexual art. She helps expand the possibilities of what it looks like to be a black thinking person.

That she chose to share this at Coachella, with its largely wealthy, white audience, wasn’t exactly a disruption. I truly believe that her performance placed HBCUs and black Greek culture at the center of American life, and that’s where they belong. Today, there are 102 HBCUs, a mix of private and public institutions. Most have some relationship with federal or state funding, and none have endowments like those of the oldest, private universities in the northeast, many of which are uncovering their ties to slavery.  The share of black college students enrolled in HBCUs has declined in recent years, but the schools do more than their share of the work — enrolling about 9 percent of the nation’s black undergraduates and graduating about 15 percent of them.

They are also American institutions that have an important relationship with our nation’s long march towards democracy. According to W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1935 essay Black Reconstruction:

The first great mass movement for public education at the expense of the state, in the South, came from Negroes. Many leaders before the war had advocated general education, but few had been listened to. Schools for indigents and paupers were supported, here and there, and more or less spasmodically. Some states had elaborate plans, but they were not carried out. Public education for all at public expense, was, in the South, a Negro idea.

Before this mass movement, the South’s leadership did not believe in the “educability of the poor,” and much of the white laboring class in the region saw no need for it, mired as they were in the plantation system’s feudalism. State by state, Reconstruction governments set up tax-based schools that would be open to all. There was resistance to nearly all of this — to the idea of blacks becoming educated, to whites teaching blacks, to the black and white students sharing facilities. As a compromise, secondary schools and colleges were opened specifically to train black teachers. Fisk University opened in 1866, and Howard University was founded in 1867, partly funded by the Freedman’s Bureau. Du Bois said these institutions “became the centers of a training in leadership and ideals for the whole Negro race, and the only fine and natural field of contact between white and black culture.”

A few studies have shown that throughout the world, compulsory education increases voter participation, and increases in education predict social engagement in the sort of groups and organizations that do critical grassroots work. The push for education on the part of emancipated blacks, then, can be considered a driving force in the ever-widening democratization of American life.

Beyoncé’s Coachella sets were a correction to the erasure and historical amnesia that make us feel like she could possibly disrupt something that her forebears had such a heavy hand in creating.

For further reading:

You’ll Dream What We Tell You To Dream and You’ll Like It

a close-up image of red, orange, blue, green, and yellow balls
Somehow, fun and unfettered imagination always equals "ball pit." Photo by Julie Kertesz via Wikimedia Common (CC BY 2.0)

The Dream Machine is the latest must-visit location for the Instagram-addicted influencer who’s already taken a selfie at the Museum of Ice Cream. But are you really dreaming when you’re in a space designed by someone else — and when you’re waiting in line with 100 other InstaFans? At The Baffler, Zach Webb looks behind the Dream Machine’s whimsical facade to pick apart its seamy underbelly. (Spoiler! It’s capitalism.)

But herein lurks an irony: by immersing yourself in a temporary reality of populated meme-crap, you are purchasing a reprieve from the Bad News World. “Dreams are an escape,” claims founder Johnson in an interview with amNewYork, and “with the world we’re living in and the feeds that inundate us with bad news, we don’t really [get a break]. We wanted to have a space that is a respite.” In practice, however, the Machine both assaults and abets this idea of the apparatus as a break—a relief from life and labor. It is, for one, just as overcrowded and saturated with sweat-air as the city outside—perhaps more so. Further, the user is not absolved from labor by any means—its evidence merely eludes the frame. They work diligently and without shame in the staging of themselves and their companions for photographs. (Almost no one travels to the Dream Machine alone). On the other hand, a frolic through these vistas requires not an ounce of critical engagement from the user, which is all to say that the Machine is exactly like the “real world”—only worse.

Read the essay

Five Early Lessons in Parenting

(RichVintage/Getty)

Steven Church | I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part| May 2018 | 16 minutes (4,362 words)

1. How to Be a Superhero

My son came home one day from his progressive and politically correct Providence, Rhode Island, pre-school and informed me that he was not allowed to talk about superheroes.

“Why not?” I asked, flabbergasted. This couldn’t be true, I thought. There must be some kind of mistake.

“Because, Daddy,” he said patiently, “Superheroes solve their problems by fighting and not with their words.”

“Yeah, but…” I tried to respond but couldn’t. I was stumped, struck dumb and silent.

He was right. But for Chrissakes, they’re superheroes. They’re the fabric of childhood. I could barely imagine my own without superheroes. Their stories helped me believe I might actually survive the nuclear 1980’s. A superhero’s problems were not the kind you could just talk about, like parking tickets, traffic jams, or sub-prime mortgages. A superhero had to deal with evil super-villains, rogue mutants, and extra-terrestrial war-mongerers. A superhero had the kind of problems that you might only be able to solve by fighting.

One of my favorites, the Incredible Hulk, couldn’t even use words. He just grunted, bellowed like an animal, and smashed things. But his anger, his insecurity and pain, was his superpower. His existential angst made him special and allowed him to help others with his unique physical gifts. What better role model for a child of the 80’s?

Still I had to admit that my son (or his teachers) had a point. It was just difficult for me to deal with the idea that he could have a superhero-free childhood or, worse yet, that he would think the model of a superhero was this guy on TV named “Sportacus.”

If you haven’t seen an episode of “LazyTown,” you’re missing one of the most bizarre television experiences. A lot of children’s shows are strange, but this one is a truly odd mixture of public service and entertainment. Sportacus, the star of the show, teams up with a spunky little pink-haired girl named Stephanie and a gang of children wearing rubber puppet suits. An adult male outfitted in a tight blue spandex flight-suit and aviator goggles, Sportacus speaks with a faux-French accent and wears a handlebar mustache waxed to sharp points. He champions lifestyle choices like physical activity and eating fruit. Pretty much any problem in LazyTown can be solved with exercise and an apple.

But what good would Sportacus be in the face of real danger? How would he handle a supervillain like Magneto or Lex Luthor or Doctor Octopus? What dreams of survival would he inspire? His beloved fruit would be poisoned with radiation. Exercise is difficult when you have a second head growing out of your shoulder and sort of pointless if you’ve mutated into a Ninja reptile. LazyTown is yet another reminder that my son lives in a world that is both eerily familiar to and strikingly different from my own childhood reality.

Some days I feel terribly ill-equipped to teach him anything.

After watching the animated film The Incredibles, we had another superhero discussion, about Mr. Incredible’s reasons for lifting train cars like dumbbells.

“Why did he do that, Daddy?”

I told him that Mr. Incredible was working out, getting stronger to fight evil, sort of like when Daddy lifts the dumbbells at home.

Then I asked, “Do you think Daddy could lift a train car?”

“Yeah,” he said, and with no prompting at all from me, “’Cause you’re a superhero.”

I just let that one settle in for a while. I let it linger in the rarified air of our minivan.

Then I repeated the story over and over again, telling friends and even strangers. But the more I told it, the more self-conscious I became, the more aware of my own shortcomings as a potential superhero. I have bad knees and bad ankles. My shoulder is wrecked. I’m lactose intolerant. I’m generally afraid of confrontation, and I trust strangers and freaks way too easily. I have more curiosity than common sense. And I look terrible in tights.

I’m glad I didn’t ruin the moment, but part of me thinks I should have politely informed him that I am no caped crusader. I’m a regular guy who makes bad choices sometimes, and he probably shouldn’t depend on my superpowers to protect him from harm. But then again I figured he’d have the rest of his life to learn this lesson. So I decided to let him believe for a while that I could lift some trains or maybe even—following his example—use my words instead of my fists to save the world and protect my family; because perhaps all children need these sorts of fictions to feel safe.

2. How to Play Dead

When I was 5 or 6, a huge scar creased my face, and I towered over many of the other kids. Not only had I pulled a pocketknife on my best friend and booted a kickball through a school window, but I regularly led a gaggle of boys around the playground in a militaristic march, while chanting, “Crush. Kill. Destroy.”

I had some issues. But I overcame them. Mostly.

So I wasn’t really worried when my son’s preschool teacher pulled me aside one day to tell me that he’d been playing a game with the other kids where they put a baby in the oven.

When she said this she said the last part almost in a whisper, a baby in the oven. She folded her hands in front of her as if in prayer and stretched her lips out thin like a knife. This was the same teacher I had to talk with about my son’s repeated reference to his colon and his drawings of the digestive system. She was one of those preschool teachers who just seemed completely incapable of understanding little boys; but she did get me thinking a bit about where he might have learned such things.

Then I remembered that I’d recently read Hansel and Gretel to him, and let me tell you, that is a seriously dark and twisted story. But I thought about it more and realized there are actually quite a few children’s stories about children being shoved into ovens or cooked in pots or cakes. One of our favorites, Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, features a naked boy baked in a cake by portly bakers with Hitler mustaches. And then I thought about a game my son liked to play with his mother. It was called “The Baby Bagoo” game, and it was a regular part of our everyday life in Rhode Island. I figured it was the kind of imagination play that good parents are supposed to do with their precocious children.

This is how it went: My son would climb up on the bed and curl into a fetal position. He’d coo and babble like a baby.

Then my wife would walk into the room and say, “Yes, I’ve come to the orphanage today because I would like to adopt a baby,” and then, “Oh, look at all these babies. I want a little girl baby. Where are the little girl babies?”

My son would cry and babble urgently.

“Oh, look at this cute baby!” my wife would say. “Oh, but he’s a boy baby.”

“Ga. Ga. Ga. Goo. Goo,” my son would say.

“What’s your name, baby?”

“Baaagoooo.”

“Bagoo?”

My son nodded his head.

“Oh, you’re such a sweet baby Bagoo. I want to take you home,” she said as she wrapped him up and carried him to another part of the room or the bed.

“Now, I’m going to leave you here by the river/ocean/lake/bathtub, OK, Baby Bagoo? Don’t go anywhere.”

She’d turn around and Baby Bagoo would promptly roll into the water and go under.

“Oh my god!” she’d yell, “My baby! My baby!” as she pulled him out of the water, limp, eyes closed. “Bagoo? Bagoo? Speak to me. Oh no, my sweet Baby Bagoo is dead.”

On cue, my son’s eyes would flutter and open wide. His arms would begin to flail and he’d rise up, cooing and babbling and saying “Bagoo” over and over again. He would be born again, newly risen, and then we’d go about our normal routines.

Of course, I recognized that my son was working through a lot of fears—layers of fear—with this game. It somehow touched on fear of abandonment, death and water, issues of gender, and the promise of reincarnation. But it was an admittedly strange game, one that other people might not understand. It even freaked me out sometimes.

I never told my son’s teachers about Baby Bagoo. I thought they might worry about us. But what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them—unless of course they were hurt by the un-tethered imaginations of children. Our cultural avoidance of death and our ignorance of its meaning begins at an early age. One of the things that makes little kids so morbid, so creative, and so fun to be around is that they are not afraid of death. Or rather they have not yet been taught to face death through fear rather than through curiosity. For my son, curiosity generates questions—and it is these that I’m constantly encouraging him to pursue. “Never stop asking questions,” I say in my more parental moments. Fear only leads us into the darkness of easy answers, to avoidance and ignorance…and this is usually about the time he stops listening to me.

“Daddy?” my son asked me once at a restaurant.

“Yes?”

“Why do we not like George Bush?”

Silence. The sound of guilty pride. Or the sound of me trying to come up with a reason that would make sense to a 4-year-old, or trying to just pare down the list I keep in my head.

“Is it because he doesn’t share his toys?”

For my son, this was the ultimate knock against one’s character.

“Kind of,” I said.

I was trying to speak his language.

“And because he’s fighting a war in the desert and killing people for oil?’

“Uh huh,” I said.

I swear I didn’t prompt him to say this.

“Daddy?” he said, pausing to blow bubbles in his soda. “Why is he doing that?”

“Good question,” I said.

I didn’t have an answer either. I also didn’t have an answer for why people want to bomb trains or planes or malls or sporting events, or why so many stories are about the loss of innocence. I just knew that we had to keep telling them. And I worried sometimes that fear would rise up and fill the void of answers, that he would stop saving babies from ovens and rivers because someone told him he’d got the story wrong.

3. How to Get Rich

In 2006, shortly after we moved to Fresno, California, I bought my son a frog-shaped sandbox and two hundred pounds of sand from Home Depot. As we were driving home with it in the back, he asked me if I thought a robber would come and steal his sandbox.

I laughed. “I don’t think a robber would be interested your sandbox.”

“Why not?” he asked.

This made me stop and think. I didn’t want to admit that his sandbox wasn’t valuable because you couldn’t sell it for crack, crank,  or a bottle; that it wasn’t valuable because you couldn’t hock a sandbox or recycle it for cash. Lately, the robbers in Fresno had been targeting street-lights in the nice neighborhoods, pilfering yards and yards of copper wire and selling them to recycling plants. More recently there had been a rash of thefts of catalytic converters from cars parked in driveways and public parking lots. Something about the stuff inside that could be sold on the black market.

My son’s sandbox really only had sentimental value. It was not worth money on the black market. It couldn’t be resold or recycled easily. But what if there was a black market that trafficked in sentimental value, an underworld where my grandfather’s typewriter is worth more than my laptop, or where a child’s sandbox is worth more to a meth-head than the copper wiring in the street-lights?

If there were such a market for sentimental value, we’d be rich.

With a few exceptions, most of what we owned was valuable purely for sentimental reasons. We liked our neighborhood, but it was not affluent. There were five vacant, essentially abandoned houses on our block, four of them at our end of the street. Though just one house away from an elementary school, we were also in some gang’s territory. I didn’t know which one. The only real evidence I could see were graffiti tags on our trash cans. Our neighborhood was not high-crime—mainly because there wasn’t much to steal. My son asked us once if we were ever going to be rich, and we gave him our standard line about being teachers and writers and how we were rich in “the things that matter.”

I didn’t want to say his sandbox wasn’t valuable; but I also didn’t want him to be afraid of robbers or bogeymen or the people who picked through our recycling bin, looking for bottles and cans. We’d had a few scares recently.

Once when my son and my wife were out walking the dog, they spotted the black-and-white police helicopter—a ubiquitous presence in our neighborhood at night—hovering just a block away. A voice boomed over the chop, ordering someone to “come out now with your hands up”; they hightailed it home.

Another morning, during our regular walk down to the bakery, my son and I passed a corner roped off with police tape. We found out later that a man had fired shots at a police officer, led the police on a high-speed chase into someone’s yard, crashed his car, and was shot more than 80 times by pursuing officers. I wanted to alleviate my son’s fears about a robber stealing his sandbox, but I couldn’t pretend that crime wasn’t real, and I didn’t want to tell him his new toy was worthless.

Instead, I told him this: “You know what? Your sandbox would probably just be too heavy for robbers to lift. There’s two hundred pounds of sand in there,” I said. “That weighs almost as much as Daddy.”

This was mostly true. I weigh quite a bit more than his sandbox. But it seemed to help. He sat there for a while, perhaps imagining the robbers trying to lift his frog full of sand or his Dad. I often tried to deflect and distract with humor, and I hoped he was imagining me curled up in the frog.

Then he said, “Daddy, I think robbers are golden.”

“Golden?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think robbers are golden and have three golden horns.”

“Golden horns, huh?”

“And they’re made of metal,” he said finally.

I imagined tri-tipped monsters of golden metal clanking and clunking through the side gate—a team of them, four or more with shovels, emptying his frog-shaped sandbox into five-gallon buckets they would trade for cash at the asphalt plant; one of them hefting the plastic frog onto his shoulder and dragging the lid across the concrete. I rose from slumber to the sounds of scraping metal and labored breathing. I dialed the police and watched the golden robbers squeeze into a blue van, ducking so their three horns didn’t hit the door frame. If I wanted to, I could see them circling the neighborhood, pilfering tricycles, soccer balls, and boxes of sidewalk chalk for their weekly haul to the other black market, the warehouse full of battered toys, worn-out t-shirts, and sagging recliners; shelves piled high with emotional attachments, a warehouse full of the most obscurely valuable things you could imagine. I hoped that if I tried hard enough, I could pretend that all robbers were golden sentimentalists, burdened by their metal skin and their guilt over stealing a child’s sandbox; but I knew that if they were, we’d be the target.

4. How to Be a Hummingbird

Providence, Rhode Island, 2005. The rain had been coming down in sheets for nine days straight, seeping through the walls in our basement, leaving puddles beneath the oil tank. We needed to get out of the house, and we drove fast, just barely tethered to the asphalt, headed for a movie in Massachusetts, a movie about a giant Were-Rabbit ravaging the village gardens. The red and green and yellow lights flowered in the moist fog. They twinkled and blinked intermittently with green. It was too much sometimes, too heavy. This place. This moment in time. The white noise of water-spray competed with the radio voices. My son blithely chattered away in his car-seat, conversing with his invisible friend, Tum-Tum the elephant.

Meanwhile, my wife and I talked openly about recent bomb threats to subways in New York City. We said whatever we wanted—things like, “bound to happen,” and “nothing we can do,” or “just gets worse and worse.” We admitted that this was our reality now. But a claymation movie about a giant Were-Rabbit awaited us, and we were happy about this. We were out of the house and not thinking, just driving and living. We were good Americans. It was early October 2005, and we’d already decided not to go to New York before the bomb threats were issued—mainly because we couldn’t afford the trip. But when we’d heard the reports of threats to subways and public transit, we were both honestly relieved to be anywhere but the city.

“Can you imagine that?” my wife asked, responding to another NPR update on the car radio.

“Getting bombed?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Or living with that threat every day like they do in so many other places.”

“No, no I can’t imagine.”

I suddenly realized that our son had gone silent; and the moment began to stretch and expand, distended with silence. He was listening to everything we’d said. He was paying attention to all the words and possibilities, looking for the suggestion of violence or fear or conflict because he had Doppler radar for such drama.

“Who’s getting bombed, Daddy?” he asked.

“Nobody, honey,” my wife said, “Daddy and Mommy were just talking . . .”

“It’s a figure of speech,” I chimed in, but I was kidding myself.

He understood. He listened to NPR every morning and heard me ranting at the voices. I didn’t want him to be afraid of war and bombs. I didn’t want him to feel targeted. I wanted him to stay young and innocent and fearless as long as possible. But I also didn’t want to shelter him from the truth or from real danger. I had to prepare him to live in a world where people bombed trains or sporting events or buildings. But how was I supposed to do this? I was in the midst of a full-on parental pause, a seizure of language, and I didn’t know what to say.

Then my wife swooped in with this diversion: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

He paused for a moment, letting the possibilities balloon.

“Hmmmm, “ he said, “Maybe a hummingbird.”

***

April 15, 2013, Fresno, California: My son the hummingbird, born almost nine months after 9/11, will soon turn eleven. He’s just a few years older than Martin Richard, the youngest victim of the Boston Marathon bombing. My son is a bright boy who takes painting lessons, plays the trombone, and dreams of being a filmmaker. He still likes birds but he doesn’t want to be one when he grows up. His mother now has a house a few blocks away from me. My son and his sister live with me half-time, splitting the weeks. Things have changed a lot in eight years. But my son tells me that he still likes listening to NPR in the car because he learns cool things. These days he’s been listening to the news of the Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent manhunt with what appears to be a kind of careful detachment, a calculated pre-adolescent disinterest. But he knows all the details, knows the bombs were packed in pressure cookers, knows they blew apart peoples’ legs, and he knows the bombs killed a young boy.

My 5-year-old daughter seems mostly oblivious to the news; she makes up songs in the back seat as we drive from school to home and listen to the radio reports. She doesn’t ask the same questions that my son asked years before, but I know from experience that she’s listening. I know she’s absorbing it all. And I suppose that’s what I’m reminded of every time something like this happens. Such things—these bombings, this terror—have the capacity to shrink your reality down to what really matters, making the world seem tiny and impenetrable, while simultaneously expanding things exponentially until your world seems immense and fragile and impossible to maintain.

I was still a new parent when my son first became aware of bombs, when he first started to ask “why” questions about war and violence. I can’t say that I know a lot more now than I did then. But perhaps he knew something then that we can all try to remember.

He may have been small, but he thought big and wild and in ways I aspired to match, ways that I still hope to preserve in my daughter and myself. If I could, I’d take them both out in the yard the next time a bomb or some other violence tears through the fabric of our days. Just the three of us, our faces pressed up close to the flowers, and I’d tell them to remember the nectar, remember their wings, their imaginations, and the way they can beat against the pull of violence. It’s a simple matter of defying gravity. I want to free them and protect them with this one fact: a hummingbird can beat its wings seventy times in one second. A simple blur of breath and flesh, and they could be gone.

5. After School Lessons

The other father schooled me during first-grade pick-up time.

“Saw some local fauna in the backyard,” he said and kind of rolled up on the balls of his feet.  He had the tanned muscled calves of a postal worker or a soldier, someone who’d walked a lot of ground.

“An opossum,” he said, nodding his head. “The wife wanted me to kill it, but I said, ‘No, let it be.’”

I told him and another mom about the raccoon I’d seen crossing busy VanNess Avenue and the Coopers hawk that took down a grackle on our street corner.

I’d called my kids to the window. “Hurry,” I said, “check this out,” and we watched the hawk stomp on the smaller bird, plunging its talons into the heart, puncturing the tiny chambers until the grackle bled out and stopped shuddering and flapping. It took a long time for that little bird to die. And then we watched the hawk carry it away.

When I finished my story, the mom gasped, “Oh, dear. I don’t know . . . ,” She put her hand up to her throat, covering the scar where she’d had her thyroid removed. “I can’t even . . .”

“It’s not violent,” I said. “It’s natural. The order of things.”

***

In one hand, the other father clutched a snack baggie stuffed with fruit. Strawberries and grapes, maybe a raspberry or two. A gift for his daughter. A treat for the walk home. He brought her something special every day.

“I freaked my sister out,” he said, gesturing toward me with the fruit baggie.

The children had already begun streaming out the doors, single-file, gravitating toward parents or guardians, gathering on the grass to wait.

“I poured salt on a block of dry ice,” he said over the chaotic noise of children.

“Watch,” he’d said to his sister. “Wait for it.”

And the deer did come. Two of them. Put their tongues to the salt. Stuck there, they pulled against the dry ice. Anchored to the lick, they strained to break free. And I wanted to tell him to stop.

“And my sister was like, ‘What are you going to do to them?”

I could see the deer pulling on their tongues, practically yanking them from their skulls. Panicked, they must have strained against their own anchor.

The other father handed his daughter the fruit baggie, “Here you go, honey,” he said and then he finished his lesson:

“And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not doing nothing,’ and that’s when I slit their throats.”

He smiled, nodding his head again. There was a breeze that day. Unusual for Fresno. But it could not carry his words away. They dropped into the space between us.

The children flocked to their parents, gathering around us like metal fragments to a magnet. Drawn to our shelter. And I wanted to hold them all, to drag them all away from the image of the deer pulling against their tongues, their throats spilling blood.

The other father’s daughter looked up at him, his words hanging there, waiting to attach and take root. My own daughter, oblivious to the gore, grabbed my hand and begged, “Can I?” pointing at the playground; so I let her go, watching her legs kick up, bouncing toward the cedar chips.

His daughter watched, too, staring at the other girls at play. She wrapped her arms tight around the baggie and squeezed until it burst. Pop! Like a shot. And the fruit spilled down around her feet. Grapes rolled like they were trying to escape. The strawberries just sat there, wet and seedy on their flat-cut sides. And the girl looked up at him.

“Why did you squeeze it?” the other father asked, squatting to the concrete, sitting back on the heels of his Army boots.

“I don’t know,” the girl said, talking into her chest and twisting her toe on the ground.

“Consequences, baby,” he said. “Consequences,” as he picked up the fruit, and tossed it into the grass for the squirrels.

* * *

From I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear and Fatherhood by Steven Church. © 2018 by Steven Church. Reprinted with permission of Outpost19.

The Escapism of Bruce Springsteen

NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 14: Bruce Springsteen performs onstage during a special performance of "Springsteen on Broadway" in front of an audience of SiriusXM subscribers at Walter Kerr Theatre on March 14, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

There is a moment at the end of Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” his seminal hit from the 1975 album, Born to Run, in which New Jersey’s most famous son intones, “It’s a town for losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.”

The lyric is classic Springsteen, a nod to the most consistent theme of his biggest hits throughout his early catalog, which spans seven records over a decade from the mid ’70s to the mid ’80s. From “Born to Run” to “Atlantic City,” Born in the USA to The River, Springsteen is constantly searching for the open road and thus fulfilling some inherent promise and potential. Springsteen was 26 when he recorded “Thunder Road,” and it’s not surprising that the musician’s promise that “these two lanes will take us anywhere” would appeal to fellow baby boomers, those trapped in contemplation between seeking out quarter-life ennui or something more.

But Springsteen’s evolution as an artist hasn’t been static. As fans age with the Boss, those same themes of entrapment and freedom have taken on new meaning while, at the same time, attracting new audiences, such as millennials and those who came of age during the recession. Born in New Jersey, Toniann Fernandez of The Paris Review grew up haunted by Springsteen’s specter:

The sound of “Born in the U.S.A.” used to conjure images of the muscular white boys of my high school years, drunk with testosterone and Natural Ice, clad in denim and American flags. They screamed along with E Street imitators in bars we were all too young to patronize. I had always found the Springsteen omnipresence in coastal New Jersey offensive.

That sentiment, though, changed recently, and Fernandez describes her quest to not only embrace the musical menace of her teenage years but to actually meet Springsteen during the Broadway run of Springsteen on Broadway.

I had exactly five hundred dollars in my savings account at the time, the last crumbs of my earnings from my days as a nine-to-fiver. He encouraged me to buy the ticket. I told him that he didn’t get it. The point was not just to see the show, the point was for the Boss to request my presence at the show, perhaps in the front row. I suppose I hadn’t been so clear to myself or to anyone else how much this was about me, not Bruce. When I went back to the ticket window, the clerk told me the ticket was in someone else’s cart on Ticketmaster and that I would have to wait three minutes to see if they released it. Of course, having the ticket withheld was all I needed to draw my debit card from my wallet. Three minutes of purgatory ended, and I paid for my ticket through tears.

Fernandez writes of finally understanding the Boss’ appeal once she left New Jersey, of realizing and appreciating what the open road feels like upon riding in the getaway car, and what’s fascinating is how this thread of escapism that Springsteen represents — his hook for all these years — is an oft-repeated thread through various forms of music. Take EDM — as Emily Yoshia explains in her recent essay for Vulture about Avicii’s reported suicide, the musician’s massive hit, “Levels,” spoke of attaining a level of both personal and professional success that seemed (and still seems) unattainable to anyone who celebrated their 21st birthday in the mid-2000s.

Like every apocalyptic radio pop song of that era, asking us to live like tomorrow will never come, there was an overwhelming need for the music of the era to freeze time, both to stave off adulthood, but also to deny every feeling of doubt and sadness and confusion that had come before, to will it away in order to start our lifestyle brands or build our Twitter following. I had managed to convince myself in 2011 that I could still get what I wanted, but in reality I had a very small reservoir left, constantly one disaster away from moving back home again.

There is a connection between Springsteen and Avicii, of escaping and living like tomorrow will never come, and it’s why Springsteen’s catalog still sounds fresh after all these years. Yes, many of his tracks are bangers, but that’s beside the point: the Boss’s lyrics connect us to a future that we may never know.