🎸Charo, the underworld, and the rings of Saturn
Featuring a weird little side rant about identity and coffee.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve read a lot of nonsense this week, so let’s get straight to the veggie patty.
RING THEORY: Saturn’s rings are very slowly disappearing, Marina Koren reports at The Atlantic. The feature we most closely associate with Saturn may, in fact, be a relatively recent development (cosmologically speaking), though scientists are still divided on the rings’ origin. Prepare for the “space feels.”
The story of Saturn’s rings is a reminder that the worlds of our solar system, however still and static they might look from here, are dynamic places, with dramatic histories of their own. “We think that the universe out there—as opposed to this, where we live, where everything is chaotic and messy and changing all the time—is this kind of crystal and never-changing thing,” [NASA scientist Jeff] Cuzzi said.
It’s funny how a shallow, external signifier becomes an important marker of our identity to others — and then, by extension, to ourselves. So many people in my life (including close family members!) have told me how strongly they identify me with coffee that I had an itty-bitty identity crisis when I switched to half-caf. It’s going great, though; thanks for asking! (Also, more than half of Americans drink coffee! Maybe not as much as me, but still. It’s not an unusual trait.)
LIMITED RESOURCE: Allison Braden, writing for Oxford American, relays the story of a Savannah library’s “FAQ boxes” — a kind of local, analog search engine long before search engines were a thing.
Handwritten on an index card, the recipe turned out to be part of an ad hoc collection of local history, general trivia, and helpful know-how. Arranged in alphabetical order by subject, hundreds of similar cards fill a trio of long orange boxes. They contain the answers to decades of questions from library patrons, and they illustrate a vanishing way of transmitting and stewarding local culture. But regional distinction hinges on knowledge that is by definition not universal, and from the cards that are in the FAQ boxes—and those that aren’t—the South’s familiar fissures emerge.
PULLING THE STRINGS: Before reading this excellent profile by Amanda Hess at The New York Times, I had heard of Charo only once, while my college roommate was watching VH1 on our small dorm-room TV. This piece made me regret my ignorance.
But the real punchline to Charo’s career is that, no matter how hard people try to peg her as “a stupid cuchi-cuchi,” as she put it, she is a virtuosic flamenco and classical guitarist with a singular talent. At her shows, after she sings and gyrates to a set of disco numbers, she slips backstage, emerges in the tuxedo, picks up the guitar and blows everybody’s mind. For years, Charo would diligently practice her guitar every night, even though she was seldom given the opportunity to play.
“I knew that the day would come. I would have the last laugh,” she said. “I said to Carmen, start preparing the tuxedos.”
CHANNEL CHANGER: At The Philadelphia Inquirer, Layla A. Jones uncovers the history of local TV news as we know it — its birth in Philly and its long history of harm to Black people nationwide.
The Action News formula delivered more coverage of crime in less time.
“Funny, bloody, and quick, somebody referred to it as. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll watch him die,” [Vernon] Odom recalled of Action News, which he joined in 1976 as one of its most prominent Black reporters.
FOR YOU RAGE: At Input, Jessica Lucas chronicles intense feuding in the fandom of TikToker William White, who has cultivated a lucrative audience among middle-aged women. The article is not only a wild ride — it’s a 190-proof distillation of so many of the problems of influencer culture.
“I’ve seen women say they’d eat his snot when he had a cold, and I’ve even seen women say they’d lose the light in their lives if he left the internet,” says Joann, a 46-year-old former fan from Pennsylvania who trolls White’s followers in a bid to break them of what she feels is a damaging obsession. … “If he doesn’t tweet or go live for a day or two, a lot of them will delete their accounts out of anger or get into fights.”
OVER-UNDER: In Orion Magazine, Leslie Jamison explores motherhood, the myth of Persephone, and the hospital as liminal space.
Persephone’s passage back and forth between the underworld and the meadows above throws into stark relief the fact that we’ll all make the journey. We’ll all use the other passport someday. And in the meantime, the boundary between health and mortality is porous and ongoing: Our bodies fall ill. They falter. They break. We glimpse death through their faltering. Or at least, we are reminded. In these moments, we live in a purgatory between the bright world and the underworld. Often, this purgatory has a name: the hospital.
FREE BIRD: A flamingo that escaped a Kansas zoo in 2005, nicknamed “Pink Floyd,” is still alive and living on the Gulf Coast of Texas, reports Daniel Victor at The New York Times. It’s a comfort and a joy to know that someone out there is living their best life.
This story also reminds me of the local, uh … controversy over whether there are any cougars here in Southwest Virginia.
[Fishing guide David Foreman’s] customers often claim to see flamingos, mistaking them for the smaller-but-also-pink roseate spoonbills that are common in the Gulf Coast. He patiently explains to them that, no, there are no flamingos in Texas. He has told hundreds of people this. …
He would have to update his spiel, he thought.
“It’s almost like nature’s way of putting me in my place,” Mr. Foreman said. “Mr. Knows-Everything thinks there’s no flamingos in Texas? Have a look at this.”
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