So I’m home now but I was up on island all last week. It was kind of a neat deal: enough people who have taken my writing classes enjoyed those classes enough that I was nominated to go up to this island on Lake Superior. There, they’ve converted an old dairy farm into a kind of art school. Some bigger barn-type buildings and a bunch of cabins.
I had a cabin with a bed and a desk and pretty good WiFi and all I had to do was write all day. Not to teach it, not take a class in it, not share it with anyone. There were no scheduled meetings and I was on my own for meals. Write write write for five days. It was neat.
Thus, we are doing a Best Of episode this week with a writer who has become one of my favorites.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a MacArthur Fellow, accomplished poet, and critically lauded author of numerous books, including There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which is now out in paperback. He’s also a person who deals with major depressive disorder and numerous anxiety disorders. In a revealing, positive, and practical interview, Hanif talks about the numerous ways he cares for his mental health issues by both taking care of himself and building a strong community of other people around him to lean on.
There’s Always This Year is part memoir, part exploration of basketball, part love letter to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio which he left and returned to, and the significance of LeBron James who also left Ohio and returned. Hanif writes about challenges he’s faced, including incarceration and being unhoused. It’s a beautifully written and remarkably moving book. I’ve never read anything like it.
Since this first aired, I’ve also read his remarkable book about A Tribe Called Quest, Go Ahead in the Rain. It’s part memoir, part history, part music analysis. Brilliant stuff.
Republican congressman Tom Kean, Jr. of New Jersey resurfaced after being completely absent from public view for months, missing tons of votes, and providing no representation for his district. Which is his job. As a representative.
He said he was diagnosed with depression and had been receiving treatment for it. He was also trading stocks.
I believe a bunch of things can be true at the same time:
It is good and healthy to seek diagnosis and treatment for health conditions.
It is also good to talk openly about it, especially if you’re in a public leadership position, because then maybe more people will get help and public health will improve.
As an elected official and as a freakin’ grown-up, you don’t get to just disappear.
Mental illness, like any health issue, like neurodivergence, doesn’t let you off the hook for your role in society.
While openness might be good, demonstrating that a lawmaker can just vanish sets a bad example because only the highly, highly privileged can get away with shit like that. The rest of us get fired and lose our homes.
Also, dude has a new mental health bill.
The proposal builds on federal requirements that insurers provide coverage for mental health and substance use disorder treatment comparable to coverage for physical health services.
Mental health legislation has historically received bipartisan support in Congress. Kean’s bill focuses on strengthening enforcement of existing parity laws and expanding oversight of insurance coverage for mental health and substance use treatment.
This happened in my hometown so it got my attention. Caution Mann is in critical condition and doctors have suggested taking him off life support as he is not likely to recover.
Many of the facts of the case are still not clear, but investigators said the 19-year-old called 911 to report he was having a mental health crisis and was armed with a gun.
According to the Valley Independent Investigative Team (VIIT), a multi-department task force looking into officers’ conduct in the case, officers tried to de-escalate the situation before three of them shot at him.
The investigative team has said de-escalation efforts lasted for about 10 minutes before officers started shooting at Mann. The team has not said if Mann fired any shots or what caused the situation to turn violent.
Now the cops may press charges against Mann.
I didn’t actually know Spin Magazine was still a thing but they are and they did a thing that music journalism ought to do more. They put together a big list of extremely deep cut albums from the last 40 years that they think are fantastic. So next time you have nothing to listen to and the next time you feel like you just listen to the same music over and over, give this a try.
He’s the co-host of Pop Culture Happy Hour and he has really, REALLY read himself some Tolkein.
You have to be a slight J.R.R. Tolkien nerd to watch the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings film series. They’re long, there’s three of them, and it helps to know your hobbits from your elves. You have to be even more of a fan to read the dense, lengthy Tolkien books. But then there’s Glen Weldon, co-host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, who has read everything Tolkien many times over including The Silmarillion. That’s the book Tolkien died while writing with extensive arcana of the world of Middle Earth. Here’s the part in the description where I would give you examples but it’s so deep, so thickly layered, such extreme Tolkienness that I kind of zoned out just listening to Glen take this deepest of dives. “The book is structured as a history, with sections on the creation of the world, the gods (Valar), the history of the Elves and Men, and the downfall of Númenor, all centered around the conflict with the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, and the rebellion of the Elf Fëanor,” says Wikipedia, and who am I to disagree? The detail, combined with Glen’s avuncular NPR voice ought to conk you out before you can say, “Celebrimbor.”
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