I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline. —Duke Ellington Here’s a deadline: publish something inspired by Duke Ellington’s quote above by the end of the day today. Each morning for the past month or so, I have been picking a quote as my parting thought for the end of a thirty-minute session […]
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Empathy and Sympathy in North Carolina
Kasey Thornton’s debut novel Lord The One You Love is Sick takes place in a fictional southern small town called Bethany. That name, and the title of the book, are references to the Biblical story of Lazarus’ resurrection. At one point, the shortest verse in the Bible — also from the story of Lazarus — […]
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Plus Four
11:25 AM: The End CNN HAS CALLED THE ELECTION FOR BIDEN —Nate Silver 3 PM: Victory Lap When I saw Nate Silver’s post, I was mindlessly staring at my computer with four windows open to different election live election blogs, as I had been for much of the past five 105 days. I’d been pretending […]
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Plus Three
7AM: Georgia While I slept, the vote count in Georgia began to show a lead for Biden. The votes in Pennsylvania continue to be counted, and the count continues to trend in Biden’s favor. Democrats encouraged mail-in voting, Trump denounced it, and state Republicans there blocked local election officials from counting mail-in ballots early. This […]
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Plus Two
10 AM: Escape From Election Central Is the CNN election room a real place? It has the cold feel of an artificial environment, a Star Trek holodeck. The room is gleaming white with red and blue accents. It offers no glimpse of the outside world except for an occasional video backdrop of the White House […]
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Plus One
I went to bed at about 1 a.m. last night, shortly after the cake I made cooled enough to wrap in foil. If I hadn’t started a baking project, I probably would have been a lazy mess of anxiety refreshing websites and Twitter on my couch while the TV rehashed the trickle of information again […]
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Zero
There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some diehard’s vote. -David Foster Wallace (via Anu Garg in this morning’s A.Word.A.Day) 11 AM: Election Day We have arrived. Today is Election Day. The sun is out. My phone […]
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1 Day: The Wind
7 AM: High winds roared through D.C. overnight. The flags atop Nellie’s — the famous gay sports bar on the corner — are straining against the wind. The D.C. flag was tearing loose from its flagpole when I went to bed. It disappeared into the sky overnight. The U.S. flag and progress pride flag are […]