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I’m appearing alongside some great Substackers for the live shit you should care about quiz show at Joe’s Pub next week. The event is free—I hope to see you there!! —Kate
shit you should care about2d
i actually can’t deal with my iconic line up of contestants for The Shit Show in NYC!!!!!!!!! @kate lindsay @Casey Lewis @Brendon Holder @Eli Rallo @Ali Kolbert @brittany spanos Brian Park Brianna Chickenfry!!!
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Nick’s Riff This Week
“I would eventually find myself working at The Atlantic—editing, with respect and admiration, David French and Tom Nichols and Molly Jong-Fast, among others—and seeing some validity in arguments about the ‘excesses’ of wokeness. I’m on the Millennial/Gen X cusp; had I, like so many others around my age, drifted right?”
I’ve just returned from the National Critics Institute, where I experienced some sort of 18th-century medical miracle. Like an Englishwoman of delicate constitution, I was sent away to convalesce by the sea. Twelve days later, I am pink-cheeked, restored. I believe in journalism again.
There were 14 of us: mostly mid-career theater critics, but also writers covering dance, food, music, television, and literature. We stayed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where Chris Jones, chief theater critic at The Chicago Tribune, and Naveen Kumar, former theater critic at The Washington Post, led us through an intensive writing program. The program itself is fully funded. Every evening, we went out to see a play, musical, film, or dance performance. By morning, we had to turn in a review, visit the campus pub, and, ideally, sleep.
Sleep! I was not getting any. My sentences were hostile, delinquent creatures I’d summoned in a fugue state. There was no time for the leisurely tinkering and second-guessing I am indulging in now. In workshops, no one apologized for a rushed draft. We held each review up to the light: What had I noticed? What was I really trying to say? Why did it matter?
We spent a day at Jacob’s Pillow, a dance festival in the Berkshires, where we saw Akram Khan’s final touring production. The theater was so dark that I kept scribbling notes on top of my earlier notes. The pages above belong to my fellow critics Toni Tresca (top) and Daniella Ignacio (bottom), who, like me, could not make sense of what they’d written when they sat down to review the performance. Like Will Graham trying to draw a clock for Hannibal.
Zadie Smith once said that a writing life requires “a great capacity to be alone.” Most days, I hunch over my dining table in a dirty sleep tee, surrounded by books, crumbs, and cans of seltzer. I read and type and Cmd-Z my way toward what I am trying to say. I love that solitude. But there is another kind, too: the fear that you may give yourself entirely to this work and still never make a life from it...
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