Maud NewtonI'm interested in books, art, psychology, ancestors, and kinship, broadly construed. My book, Ancestor Trouble, was a best of the year per New Yorker, NPR, Washington Post, Esquire; a John Leonard prize finalist; and a Roxane Gay pick. She/her. ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kja6t1J2lnq%2BkpLs%3D

Certain poems feel perfect. What I mean is not necessarily that they are beautiful (though they might be), but rather that they feel inevitable, that when you read them you come to feel as though they couldn’t possibly have been any other way, that the poet hasn’t composed so much as discovered them, uncovered them already in their final form. Often, for me, that feeling emerges—or is suddenly cinched—in a poem’s last lines.

Over the past couple weeks, Michael McDonald has been inescapable. Even more ubiquitous, it seems, than he was in the early 1980s, when his distinctive voice could be heard on virtually every third song played on the radio, and SCTV’s Rick Moranis (a Steely Dan superfan himself) could confidently hang an entire sketch on McDonald’s sheer omnipresence. The Yachtfather has been takin’ it to the streets, so to speak, to promote his new memoir, What a Fool Believes.

The internet is an interesting place. Depending on where you spend your time and how the algorithms are tuned to your activities, significant events can unfold without ever coming to your attention. Take Caitlyn Clark, for example. Despite her long-standing success, many only came across her name in 2024. She’s been making waves for years, just ask Travis Scott. Or MrBeast, who churned out a new video every five days for a decade, accumulating billions of views.

Did you know there’s an entire genre of video games where you play as Sisyphus, trying and failing to roll a boulder up a hill? It’s true! There’s this one you can play right in your browser, and this one you can play on your iPhone, and this one and this one on Steam. These games are all brutally difficult — some literally impossible. But wait, you might be thinking. Wasn’t Sisyphus’ boulder, like… a method of eternal punishment?