It’s been a little over a week since the publication of Elliot Page’s memoir, Pageboy, and the haters have settled in on Goodreads. This isn’t surprising. Page is perhaps the most publicly visible trans celebrity to publish a memoir in recent memory. What’s more, though he does write about his career in Hollywood, the making of movies like Juno and Whip It, and his relationships with famous actors, in many ways, the book is not a traditional celebrity memoir. Pageboy is an intimate, vulnerable, and poetic coming-into-self story about one trans man’s deeply personal and specific journey. It’s not a chronological story, either — it’s a queerly beautiful collection of memories and moments. Page moves around in time, skipping from childhood to the near-present to his early acting career and back. This nonlinear structure will feel bone-deep true to many queer and trans readers. It certainly felt like home to me.

It’s also what some readers seem to have such a problem with. After finishing the book, completely delighted by the inherent queerness of this structure, and with a queasy feeling in my gut that people were going to hate it, I spent about seven minutes scrolling through Goodreads. I did not read every review, but seven minutes was enough to confirm my suspicions. There are, happily, many glowing reviews. But the theme of the negative reviews is consistent: Why couldn’t he have told this story chronologically? It was so confusing to keep track of the timeline! I couldn’t make sense of the nonlinear structure. None of these are actual quotes — I’m paraphrasing from lots of reviews.

What’s even more telling is the surprising number of positive reviews with a caveat. I read several four-star reviews praising Page’s writing and honesty, exclaiming how much they enjoyed the book on a whole and then — but why did he have to tell it this way? It would have been so much better and easier to follow if it has been told chronologically. Again, I’m paraphrasing.

In popular culture today, Judy Garland is best remembered as an actress, singer, and entertainer extraordinaire whose personal struggles often overshadowed her professional accomplishments.

While she was under contract for 15 years with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) during which she starred in career-defining musical roles in The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, and numerous others, her life was plagued by impossible work demands. As such, biographers differ on whether it was her mother or MGM that got her hooked on amphetamines to keep her going; whatever the case, it led to a lifelong battle with alcohol and substance abuse.

Following her untimely dismissal from MGM in 1950, she rebounded from a highly publicized suicide attempt with record-breaking concert appearances that redefined her career outside of Hollywood. She received an Academy Award nomination for what was supposed to be her triumphant comeback film, A Star is Born, and became the first woman to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for the live recording of Judy at Carnegie Hall. Still, financial difficulty and drug dependence doomed the rest of her life, and she died from a barbiturate overdose at the age of 47 in 1969.

But one fact about Judy Garland that often gets left out of modern reporting on the star is that she was a passionate fan of poetry. In fact, as a teenager at MGM, she self-published her own book of poetry called Thoughts and Poems. It was 10 pages long and contained eight poems. It first published in 1940 with only a select few copies given out to close friends. Jack Chitgian Bookbinding Service in Beverly Hills, who manufactured the book, reprinted an unknown amount of copies in the early 1970s after Garland’s death. One copy that survived was sold at auction in 2017 for $1,600.

According to Manuel Betancourt in Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall, the poems Garland wrote in the 1930s are defined by “overly dramatic scenes of romance and glamour befitting a teenage girl who pined away for boys who were always much more interested in, say, Lana Turner, than Judy herself.” In her early years, Garland was always made out to be the ugly duckling when compared to other young MGM stars like Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ava Gardner. Her first serious romance was with band leader Artie Shaw, who left her to elope with Turner in 1940.

It’s summer, with longer days, more sunshine, and warmer weather. It’s a great time to be outside — but as someone who hasn’t always loved being outside, I get that it’s not always easy as saying “get outside!” Being outdoors and in nature does not come naturally to me. I’d rather be inside in the air conditioning, wearing comfy sweats, and curled up with a great book. However, I know that both my son and I are happier, much less stressed, and healthier being outside, getting plenty of sunshine and fresh air, and exploring nature…even if I don’t always love the bugs.

It’s been a process for me. Because I want my son to love nature, I have had to very deliberately choose outdoor activities like our nature class, and make a concerted effort to take our homeschooling outside when we can, even if it’s just a morning walk around our condo building, or sitting outside on a blanket for our read-alouds.

While I still consider myself a “newbie” with the outdoors, I love reading memoirs about those who are more adventurous than I, like Morgan Sjogren’s Path of Light, or Jennifer Pharr Davis’s Becoming Odyssa. But there are other books that are great to read to help you get started on your outdoorsy journey — whether you’re thinking about hiking, trying an outdoor sport, or not quite sure you “belong” in the outdoors. (You do). I’ve put together a list of some books to pique your interest, encourage you, or provide you with some reassurance about getting started on your outdoor journey.

Summer is on the way, bringing with it longer days, warmer weather, and the chance to join in with a whole host of summer activities! Summer can be an especially fun time for very small children, who will love seeing how the change of seasons affects plants and animals, and who will look forward to exciting days at the park or the beach. Whether you live in the city or the countryside, there are plenty of great things about summer to enjoy, including ice cream, barbecues, warm evenings, and outdoor games. While us adults have lived through many (many, many) summers, sharing them with little ones can bring the magic back, and remind us of the joy this season brings.

If you have a toddler in your life who’s learning about the seasons, or eager to get outside and play, there are plenty of great summer books for toddlers. Some of them focus on summertime plants and animals, while others explore all the cool summer games children can play. If you want some inspiration for what to do this summer, or just want to share a fun read with your little one, check out this list of cute and fun toddler summer books, with storylines and illustrations that will keep you entertained all summer long!

There are few authors working right now that are as prolific as Alexis Hall, best-selling author of urban fantasy, mystery, sci-fi, and romance. He has written over 30 books in the past 10 years alone, with many more books announced for the near future. Hall’s work has been nominated for multiple LAMBDA awards, and many credit his books for bringing queer stories to mainstream audiences.

But who is Alexis Hall? Actually, he’d rather you not know. In fact, Alexis Hall is a pen name the author uses to separate his writing career from his day job. Yes, somehow Alexis Hall has a day job on top of writing four books in 2022 alone. But in general, the author is very secretive about his personal life.

“I’m personally a strong believer that an author’s work should speak for itself,” Halls says on his FAQ page. “While I would never discourage other authors from positioning themselves differently (as long as they don’t use their platform to harm people), I actively don’t want to centre myself in my own work.”

Okay, so the books should speak for themselves. That’s all well and good, but when an author has this many books, where do you even begin? If you’re new to the world of Alexis Hall, here’s your reading pathway. These books are just the beginning of what this author has to offer, but they’re the essential must-reads.

The collective dream is over. Squinting, we walk out of the playoffs and return to Life. Images linger—a giant holding a toddler in a storm of confetti. A shiny, exuberant, mantis-like man standing next to a trophy. The woman who sat courtside wearing red and white gowns. The inexplicable man-made-out-of-Sprite commercial. Duncan Robinson’s tough-guy face.

On Monday, after the great battle of Game 5, the Denver Nuggets won the NBA championship for the first time in franchise history. I was introduced to the on-court chemistry between the Nuggets stars Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray during the 2020 Western Conference Finals. Though they lost that series in five games to the Lakers (who would go on to win the championship after beating the Heat), they were great fun to watch. I found Murray’s smile infectious. He seemed unselfconscious and comfortable in his body. When he was having fun, I was having fun.

In 2021, Jokić received the first of two consecutive MVP awards. Right before the playoffs that year, Murray tore his ACL, missing the playoffs and the entire next season. Jokić carried the team without him, but in the 2022 playoffs, the Nuggets lost in the first round to the Golden State Warriors (who later went on to win the championship). While the Sixers center Joel Embiid won this year’s MVP, most basketball fans believe Jokić is the better player. His performance in these Finals was sensational. His passes were gorgeous, his threes looked like afterthoughts. When the camera cut to him, he often seemed displeased. He was an unstoppable force, even when he wasn’t scoring. He made it look effortless. I thought of him as Paul Bunyan.

I liked whenever the broadcast cut to a room in Serbia, Jokić’s home country, where fans stayed up till dawn, watching the Nuggets game live. In the postgame interviews before the award ceremony, it was wonderful to see Jamal Murray’s teary-eyed smile as he spoke about the long journey coming back from his injury. And even a Heat fan could appreciate Jokić’s genuine disappointment upon learning that he’d have to attend a victory parade in Denver on Thursday when he was eager to fly home to Serbia to watch his horse, Dream Catcher, race on Sunday.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Richie Hofmann’s “Armed Cavalier” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

As is so often the case for me, the poem began as another poem entirely. I was working on a poetic sequence that interposed my translations of Michelangelo’s homoerotic sonnets with several short, original haiku-like poems inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. Both artists were interested in beauty and torture. Mapplethorpe’s photographs are experiments in self-portraiture and bondage. In one of Michelangelo’s sonnets, the speaker confesses that, in order to be happy, he must be conquered and chained, a prisoner of an “armed cavalier” (the phrase puns on the name of the object of Michelangelo’s infatuation, Tommaso dei Cavalieri). Upon reading that phrase, I instantly wanted it to be the title for a new poem that would express the extremity of sexuality and the extremity of making art. 

From the sonnets of Michelangelo, I wanted to import a kind of violence of rhetoric (not unlike the dramatic conceits we find again and again in Petrarch). The poems are so desperate. Their pain is sculptural. From the photographs of Mapplethorpe, I wanted to import a violence of image. And the sense that everything—flowers in a vase, classical sculpture, BDSM—is part of a landscape of embodied beauty. Ultimately, as I revised the poem, and reworked it into “Armed Cavalier,” I wanted to express the ferocity of feeling in both artists’ works, but without any overt ekphrastic framing. 

On September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies, and the Germans, who had already occupied the north of Italy, immediately moved to take over the rest of the country. Just days later, they invaded Rome. Meanwhile, British and American forces had landed in the south and were slowly moving northward.

The writer Alba de Céspedes and her companion (and later her husband), Franco Bounous, were living in Rome. De Céspedes had been jailed briefly by Mussolini for antifascist activities; Bounous was a diplomat and did not want to collaborate with the Germans. As conditions in the city worsened, becoming more chaotic and more dangerous, de Céspedes and Bounous decided to leave. On September 23, “secretly, at night,” they departed, “each with a suitcase,” de Céspedes wrote to her mother, “thinking we’d be gone a few days, that Rome would soon be liberated.” They escaped to a village in Abruzzo, east of the city, where they expected they would be able to wait in tranquility. But the Germans showed up, and they fled again, to a tiny village in the mountains nearby, Torricella Peligna.

This diary recounts the days between October 18, when they had to flee Torricella and go into hiding in the woods, and November 19, when they decided to try to get through the German lines to reach the safety of the Allied-occupied zone. De Céspedes later wrote, “Life had gradually become more unbearable, the Germans were coming at night, too. So we decided to risk it all and cross the lines, reaching the Anglo-American troops. And safety. We did that, walking at night, November 20”  Guided by a local farmer, Fioravante, they managed to cross the Sangro river, which marked the German front line, and arrive in the Allied zone. From there they were taken in a farm cart to Bari, where de Céspedes began broadcasting for the antifascist station Radio Bari. Eventually she and Bounous moved to Naples and, finally, returned to Rome, after it had been liberated by the Allies in June of 1944.

—Ann Goldstein, translator

We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read. Theology always risks leading us astray by elaborating its own discourse, with the biblical texts merely as a point of departure. The presence of poetry in the Bible is the key to a more pertinent and more faithful reading.

There are many poems found in the Bible. We know this, vaguely and without giving it too much thought, but shouldn’t we be rather astonished by the role of poetry in a collection of books with such a pressing and salutary Word to express? And shouldn’t we ask ourselves if the presence of this writing—so much more self-conscious and desirous than is prose of a form it can make vibrate—affects the biblical “message” and changes its nature?

It is unsurprising that the Psalms are poems, given their liturgical purpose and the abyss of individual and collective emotion that they explore. At the heart of the Bible and yet also apart from it, they lay out, we might suppose, for both the individual and the community, the lived experience of religion that other biblical books have the task of defining. We can accept the Song of Songs as a love poem, Jeremiah’s Lamentations as a sequence of elegies, Job as a verse drama, and we discover without too much surprise a considerable number of poems in the historical books: the song of Moses and Miriam, for example, in Exodus 15; the canticle of Deborah and Barak in Judges 5; the lament of David for Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1. And yet when we think about the presence of all these poetic books in a work in which we expect to find doctrines, and about the turn to poetry in so many of the historical books of the Bible, it gives us reason to think again. And how should we react to Proverbs, in which wisdom itself is taught in a poetic form? Or to the prophetic books, where poetry is sovereign, where warnings of the greatest urgency, for us as well as for the writers’ contemporaries, come forth in verse?

Isn’t this curious? And poetry appears from the beginning. In the second chapter of Genesis (verse 23), Adam welcomes the creation of woman in this way:

Julian Maclaren-Ross’s 1947 novel, Of Love and Hunger, is a defiantly unedifying English comedy about a vacuum-cleaner salesman trying to keep his chin up in the gloom of prewar Brighton. Its not-quite-forgotten (if never-exactly-acclaimed) author has been on my radar ever since I learned that he was the model for the bohemian novelist character X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. That monumental roman-fleuve of English life happened to be a significant inspiration for a project of my own—a novel about the seventies London I grew up in, an excerpt of which appears in the new Summer issue of the Review—so when I found myself trying to think of a book that one of my middle-aged characters might have read in her youth, the Maclaren-Ross novel sprang to mind, and I finally read it. As it turned out, I don’t think my character, a tortured soul who tends to find everything “ghastly,” would have enjoyed it. She would have found the seedy boarding houses and tearooms and pubs that comprise its setting “ghastly”; she‘d have found the petty swindling and debt-dodging antics of the protagonist and his fellow salesmen “ghastly,” and she’d have found his unapologetic romance with the wife of an absent colleague “too ghastly for words.” But I couldn’t get enough of it. There’s nothing obviously brilliant about the writing or plotting, both of which tend toward the studiedly humdrum. (“Two more cars passed, then a bus.”) But somehow its little throwaway visions of fleeting bliss snatched from abiding squalor got under my skin. I haven’t enjoyed a novel so much in ages. 

—James Lasdun, author of “Helen”

Recently, I’ve been listening to old demo tapes by the Cure on repeat. I like hearing the rough and sometimes fragile beginnings of their songs. A demo feels more like it’s breathing—it’s not fixed. It has been through fewer hands and there’s something enthralling about that. The song is still thinking. The demo for “Six Different Ways” sounds underwater but the essence is there—maybe even more than in the finished song. There is a thinness, a wobbliness, and a directness to the recording—a distinctly temporary quality—not perfection—not in tune always. More the act of making a root.

If you are contemplating self-destruction, please tell someone you trust. Immediate counseling is available 24-7 by dialing 1-800-SUICIDE or 988.

A Sunday afternoon in early spring. We’d spent the morning quiet, in separate rooms—me in my office, writing; Molly on the bed in the guest room, working too, so I believed. I’d pass by and see her using her laptop or reading from the books piled on the bed where she lay prone, or sometimes staring off out through the window to the yard. It was warm for March already, full of the kind of color through which you can begin to see the blooming world emerge. Molly didn’t want to talk really, clearly feeling extremely down again, and still I tried to hug her, leaning over the bed to wrap my arms around her shoulders as best I could. She brushed me off a bit, letting me hold her but not really responding. I let her be—it’d been a long winter, coming off what felt like the hardest year in both our lives, to the point we’d both begun to wonder if, not when, the struggle would ever slow. I wished there could be something I might say to lift her spirits for a minute, but I also knew how much she loathed most any stroke of optimism or blind hope, each more offensive than the woe alone. Later, though, while passing in the hallway in the dark, she slipped her arms around me at the waist and drew me close. She told me that she loved me, almost a whisper, tender, small in my arms. I told her I loved her too, and we held each other standing still, a clutch of limbs. I put my head in her hair and looked beyond on through the bathroom where half-muted light pressed at the window as through a tarp. When we let go, she slipped out neatly, no further words, and back to bed. The house was still, very little sound besides our motion. After another while spent working, I came back and asked if she’d come out with me to the yard to see the chickens, one of our favorite ways to pass the time. Outside, it was sodden, lots of rain lately, and the birds were restless, eager to rush out of their run and hunt for bugs. Molly said no, she didn’t want to go, asked if I’d bring one to the bedroom window so she could see—something I often did so many days, an easy way to make her smile. I scooped up Woosh, our Polish hen, my favorite, and brought her over to the glass where Molly sat. This time, though, when I approached the window, Molly didn’t move toward us, open the window, as she would usually. Even as I smiled and waved, holding Woosh up close against the glass, speaking for her in the hen-voice that I’d made up, Molly’s mouth held clamped, her eyes like dents obscured against the glare across the dimness of the room. Woosh began to wriggle, wanting down. The other birds were ranging freely, unattended—which always made me nervous now, as in recent months a hawk had taken favor to our area, often reappearing in lurking circles overhead, waiting for the right time to swoop down and make a meal out of our pets. So I didn’t linger for too long at the window, antsy anyway to get on and go for my daily run around the neighborhood, one of the few reasons I still had for getting out of the house. I gripped Woosh by her leg and made it wave, a little goodbye, then hurried on, leaving Molly staring blankly at the space where I’d just been: a view of a fence obscured only by the lone sapling she’d planted last spring in yearning for the day she wouldn’t have to see the neighbors. 

*** 

I read Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence two ways: first as a new work by a friend, written through and about what I know to have been some of his most harrowing years, during which he recovered from a near-fatal bus accident in Morocco, and also as the second collection of a phenomenal early-career poet with a dangerously skilled command of craft. I read it as an intimate reader, and as a distant one, and both times, I experienced a sense of introduction. When we talked on Zoom, Charif told me the book “feels like a birth,” and that feeling of birth, or rebirth, permeates Trace Evidence, as a deepening and an extension of the questions in Shanahan’s first collection, and as an announcement of self and purpose that feels brand new.

—Morgan Parker

PARKER

I love the last line of “Trace Evidence,” the book’s titular poem: “For us here now I will be the first of our line.” It’s such an exhilarating sentence. Can you tell me about that idea of deciding to be a beginning?

Four weeks sharing a room in San Francisco, four weeks since I decided not to go back to England. Gabe wasn’t sleeping. A quarter tab of acid for his breakfast. Spliffs throughout the day, booze and blue raspberry C4 preworkout all through the night. He was recording an album, working on his set, making a website, building a 24-7 open-source radio live-stream at a free hackers’ space, and not finishing anything.

I was trying to write but spending a lot of time crying on the hot roof of the apartment building when he wasn’t around. He found me up there one afternoon at the end of one of his twelve-hour stints at the hackers’ space. Two straw hats, a beer, two cups. “I know you like to drink out of little cups!” He smiled and the inside of his mouth was blue from the raspberry preworkout. How do you hate someone as much as you love them? He said he’d been looking for me because he had a great plan. A childhood friend in the city was driving down to their hometown and we could get a ride. I could meet Gabe’s parents; go to the beach; see the fields, wildflowers, and back roads. So beautiful this time of year. I wondered if it might save us. “It’s God’s country,” he said.

We arrived at his parents’ the following morning, after a four-hour drive south. A low ranch-style house on a wide road of low ranch-style houses. Gabe said it was too nice a day to be stuck inside, so he took me around the side and we climbed straight up onto the roof: “I know you like roofs in California!” I did like roofs in California. The front and back yards of gravel, wood chip, and pebbles, interspersed with the occasional palm tree or redwood. At the end of the road was the main street, a couple of stores, a steak house, and a taqueria. Beyond, fields of lemon trees and mustard grass and farmland that stretched a few miles inland, up to a range of golden hills. Above us, the sun shone like the grill of a new truck.

The house was full of knickknacks and shells and crystals and string lights. A “Be Grateful” sign by the coffee maker. A “Be Grateful” mat by the front door. A canvas in the kitchen printed with a picture of three fluffy ducklings and the words “I have joy down in the bottom of my heart.” It was hard to make out how many cats there were. And then Birdie, the overweight chihuahua, waddled in from the hallway and charged at Gabe, baring his red gums and gnashing tiny, pointed teeth. Gabe told me the dog was the spawn of the devil and the root cause of all the issues that existed between him and his parents. I already knew that the issues between Gabe and his family had begun when Gabe had gone to college in Santa Cruz five years before, found drugs, wouldn’t get a real job, and kept having to move back home when he ran out of money.

The pandemic seemed like a good time to read the ninety-odd novels of Balzac that comprise The Human Comedy. (Which you can get on your Kindle for ninety-nine cents, by the way.) I was definitely obsessed with Balzac in my first youth. Some lines and ideas of his were then emblazoned on my brain: the ruthless mastery an artist must have over his material to boldly cut and shape it; “the impetuous courage of the South;” the “tenacity of purpose which works miracles when it is single-minded.”

Once, in my first youth (I probably got the phrase “first youth” from Balzac), I was having dinner with my brother, Nick Lemann, and about a dozen of his friends, all journalists like him; I was sitting right smack in the middle of the table, and I was, as I recall it, the only girl. They kept talking about politics, of course, and I wasn’t interested in politics at all and still know nothing about them, so eventually I fished out a Balzac novel from my purse and started pointedly reading it in the middle of dinner at the table, amid their conversation. It was like saying, You can be interested in politics, I am interested in Balzac. 

I have no regrets about it. I was making a point! The scene is emblazoned on my brain. It was the only way I could assert myself in that context! It got their attention.

—Nancy Lemann, author of “Diary of Remorse” 

There’s a shortage of good signs en route to the Preakness Stakes, the annual horse race in Baltimore best known as the Kentucky Derby’s older, less attended sibling. By good, I mean the useful types that tell you where to go. There are plenty of other kinds: ads stationed outside delis; DIY posters offering lawns, driveways, and other car-size surfaces as extremely pricey parking options; at least two hotel-related banners on propeller planes; and sandwich boards affixed to roving scalpers, which read, counterintuitively, I NEED TICKETS. The result is a ring of confused, directionless traffic around the track, where it’s easy to forget that everyone has come for a spectacle essentially premised on speed.

The lack of organization at the Preakness is appropriate; horse racing is America’s least centralized sport. There is no MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL for this game. There is a panoply of jockey clubs, trainers groups, state racing boards, owners associations, and veterinarian organizations. The racing rules change from state to state. The racing seasons change from track to track. Even the kind of race a horse runs may fluctuate with the weather. This tradition of casually maintained chaos is almost a point of pride. In 2020, when Congress passed the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA)—a modest attempt to standardize antidoping rules across the industry—it was met with three years of bitter infighting, five federal lawsuits challenging its constitutionality, and most recently, an exquisitely melodramatic public letter from the U.S. Trotting Association that opens with a Thomas Paine quote. That is to say, it’s in the spirit of horse racing that, this past Saturday, as I approached the venue, I had no idea where to go or who was in charge, and neither, seemingly, did anyone there.

The venue was Pimlico Race Course. Of the many contrasts to be drawn between the Derby and the Preakness, most land in the former’s favor. The track is one of them. The Kentucky Derby is run at Churchill Downs—a 147-acre complex in Louisville whose 170,000-person capacity, hexagonal twin spires, and $121 million Bush Jr.–era renovation make it one of the largest, most recognizable, and most opulent race courses in the country; Pimlico isn’t even the nicest option in Maryland. It’s the second oldest racetrack in the U.S. and doesn’t look a day younger, though parts of it technically are. The original clubhouse—a “Steamboat Gothic-era” “rambling wooden Victorian confection,” as one Baltimore Sun article put it—burned to the ground in a 1966 electrical fire, leaving only a horse-and-jockey-shaped weather vane behind. The newer clubhouse, built a few years before the fire, seems to take most of its architectural influence from high school gymnasiums and the DMV. It is also, however, awesome, if you like these things more for the money and big fast animals than for the antebellum theatrics.

The clubhouse was white, brick, and not entirely full. Live racing attendance has been on a downward slide since the Reagan administration, and the pandemic and the rise of online betting platforms have only sped up the process. In 2022, Pimlico’s owners—a company formerly known as the Stronach Group, now operating under the dubiously pronounceable name 1/ST—made a play for younger audiences by setting up a music festival just off the track. This sounds like a good idea, and last year, with Megan Thee Stallion headlining alongside Lauryn Hill, it may have succeeded in bringing the median age of attendees down by a decade (in 2021, it was sixty-five). This year’s bill featured Sofi Tukker—a dance music duo comprised of a girl named Sophie and a guy named Tucker, which broke out seven years ago with a single called “Drinkee”—and Bruno Mars, an artist with fifteen Grammys and, based on the turnout, maybe as many fans. Between Friday and Saturday, racetrack and festival, this year’s event drew just 65,000 people—barely a third of the 182,000 who came out in 2019.

This week, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón in conjunction with the Library of Congress announced that NASA’s Europa Clipper will be launching on its mission in October 2024 with “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” The poem, written by Limón, will travel 1.8 billion miles through the galaxy. It will be engraved on the space craft.

There has long been speculation of life on Europa beneath its ice-covered ocean. Whatever that life might look like is yet to be known, but the mission will provide vital information about the moon’s inhabitants, culture, terrain, and potential for supporting life. The Europa Clipper is expected to land on Jupiter’s moon in 2030.

More, you can have your name included as part of the mission. Anyone who’d like to sign the poem as it hurtles through space may do so at NASA’s Mission in a Bottle website. Every name included before December 31, 2023, will be engraved on a microchip to accompany the poem.

“Writing this poem was one of the greatest honors of my life, but also one of the most difficult tasks I’ve ever been assigned,” Limón said at an event held at the Library of Congress to announce the project. “Eventually, what made the poem come together was realizing that in pointing toward other planets, stars and moons, we are also recognizing the enormous gift that is our planet Earth. To point outward is also to point inward.”

NASA has launched similar projects before, allowing anyone who wished to send their name into space to do so with Artemis I and several Mars spacecraft. The current Mission in a Bottle efforts are similar to the Golden Record sent aboard the Voyager, which sent into space an array of sounds and images from across the globe into space.

This week, book banners showed up to the Douglas County Public Library board meeting in Colorado to protest books in the system’s collection. It is not the first time they’ve done it, and it’s also not the first time counter protestors have shown up to push back. None of this is news nor is it all that interesting; at this point, it’s pretty standard, even if there are still folks choosing to ignore this is happening in their own back yards at their public library.

What is more interesting than that, though, is looking at how these crisis actors are presenting their message and courting people to their cause. Propaganda works when an uninformed public — usually folks who aren’t engaged in the inaccurately named “culture wars” online — sees it and is appalled by what is presented. Good propaganda works because it’s convincing and presented in such a way as to appear authoritative. But y’all, this isn’t even close to good, and the book banning bigots do not even care. By presenting their false narratives in the most outrageous manner, they’re able to stoke anger and fear in new ways…and it is working.

But let’s break down what is truth here and what is spin (spoiler alert: it’s all spin). The purpose of sharing this is twofold: first, exposure matters since too many folks who care about the First Amendment Rights of all and the freedom of access are putting their heads in the sand and not looking at this stuff and second, this will help in your own talking points with friends, family, board meeting members and attendees, educators, and legislators, debunking fact from fiction.

Because sorry, that’s your job, too. You can’t not look and pretend it is not happening.