There's a lot to be learnt from history about making the most of our clothing

April 28 – June 30, 2023

April 21 – June 3, 2023

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.