Ergodicity
On Grading for Equity, playing the game of school, and the real world
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ERGODICITY*
Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity is, essentially, a plea to teachers to stop treating school as if it were some extremely intricate, borderline cruel game that we want our students to fail at often.
Many of the ideas in Grading for Equity are not necessarily new or shocking when considered in isolation. Almost anyone who has ever gone to school has at some point probably complained about how grades don’t necessarily fully reflect skill or knowledge. However, seeing all problems with conventional grading, and its mostly dark history, rounded up in one book really underlines how becoming a teacher means inheriting arcane and harmful rules and a bit of an attitude problem.
Feldman does not overuse the language of students trying to “game” the gradings system instead of trying to learn (picking up extra credit assignments instead of redoing those where they actually failed), but this framing sticks out as it is a parallel to the language of “gamification” that has been pushed onto educators, creators, and marketers alike over the last few years. When we talk about “gamification” we fully understand what the goal is – use points as a quick incentive for the player to do something we want them to do. But when we talk about school, where grades often serve as points and teacher’s grading policies are the rules of the game, we lose sight of how little gamification has to do with learning and how much it has to do with compliance.
Occasionally, I get caught up in some build-your-bundle function on a clothing website and spend way too much time trying to assemble my perfect mini-collection. I tell myself that the small discounts unlocked by these bundle deals make the time expenditure worthwhile. Almost always, though, I do not actually buy anything – I understand that the whole purpose of the matching game is to keep me on the website longer and make me more likely to spend money on a product that now looks like it somehow reflects something about me. The retailer is, to an extent, training me to think of their products in a certain way and to expect a certain service. When they offer a better discount on some item I had eyed a week or two ago, I do often cave. Somewhat similarly, I expect my students to cave and fall into behavior patterns I want them to fall into when the rewards I can offer are good enough. Feldman is insistent on asking teachers to focus on the “why’s” of these behaviors rather than the behaviors themselves.
If my students return homework on time because they know they will be rewarded for it (even if they sometimes have to copy or cheat to meet the deadline), does that mean that they know what homework is for? If my students ask questions in class because they know I’ll give them participation points – participation points that might even “cancel out” some part of a low exam grade – does that mean they’re asking me quality, honest questions that they actually need to know the answers for? In higher education, especially at the PhD level in the sciences, there is lots of talk about transferrable skills. If you don’t get a job in physics, you can still use your problem-solving chops to get a job in some other field where problem solving is crucial, the wisdom goes. Doing homework as means of practicing skills should be a transferrable skill as much as asking pointed, honest questions is. Feldman argues that many students don’t transfer these skills to new settings because they never learn them in the first place – they just act them out because that’s how you win at the game of school. In the book, he excerpts from interviews with students who admit as much: they openly talk about having cheated just to have something to hand in or to having asked questions they knew the answers to just to receive a high participation grade.
And the game of school offers very different quests with very different guides to very different students. In the book, Feldman pointedly reminds us that American schools adapted many of their current grading practices only when it became necessary to sort rural and immigrant students into future professions in fast-growing industries. In other words, school was meant to decided which students are assimilated enough and compliant enough to work a factor job and which select few may have a shot at a profession that will value them more than a physical cog in a greasy, polluting machine. The idea that grades, and therefore student knowledge and skill, fall on a Bell curve or satisfy a normal distribution brings with it the baggage of the impossible quest for the truly average person and more than mild flirtations with eugenics. As Feldman repeatedly makes clear, much of the grading practices we inherited from the first push to make American education into something more than shared grade school houses, don’t really recognize students as people with differing experiences and desires, but rather workers that need to be molded or ne’er-do-wells that need to be disciplined. When educators today talk about the achievement gap that arises when we compare the successes of our minoritized or underrepresented students and, to be blunt, richer and whiter kids, we sometimes do forget about this history. For a whole population of people, for generations on end, school was not a place where you achieved, but rather where you were told what your presumably predetermined place was and taught how to comply with that. Presently, when teachers institute grading policies that are all-or-nothing with respect to late submissions of assignments or when vague terms like “classroom citizenship” or “effort” are graded, the experience of a certain type of student is not all that far removed from those early sort-and-correct philosophies.
In one of the early chapters of Grading for Equity, Feldman offers an example of two students that receive the same overall grade for a course based on traditional grading practices. One student clearly shows skill and knowledge on exams, but they are not timely with homework, which lowers their homework grade, and have a bad attitude, which lowers their participation grade. The other student struggles with exams but collects many homework points as well as all the effort and extra credit points. They both advance to the next grade with the same report card, but vastly different skills. Certainly, something is wrong with this picture. Yet, as I have personally witnessed at times, the suggestion that late work should be accepted or that participation grades simply should not be given as they convey no information about a student’s knowledge drives many teachers into a madly defensive stance. This too is part of the bleak and harmful cultural legacy of the way education has been structured in this country – if a student has a lot of knowledge but does not fit our vision of a ‘good student’ we feel entitled and obligated to correct their behavior by assigning them a low grade. Keeping up a certain façade over who you are, quite literally becoming an avatar that may not reflect your true self, becomes part of playing the game of school for some students.
Unfortunately, this sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit bias extends through the stages of academia and culminates with the institutions of the PhD. Here, in most programs, one gets a shot at defending their degree only once their advisor makes the mostly idiosyncratic decision of their students-cum-candidate seeming ‘ready’. Grading for Equity focuses on high school education, but it is, in my mind, worth noting that what Feldman identifies as a need to buttress the teacher’s egos and their sense of what is right in the world with the power of wielding grades does not subside once the teacher becomes a tenured professor with considerably more power and prestige. The idea of enforcing a social hierarchy of power, of correcting behavior and rewarding compliance mistaken for respect is hardcoded into most contemporary educational systems. Students that learn to win the compliance game early are not spared from having to play it again later when they move to the next level of the education quest. Those that fail early on barely stand a chance when it comes to reaching higher levels and even better equipped academic “bosses”. As the vision of a “good student” or a respectful and dignified academic, rarely defaults to someone who is not a straight, white, cis man, the rules of the game certainly don’t seem to apply to everyone in the same way. For sure, there are cheat codes and academics have named “the hidden curriculum” as part of the problem, but a student should primarily be spending their energy on trying to learn rather than trying to lift the veil, to borrow some of Feldman’s language, on why they have the grade they do and what sort of more-magic-than-math will be needed to drive up their numbers.
***
“If a students have their notebooks, they receive 5 points regardless of how they use the notebooks. Rather than show them the causal connection between preparation and success, we separate cause and effect and treat them independently.
Rewarding certain behaviors is meant to support student learning but it forces students to fit within a set of behaviors anchored to the teacher’s subjective, implicitly biased idea of what a successful student is – behaviors that more often than not are the behaviors that their teacher has and values, embedded within that teacher’s specific culture, upbringing, and learning styles.
…
If some behaviors that we find valuable for learning don’t help certain students in their learning, why would we punish students for not showing those behaviors, and why reward those students for exhibiting behaviors that don’t help them?”
Joe Feldman, Grading for Equity
***
The realization that struck me the most while reading Grading for Equity was that, as teachers, we are often implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, incentivized to think that it would be bad if everyone in our class got an A. In other words, we are conditioned to treat As as a scarce commodity rather than a goal that, ideally, every single one of our students should be within reaching. If getting an A means that a student has fully mastered some predetermined set of skills i.e., they have met a standard, then their A means as much as every other A in the class. As Feldman notes, a driver’s license does not begin to mean less and less with each new driver’s test passed, and neither does the bar exam. So, when we feel that there are too many As in our classes or that some of them are not as worthy as others, we are really admitting to ourselves that we are grading something other than skill. Classes in which getting a grade means collecting points, finding cheat codes and making up for a lack of knowledge on exams with participation points or other rewards for behavior really do have winners like games do. Their As come to at least partly reflect extra savvy or extra dedication to unlocking all the rules. However, if they need to be able to sit down and solve a statics problem or calculate the trajectory of a projectile in their next class or on their next standardized test, that A that they won rather than earned will not get them very far.
Teachers do often worry about how far that “very far” can be and whether we are preparing our students for unfairly short distances. A few months ago, a colleague of mine presented on a gradeless grading scheme they were implementing in a college elective and was met with skepticism and pushback from a sizeable group of teachers at our school. The gradeless scheme, roughly, allowed students to receive individualized qualitative feedback on their work based on a predetermined, readily available, transparent rubric. The qualitative level of skill they landed on within the rubric would eventually get turned into a grade, but they barely ever received a single letter, and they had chances to climb upwards through the rubric through re-dos. If their work started out at “competent” (roughly a C), but their second attempt upgraded it to “outstanding”, their final grade for the assignment was an “outstanding” or an A rather than some average of their first attempt and their second. The lack of averaging is something Feldman also argues in favor of – if the most recent grade is the one that’s kept then that’s the grade that reflects the student’s most recent, or current, level of skill. The idea that the first and second grade should be averaged, both he and my colleague argue, is more punitive than it is informative. The average between the A and the C does not mean “this student started at a C, but improved to an A”, it instead says “this student is performing at an A, but we won’t give them an A so that they don’t forget their failure at C”. “Growth mindset” is such a potent, buzzy phrase in the education space (many schools explicitly list it as a value they’d like to foster), but we often average grades to, to put it somewhat crudely, remind our students where they came from. If you started at a C, the farthest you are allowed to come is a B.
The most common argument I have heard against retakes and the lack of averaging of past and present grades, and one that Feldman addresses as well, is the fear of the teacher’s favorite boogeyman, a game even more cruel than school, The Real World. In the Real World, the playbook explains, there are no re-dos and retakes, your mistakes are never forgotten, you can never get credit for late work, and there are no rubrics to guide you in your performance. It’s a dog-eat-dog world where you sink or swim, where college professors have no empathy, every graduate program suffers mythical rates of attrition, and every person with a Real Job is either always perfectly correct and perfectly on time or, I guess, they never get a job again and bring major dishonor on themselves. It’s like those old-school games where you jump over spikes except that there are no save points, and nothing ever resets.
I am, of course, exaggerating. I do, however, believe that this myth of the Real World is dangerous, and I do not want to be preparing my own students for it. Having come from academic science, where revise-and-resubmit is such a common outcome to sending a paper to a journal, and now working part-time as a writer, where so much about working with an editor is being directed to re-write and re-do a piece in order to make it better, I am certainly biased. My “real” world has always been high pressure and demanding of excellence, but it has also always been one where things are rarely perfect the very first time you try to do them and that’s a natural part of the process. At the very beginning of 9th grade conceptual physics, I teach students about the scientific method and spend a lot of time emphasizing how revisability is a huge asset to science, how science could not work if we did not give ourselves the option to revise, redo and retake. Grading for Equity returns to the issue of the Real World a few times I its two hundred plus pages and makes a similar point – in most workplaces one mistake is not fatal and there is usually recourse, though sometimes an uncomfortable one, to correcting errors and improving skills.
The thing that is most bothersome about the Real World, however, is that the whole notion of teachers using it to scare students is remarkably condescending to and dismissive of their lived experience. I am writing this a few days before public schools in New York City welcome their students back for in-person learning, and just in the last few months I can count a storm and a flood, a rise in coronavirus cases and truly awful anti-abortion legislation as factors that would have terrified me as a young person. Not to mention record heat from earlier in the summer, a reminder of the climate dystopia we already live in, which forms a potent one-two-punch of despair together with the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan coming on the heels of a war that has been doing damage for longer than any of my students have been born. Is It in any way realistic to think that any young person does not already know how tough and cruel the real world is? That they think that they’ll be safer and more coddled in the game of life than the game of school? And this is just the macroscopic picture, one that does not consider both systemic inequities and isolated struggles that many students encounter outside of school regardless of how harshly we grade their problem sets. For some of them, winning the game of school in preparation for the final boss of the Real World is such a joke, because the actual real world has already been ruthless to them and their loved ones. In this case, instead of bloviating about their future, we should be focusing on giving them skills and knowledge that can help them move into a world less cruel than our boogeyman.
***
“To best prepare students who will likely face discrimination, should we want to replicate that world in our classroom?
Of course not. Let’s instead give our students who have been historically underserved – who in their real-world experience racism from institutions as well as the people who work within them – a learning environment free from that treatment. We don’t serve our historically underserved students by replicating the inequities that caused them to be underserved, but by creating the most equitable community – and most equitable grading and assessment system – we can.
…
When we normalize rubrics and standards scales, we help students understand that those who will judge us have expectations. If we know what those expectations are, we are more likely to meet them. Rather than making students more vulnerable, we are training them to advocate for transparency, to ask what specifically is expected of them in order to get an A on the college project, to earn an outstanding performance evaluation, or to receive the scholarship award.”
Joe Feldman, Grading for Equity
***
Over the course of the last year many teachers, myself included, have felt the real world creep into our classrooms or have had to move our classrooms to what felt like the very center of the real world. Returning to an only slightly more normal situation this year, there’s a lot of fear and trepidation about our own performance. There is also a lot of fear concerning what our students have lost in terms of learning as much as social and emotional savvy over the course of the last eighteen months. I cringed very hard and very often when I overheard colleagues complain about teenagers’ lack of emotional grit or resilience all throughout last year. I felt the lack of compassion implied in those complaints fairly personally. This past year has likely been my most professionally successful year to date, as a teacher and a writer. I met all of my deadlines and did all of my homework just like I had always done when I was a teenager and later a young adult. However, none of that prepared me for the dread, burnout and depression that was coupled with being successful during such a bleak year and having to, also, just live through the year itself. Reading Feldman’s book made me wonder whether I would’ve had taken on less work, negotiated better boundaries, demanded more compensation or insisted clearer terms for evaluations of my performance had I been brought up in a different education system. To me, this was one of the biggest takeaways of Grading for Equity – we have to teach students how to own their learning and advocate for it and for themselves instead of teaching them how to hack school in the same way they hack any other point-collecting game.
I’m not going to say that we must teach students to change the world that doesn’t serve them. There is lots of naivete to that statement: it is idealistic enough to not see that this approach would put most of the change-the-world burden on students that are already most underrepresented, discriminated against or treated most poorly. We should not ignore that voices of some students are often heard less loudly than others when we try to tell them how to use theirs. But I do want to argue that we should give students tools that can help them thrive and then, consequently, have the capacity and stamina for chipping away at structures that are trying to prevent them from doing so. Students that know second chances are often given may be less likely to crumble under pressure or reach for cheating as an insurance policy against the expectation of perfectionism. Students that know how to ask for extensions or to see the rubric by which they are graded or to get constructive feedback past a single letter may be more likely to actually get those things. This makes it more likely for them to feel like they have a say in how they are taught and evaluated. By letting students negotiate the best way to learn with us we are not necessarily relinquishing power as much as establishing a new norm where there is no place for a zero-sum power approach in the classroom. Students can’t really avoid learning and just play the game of school instead if they have the option of bending a rule here and there – they can’t refuse a quest that they co-created.
While I was reading Grading for Equity, I often stopped to take notes and write down ideas for my own classes. I had thought about and around many of the ideas in the book as I was learning and re-learning the ropes of pandemic teaching seemingly every week last year, but holding the book in my hands helped me put a finger on some of the amorphous discomfort at the pit of my stomach that would often arise when I sat in faculty meetings or sat down to tally up my grades. I had already made it a pretty blanket policy to accept late work and to allow for more-or-less infinite retakes and re-dos, but Feldman’s writing made me realize that a fair amount of what I was doing was either misguided or not enough. Some of his suggestions seem radical at first, like not assigning extra credit because if something is important to learn it should not be opt-in-or-opt-out or like refusing to assign zero and asking students to actually do the work, no matter how late, instead of avoiding learning by taking a mathematically hit to their master score in the course. He also argues in favor of basing most grades on summative assessments (he likens homework to sports practice where no one is keeping track of goals or home runs) and pretty much never doing the thing we all learned as students where you add up all assignment and divide them by some number to figure out your final grade. Everything in Grading for Equity makes sense after just a bit of consideration, but it is also just so much to process given how little variety many of us, or at least me, experienced with our own work being graded. Ironically, as I write this in concert with getting ready to get back to school, it is now me – the teacher – that’s anxious of encountering the real world in the form of colleagues, co-teachers, deans, counselors and principals that may similarly be used to one way and one way of doing things only.
The book’s only drawback, which is maybe really not about the book at all, is that it guides the reader through many very practical approaches for making their grading more accurate (i.e. more based on student’s skill and knowledge) and consequently more equitable, but cannot offer much advice on how to implement them in a school where other teachers exist too. To be clear, I am lucky to work in a school where many teachers are very open-minded and some are certainly way ahead of me in terms of equitable and progressive grading practices. However, I have to wonder whether I am doing a disservice to my students if I don’t teach them the point-collecting tricks they may need in their next science class or whether I will become a problem for my colleagues that also teach physics once word comes from above that we have to adopt an aligned grade breakdown and syllabi that can smoothly run in parallel. I am not running the game here, just barely designing one level. Though Feldman acknowledges that grading issues that he devoted many carefully researched pages based in the work of endless sociologists and psychologists need to be addressed by whole school communities – systemic issues require systemic actions after all– that acknowledgement is far from comforting.
Of course, the point of Grading for Equity is at least in part exactly to make teachers like me uncomfortable with our own compliance and complacence within the existing system of education. Just like our students play the grade game, so we also play the game of not being a problem for our administrators, making tenure if possible, avoiding wrathful and influential parents, and collecting enough hours, extracurriculars and accolades to be deemed irreplaceable. As a new teacher, I was observed and reviewed multiple times last year and often felt like a clueless student barely squinting at the outlines of the teaching game’s rules, especially when feedback was given to me vaguely or without a clear rubric. I suspect this year, my year two, will be more of the same. Here too I take one of Feldman’s points to heart: I should advocate for myself in the same way I want my students to learn to advocate for themselves in my classroom. I too should push back on trying to play the game and find cheat codes for my career and try the harder, but more constructive and honest path instead.
On the first day of last school year, I was living in my in-law’s basement and agonizing over whether I have to pair my brand-new teacher slacks with even newer teacher kitten heel shoes. I chose badly on day one, got bad blisters and returned to sneakers by day two. The lesson was multiple; I had to trust myself and be myself for one, and I had to learn to be vigilant for avoidable pains. This year, I know I’ll be walking into the classroom a more confident Dr. Callaghan, comfortable in a pair of Vans I had been running around in all summer and with a much better idea of what it means to spend so much time controlling and influencing a young person’s everyday experience of the world. When I wrapped up my summer class in July, I felt both relieved for my own mental health and worried for the future of students I had come to feel increasingly protective over. One day, over lunch, they put on the most joyful, loud and teenage-like karaoke session and I almost cried to a rendition of a Sam Smith song because I had forgotten what kids having fun at school looks like and then immediately remembered how many of them will struggle in classes for not bringing in a notebook or handing in an assignment a day late or not raising their hand often enough when summer ends and school starts “for real”. I hope that having read Feldman’s book will give me at least some tools for turning that tearful feeling into a mindset of action and informed advocacy.
The world is under water, the world is burning, the world is sick, so it is really not the right time for playing vacuous games.
Best,
Karmela
*In physics, and especially statistical mechanics, an ergodic system is one where any smallest constituent of the system eventually visits every part of the system’s volume. For example, if the system is a box of atoms, it will only be ergodic if every atom at some point finds itself in every point in the box and with every possible velocity. In this way, in an ergodic box of atoms there are no favored configurations i.e., no arrangements of atoms (think of all atoms bunched up in one corner for example) that are much more likely than others or fully forbidden. To put it loosely, in an ergodic system there is something of an equity of paths for all constituents of the system.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
I’ve been lucky to have had a chance to report three very cool physics stories in the past few weeks.
The first focused on an experiment carried out at Korea University where physicists used lasers and crystals to assign numbers to wave-ness and particle-ness of light. Effectively, they managed to quantify wave-particle duality which is one of the most important, and most counterintuitive, ideas in quantum physics. This story ran in Physics World and working on it really made me reconsider how complicated and rich the foundations of quantum mechanics really are. This new work may really change the way we talk about how waves and particles do or do not coexist.
The second, which ran in Scientific American, was about seeing what electrons do inside of a solid by hitting it with highly charged ions. I reported on a very creative experiment from TU Wien in Vienna, Austria where researchers had the idea of peeling graphite (like a banana) to get a better look at the many complex electronic processes in its interior. Physicists have been throwing particles at things to study them for decades, and this experiment is one in the long succession of researchers getting better and better at using collisions and scattering as, essentially, magnifying glasses. I learned a lot from writing this article, finally digging into what an Auger process or ARPES are after six years of avoiding the topics in graduate school, and I was delighted to find that Scientific American had space and interest in an old-school-ish solid state physics story like this.
My third story, published in WIRED, focused on how 3D printing could make experiments with ultracold atoms smaller, quicker to assemble, more customizable and overall more accessible. These experiments are relevant for so much basic research into quantum physics as well as many future quantum technologies (like sensors and clocks) so the advance I wrote about, led by a team from the University of Nottingham, has the potential for really making an impact if taken up by more researchers and manufacturers. I am always really happy when an editor has space for a story about ultracold atoms and many of the scientist I interviewed for this story were fantastic discussion partners when it comes to the topic. I know I always say this, but I really hope to bring more stories like this to not overly physics-y outlets like WIRED in the future.
LEARNING
For the last two weeks of August, I pretended that writing was my full-time job and spent almost all of my time reading, pitching, interviewing, writing and editing. I ran every day, and I did squeeze in some lecture writing for the classes I will be teaching all fall in-between my writing assignments, but most of my days were consumed with the process or reporting on science and I really enjoyed that. In addition to being a very fulfilling change of pace, especially as my teaching schedule is about to be full to the brim yet again, these two weeks were a great opportunity for me to test out how many stories I can work on in parallel, how many interviews I can conduct in a day, and what the best pace for putting a reported article together is for me. It is not really secret that I occasionally toy with the idea of writing full time, were that ever to become financially viable, so I was extra grateful for the last days of summer gifting me the opportunity to have a small insight into what that life would be like.
New York City public schools begun their fall instruction after Labor Day so when my writing days ended, I had time to briefly rest then quickly returned to faculty lounges and classrooms I had temporarily waved goodbye to at the end of July. The exceedingly warm September weather made the whole work thing seem quite inappropriate at first. Then, I sat through two days of presentations about pandemic safety and students’ pandemic-related mental health issue that teachers should anticipate, and they snapped me right back into the reality of working with young people during this still really scary time. There is a lot of tension in being asked to simultaneously acknowledge students’ trauma and normalize discussing it while also enforcing a high level of often unforgiving academic rigor. Before students rejoined us in the extremely well-ventilated school building, it was rather clear that we’ll all just be making it all up as we go along. Once students were there for our traditional week of interdisciplinary community-building “writing and thinking” workshops, it was clear that they were mostly just happy to be back. Workshop week packed in a few challenges, but mostly I learned that sometimes we need to give our students more credit for owning themselves and their behavior both academically and emotionally. I had some great conversations with students I had never met before who just wanted to talk science in-between activities, I heard students share their writing and their thoughts very bravely and authentically during the workshops, and I felt a whole other level of belonging when I got invited to run a 5k with my school’s cross-country team. I hope that the rest of the semester, and in just a few days we’ll be knee deep in physics and calculus again, will teach me some more lessons about small joys and big gratitude along those lines.
I also impulsively attended a few boxing classes after work in recent weeks and though my hooks and uppercuts are nowhere near good enough to claim that I have learned how to punch properly, leaning into this mode of physical activity has in many ways been a huge learning and self-awareness experience.
LISTENING
Starspawn by Blood Incantation which is just solid death metal that I return to over and over.
The new Wolves in the Throne Room record titled Primordial Arcana which warmed me up to this band again, something I am happy about as Celestial Lineage is one of my all time favorite records. I’ve always been a sucker for atmospheric death metal and when Wolves in the Throne Room do it well – without leaning too much into either part of genre – they really do it well.
Similarly, I’ve been liking the recent King Woman album called Celestial Blues much more than their past work, likely because it is more raw and ominous (just look at the album art). Kris Esfandiari is really an awesome force in the most literal meaning of the word.
Staying within a similar genre, though I do not love every bit of singing on Latitudes’ Agonist, the overall sound of this record is loud in a way that feels deliberate and polished without its punchiness being overly diluted by those qualities. To be more direct, when clean vocals are not trying too hard, this record goes hard.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I did not care for Deafheaven’s recent album Infinite Granite which seems to have reserved all its punchiness for the record’s last song and is basically a soft shoegaze record otherwise. Deafheaven has always been interesting and important exactly because they could harness the tension between borderline saccharine soft melodies and the avant-garde black metal elements from their earliest days – removing the latter half of that mixture just didn’t work for me. Even the last song, the one that sounds like old Deafheaven, feels a bit stale after so many clean singing, dreamy but sad, ultimately unmemorable tracks. I’ve written about having seen this band in concert and being struck by them before, and as is probably true for many metal fans of my generation, hearing Sunbather in college really expanded my perception of the genre. Of course, bands evolve and Deafheaven have been quite explicit about how much they wanted, or needed, this record to be different. That different version of their still impressive musicianship just isn’t what I’m needing these days.
WATCHING
My partner and I watched Maltese Falcon after one of our Friday night forays into neighborhood outdoor dining, date night if you’d like, tapping into our continued shared interest in old heist movies. With all the caveats for outdated gender politics and quippy dialogue that any film from 1940s probably calls for, this was really a fun romp of a movie and a worthwhile classic to revisit.
While I am generally pretty uninterested in both the Marvel and DC cinematic universes, we settled on Suicide Squad for another date night and enjoyed it. This is a gross, grimy, indulgent movie that dances around the edges of political statements, but mostly wants to blow heads off and give John Cena a chance to establish an over-the-top precedent for his upcoming TV show. Suicide Squad is too long and tries to pack in too many sentimental moments for too many characters. However, it is more honest about the corniness and belligerence of older comics and less interested in being a relatable blockbuster than I feared. It was refreshing to give it a few hours of our time.
We watched Empty Man because it seems like every podcaster I even remotely respect really liked it, but I ended up unsure of what to make of it. This is not a bad movie, but it didn’t strike me as particularly good either. Something about its production read as a little more homemade than I expected, and I could not shake the feeling that the story is also one that a sophisticated horror fan would come up with through a skillful paint-by-number of favorite tropes of the genre. At the same time, Empty Man has some really disturbing imagery, builds suspense pretty successfully and its somewhat unsurprising ending is still quite satisfying. All of the actors really go for it in their performances so in many ways the whole thing is a model example of how to make a solid horror movie. It’s not necessarily a piece of filmmaking that will change the genre, but maybe that matters less than its diligent adherence to its more recent themes and conventions. If you’re into creepy cult content and know what a tulpa is (whether it be from the X Files or Supernatural), Empty Man is very likely to be your cup of tea.
On the TV front, we are still watching the Sopranos and have made our way into the show’s last season. In this late stage, the writing has become somewhat less tight and more and more characters that were previously barely there are being asked to carry whole episodes. At the same time, the show is also becoming more experimental and headier. As I have noted before, the worldbuilding and character work in this series are so good that it almost doesn’t matter how awful all its protagonists are. The first few episodes of season six, however, do offer a small glimmer of goodness that is refreshing after the bleak ending of the previous season. At this point, unfortunately, Sopranos also adds some heavy homophobia to its usual repertoire of misogyny and sexism which make some episodes that much harder to sit through. Regardless, I am still uncomfortably invested in seeing what will come next, in terms of TV-making artistry and the show’s plot alike.
READING
I have made my way through about a third of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino and so far it has been nothing short of fantastic. Tolentino seamlessly weaves pop culture, theory, literature and her own experience into easily readable essays about topics ranging from feminism to the Internet. Whenever I’ve felt she may be getting too abstract and acadmic, she’s brought me back with a type of crude-by-funny comment I’d expect from a friend. In other words, her voice is compelling, but her arguments are not shallow. This is a book of criticism much more than it falls under the ever-growing personal essay umbrella and Tolentino certainly deserves to be compared to a millennial Sontag or Didion. I’m excited to keep reading this book.
At the tail end of summer I had a bit of time to sift through some of the newsletters in my inbox and reading some of these really resonated with me in moments of uncertainty and expectation of change (of season, of work habits, of health concerns).
Radical Love Letter #60: in all its beauty & all its ugly pain by Raechel Anne Jolie where she argues for not looking away from the (climate) apocalypse or treating it as a problem disconnected from our own bodies. In a manner reminiscent of adrienne marie brown she argues for an embodied approach to future action, a feeling of motion and will in our bodies that can power revolution, resistance or, maybe, salvation because it is authentic and visceral.
Recent issue of Blackbird Spyplane on cultural appropriation, a comically loud and garish newsletter that everyone seems to be reading, but that manages to make a more nuanced and coherent argument about this rather convoluted and contentious topic than many less all-caps-all-idiosyncratic-jokes oriented authors and outlets.
Mimi Zhu on abundance in their newsletter WRITE, TO HEAL. Think pieces around scarcity mindsets, love and community are not rare for queer writers and the argument Zhu puts forward here – that though material abundance may not be within reach for many of us due to systemic issues, we can adopt an abundance mindset when it comes to relying on community to redistribute wealth and provide help and love in ways those systems can’t exploit – reminds me of essays and letters I have both read and written around the edges of in the past. However, an argument that resonates and that feels hopeful is one that is certainly worth repeating, revisiting, redefining and refining until it feels even more internalized and actionable.
On Milk by Alicia Kennedy which pulls no punches when it comes to the dairy industry and its horrifyingly powerful lobby, the remarkable marketing machine that would make you think that almond- and oatmilk companies secretly run the world, and the history of non-dairy “milks” (of course, they did not start with cutesy cartoons in Brooklyn coffee shops). Kennedy is often as critical of vegans as she is of those that advocate for consumption of animal products, and her writing is always pointed in a way that makes the information she wields and synthesizes impossible to ignore. This letter is some of her most succinct and best.
My Music, a poem by Campbell McGrath. I loved the line
“I am the names of all fifty states on your tongue,
their Olde English nostalgia and Amerindian prolixity
and majuscule Latinate transliterations rolled together,
I own the alphabet and the stars in the sky,”
And all the gorgeously mundane Americana imagery the poet claims throughout this piece.
EATING
Big tomato salads while the summer is still around (secret is in lots of crunchy toppings and a generous sprinkle of salt), farmers market fare and vegan muffins during a brief trip upstate (if you ever find yourself in Ossining, NY you have to grab a vegan muffin at First Village Coffee), savory crepes inspired by my mom (I almost always start with this recipe and try to not riff too much), overly complicated vegan tacos (my minimal repertoire is a protein like beans or soy curls, a homemade slaw, a cashew cream, a salsa and avocado), carrot cherry oat smoothies for breakfast (your mileage likely varies on this, but a good spoonful of peanut butter makes these very satisfying and filling), this seven layer dip on the occasion of draft night for my husband’s fantasy football league (but with homemade cashew cream and pinto beans refried from scratch), vegan cinnamon rolls I made during a brief trip to an overwhelmingly large camping ground and summer home a friend had briefly rented our in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania.