On campus

Notes from a college visit, plus Links of the Week: genius grants, the queen of bestsellers, and the last days of Siegfried and Roy

A quick announcement for those of you in the Charlotte area: The great Michael Schur—creator of THE GOOD PLACE, PARKS AND RECREATION, and so much more brilliant television—will be at Park Road Books on Saturday at 2 p.m. to talk about his wonderful book HOW TO BE PERFECT. He’ll be in conversation with my dear friend Joe Posnanski. I’ll be there, too—not in any official capacity, but come say hi. It’ll be well worth your time.

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We just got back from an eight-day road trip to Wisconsin, where I spoke at a conference at beautiful Carthage College in Kenosha. The campus is right on the banks of Lake Michigan. You can look out the window in some of the classrooms and see one of the grandest vistas in the world. I don’t know how anybody gets any studying done there.

Why Carthage? Well, almost 20 years ago, I did a story on a math professor at Davidson College named John Swallow. He was trying to solve a math problem no one had ever solved, and he did it. After the story, Alix and I got to be friends with John and his wife, Cameron. John is now the president of Carthage. So it was a nice reunion, not just with friends but with family—Alix is from Wisconsin, and so we brought along her mom and got to see a bunch of kinfolk.

It had been a while since I spent much time on a college campus. Here are a couple of things I noticed:

Crocs are still A Thing. I still wear Crocs, but I figured that if I was still wearing something it couldn’t possibly be cool anymore. But it seemed like half the kids I saw at Carthage were wearing them—specifically white Crocs with those little doodads jammed in the holes. I’ve since heard from people in various parts of the country that Crocs are still hot with younger students as well. Lounge with pride, fellow kids.

Parents still worry. Over the weekend I had two separate conversations with fathers of students I’d talked to earlier—one student wants to be a film director and the other wants to be a journalist. Both dads begged me to talk their kids out of it. I totally understand this from the dad point of view—it’s hard to succeed in either field these days, and nobody wants to see their children fail. But I told both of them that their kids were smart (which is true) and that they’d probably regret not trying more than trying and failing. I think the dads bought it. Sort of.

A small school has its benefits. Maybe my favorite thing about Carthage is Watson, the Swallows’ old basset hound:

Students can check out Watson like you would check out a library book. The Swallows leave a couple of leashes on their front porch, and students sign up to take Watson for walks. The only issue is that sometimes Watson gets down the road and decides he is done with walking. Then the students have to figure out how to get him back. I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

The main lesson for me is, now I want a basset hound.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. Thanks to all who shared their favorite vacations in the post I put up last week.

2. The new episode of the SouthBound podcast features Jonathan Abrams, whose new book THE COME UP is a brilliant oral history of hip-hop. We talk about everything from his top 5 rappers to the record his mom made him take back to the store. Jonathan is a thoughtful and engaging guy. I really enjoyed this.

3. Two of my favorite magazine writers, Chris Jones and Michael J. Mooney, teamed up for this story in The Atlantic about the rise and fall of Siegfried and Roy. It’s an amazing story, full of arrogance and innocence. I will also now think of Chris and Michael as the Siegfried and Roy of journalism.

4. I didn’t know anything about Colleen Hoover, except that her novels have absolutely dominated the bestseller lists lately. Alexandra Alter gets us caught up. I’m not sure I’d like Hoover’s books, but I came away from this story liking Hoover.

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: The death of a dog in Brooklyn, and how it split a liberal community.

6. It’s always inspiring to see the new recipients of the MacArthur “genius grants.” This year’s crew had a couple of people I was especially excited to see: Ornithologist and writer Drew Lanham, a guest on SouthBound back in 2019, and writer Kiese Laymon, whose book HEAVY was an inspiration when I was writing THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.

7. When I was a kid reading MAD magazine, one of my favorite things was the tiny cartoons Sergio Aragonés would draw in the margins. Turns out he’s still at it!

8. Columnist John Archibald—another former SouthBound guest—on one of my favorite Southern words: tump.

9. Charles Bethea of the New Yorker on a bizarre mystery: headless goats in the Chattahoochee River.

10. A belated RIP to the legend Loretta Lynn. This was one of the first records I remember hearing on the radio as a kid … it’s a kiss-off to a trifling man, a celebration of feminism and sexual freedom, and funny as hell to boot. In short, it’s Loretta Lynn.
    

See y’all next week, everyone.