Tuesday 3.37: See you on the holidays

Elle Magazine recently published an essay about journalist Christie Smythe’s romantic relationship with known medicine criminal Martin Shkreli. I read two or three paragraphs of the piece, which seemed perfectly well-written, before closing it and reading something about Fernando Rodney, who is 43 and currently pitching in the Dominican Winter League in the hopes of returning to Major League Baseball.

Scrolling through Twitter for the rest of the day, the Smythe profile was impossible to ignore. It was perfectly placed, at the nexus of inroads into the most fervently discursive corners of politics, journalism, publishing, feminism, cultural criticism, &c. You knew there were going to be a lot of takes because before you even saw them, you saw jokes about not having a take, like the eerily low tide that precedes a tsunami.

Yet here I was, instead watching GIFs of Rodney zipping fastballs for Leones del Escogido. It was deliberate, and it felt great.

I have the thought sometimes that the space in my brain is finite, like a bucket filling with water, and when it finally fills up, every additional drop will displace another drop, a memory, a learned word, a joke—sending it tumbling over the side. I suppose my conceptual understanding of the electrical map of the brain is refined enough to know that this isn’t the best metaphor, but it’s still how I feel.

David Foster Wallace had a much-quoted essay that talked about the importance of this particular flavor of intellectual decision making. The way he framed it was a little more active. It wasn’t so much what you remembered or knew, but about what you thought about. So, the currency wasn’t brainspace, but time—a resource that’s easier to conceive of in terms of its finiteness.

And it was this I think that made me stop reading—however distasteful or vapid I find Shkreli, my aversion wasn’t to him, but to an interest in him. The journalist who fell in love with him, the journalist who wrote about the journalist who fell in love with him, the concentric circles of purpose and relevance, of the story as compelling, or indicative or exemplary of some common cultural phenomenon with which we all must reckon, the belief that this was a story worth telling, that there could be some lesson gleaned or something of value articulated in its telling—all this seemed not just unpalatable, but unnecessary.

In a way, it’s sad and troubling that not learning about something can feel like you’re exercising a right. We’re so inundated with media today that consciously filling a half hour with something other than what’s right in front of your face takes way more effort than is probably healthy. But doing so is good for you, I think, because it allows you to recognize what you really find valuable, not just “interesting” in the moment.

Anyway, here’s the convergence baseball and pharmabro:

You probably didn’t notice, but I’m behind a bit on newsletters. That’s the holidays for you. I expect to get caught up in the coming days.