Fans gather outside a bodega to watch a soccer match on TV
I am slowly seeing the neighborhoods of the City get ready for the World Cup. I’m not talking about the big corporate stuff, or the FIFA shit. I’m not even talking about the stuff the City is putting up for the tourists, if the tourist show up. No, what I am talking about are the people and the stores doing stuff. How people are displaying nation flags in their windows, how store fronts and bodegas are getting tv positioned in the windows for people on the street to watch. I love living in a City of Immigrants because everyone is from somewhere, and there is a special pride in being able to show that off. The World Cup in New York City is a special time, regardless if it’s being played here or not.
Speaking of sports, Game 2 of the NBA finals is tonight. I will admit that I am a half-ass Knicks fan. I watched less than a handful of regular season games, and was hit or miss with the playoffs. But, I am here for the Finals. In a weird way, I am trying to use the Knicks as a learning experience for the kid, to have some pride in her hometown team. My loyalty to teams has pretty much been spoken for, but pro basketball seems to be the one area of fandom that I have some wiggle room, which means I have a very clean concience when it comes to rooting for the Knicks and Liberty. (Also, I’m cool with the Gotham FC, and iffy with NYCFC but that is a blog for another day.) All of that being said, all the Knicks love should be totally welcomed because the Knicks sure have brought this whole City together, which is damn near impossible to do.
I gotta go to the grocery store, so the last point here is a little thin…
(The short story “Stories” by Annie Ernaux, which was translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, appeared in the June 8th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Photograph by Jet Swan for The New Yorker
You know what I like most about Annie Ernaux’s “Stories”? Well, besides the language, and tone, and ethereal feeling of the loss of a past childhood, or how it feels innocent and menacing at the same time, or the power of words and storytelling, or how the protagonist/narrator doesn’t seem to be a very nice person because she sort of traumatizes a five-year-old. No, my appreciation for this story began to form when I finished reading it, as I was left wondering how fictional was this piece? I know full well that the overwhelming majority of Ernaux’s work is autobiographical, but I was still left wondering, to what degree is this fictional, or factual? For the sake of writing this, I’m going to come down on the side of fiction, as it is in the “Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, but I feel that for this story to work on all levels, Ernaux needs us the believe that this really happened. And not a portion of it; all of it. Even though I am sure this story is based on an event which has been fictionalized.
See, it’s that last paragraph which might well be the best, and correctly used version of the “Dead chick in the basket” trick. (To explain, “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. This device was effectively used in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” where the name of the device comes from.) We go through this whole story, and then are given this last paragraph which seems to explain that this is all real. Or is it? She is a character in her own story? She wrote this to understand herself, but ended up writing another story? (You know, this just might be an unreliable narrator.)
I will die on this hill of a fictional interpretation, because wasn’t Ernaux trying to tell us in this story that she discovered she had the ability to create a fiction so powerful that the audience accepted it as reality and had an honest emotional reaction to it? It’s like it’s meta on meta on meta. And we will never figure out what the truth is because only Ernaux knows that.
A happy group enjoys a fun autumn drive surrounded by colorful fall foliage.
My kid doesn’t believe that I do exercises. She knows I go to the gym, as she’s seen me do it. What she doesn’t believe is that, while she’s at school, I doo push-ups, sit-ups, and squats at home. She wants my wife, her mother, to take pictures or shoot a video of me working out at home. I don’t know how to feel about my child doubting me on this matter. Is she saying that I would lie about this? Or is she saying that there has been no progress in my size, so I must be lying? Or is she just making fun of me?
We rented a place in Vermont over Memorial Day weekend, and we all had a good time. One thing that I noticed about myself was that I had a very difficult time just sitting still, being quiet, and not moving. The whole family has been under a great deal of stress this Spring, with jobs and school, and life in general, so the break was needed. But, with my inability to just be calm of twenty minutes, I started to wonder if I have burned myself out, and started to get use to feeling edgy all the time; as if stress is my default state, and I need to constantly engage in something.
See, when we were driving back to New York City from Vermont over Memorial Day, we got stuck in some pretty bad traffic around Albany, and we started getting bored with our playlists. So, the wife asked what album did I want to listen to. The first thing that popped into my head was “Achtung Baby” which she put on, and it still holds up as a great album. Then the wife suggested “Ten” which was awesome to listen to as well. The kid wanted to listen to “Guts” which we all enjoyed. When we made it home, we decided that for this summer, for all of our road trips, we are only going to listen to albums. I had forgotten how much fun it was to road trip and go from album to album. Not since the days that I had a cd player in my car, had I done this.
I have been trying the “gratitude list” thing for the past month now.
In the rendition that I was shone, when you wake up in the morning, you are supposed to make a list of 10 things you are grateful for, but you cannot repeat the same thing day after day. You gotta come up with new ideas. Makes sense, because I can see people cheating at this and putting down their spouse, or kids, or dog… maybe not in that order. The point is that you start off the day on a positive note, listing what you have, or what’s working on your life, or what you have in abundance.
I won’t lie, it kind’a works. And I say kind’a because you have to have the right attitude for it.
Here are a few funny things that I have gratitude for at 5:30am on most weekeday:
(The short story “Standings” by Chang-rae Lee appeared in the May 11th & 18th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Adrian Tomine
When I graduated high school, my uncle got me a subscription to The New Yorker. He was a very smart and well-read man, and he knew of my ambitions to have a writing career, and this graduation gift, which I emphatically received with much excitement, was his way of encouraging me. I say all of this because off and on over my adult life, I have continued to subscribe to The New Yorker, and for that reason I feel fully justified, due to my extensive financial investment in the publication, to complain to the Fiction Department, and formally request they stop publishing works of short fiction which are merely excerpts from novels. I speak of Chang-rae Lee’s “Standings”, which by the magazine’s own admission “… is drawn from “A Tender Age.”” Then adds Change-rae Lee “…is the author of the novel “A Tender Age.” (August, 2026)” Though this work is an excerpt, it was published in the short fiction section of the magazine, so I will be reviewing it as a short story.
“Standings” is the type of story that suffers from the sins of being too smart for its own good, and wanting to do too much. The story is overly long, bringing in as many details as possible to give the reader the full feeling and experience of what it was like to grow up in this environment of 1976 adolescence. Not to make light of the subject matter, but this is a coming of age story of boys on the cusp of crossing into adulthood, and being unclear what to do with the rage and aggressiveness they are supposed to embrace as they try to figure out what manhood is. This is a pack of “lost boys” with no direct positive male influence, and left to their own devices, devolve into racism and violence. On the surface, this is a deep well to work with, and speaks to the potential of an engaging and enlightening story. But here, the story felt unfocused on what it truly wanted to tell, with many tangents of ideas flailing. As Milhouse would say, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?!”
Another issue that I had here was that I never felt the protagonist was ever in any peril through the course of the story. I spoke of the aggression between the boys, but the tone flipped between a comical story of boys posturing toward each other knowing that nothing would happen, to a very serious they must kill or be killed. Instead of creating a logically narrative development, such as playing at being violent leading to violence as survival, the story seemed to flip a switch. What we are given is a bipolar feeling of it just “happens,” which left me thinking I had missed a step, or an unearned short cut was taken. By doing that, the intention of the action never felt believable. The protagonist does pull out a knife at school and tries to harm another student, yet his consequences are suspension, some therapy, a bit of social ostracization, but on the whole he was able to continue on as a well-adjusted adult. Meanwhile the other boy has trouble coming out of his home due to the trauma, and another boy turns out was schizophrenic all along. Other than that…
This brings me to my last point, which is that I never felt an urgency in the writing. In my point above, I stated that the protagonist never felt in peril, and part of that has to do with the language used. The narrator/protagonist is clearly writing this story – this is a first-person narrative that would never be confused with a friend talking to us, or a person at a bar telling us this story. No, this is unquestionably a story being written, and as such, it sticks to the rules. (Hell, the knife was introduced in the second act, and was used in the third.) It felt like an undergrad working hard to get an A in a creative writing class. The narrative plays it safe and does everything right, but in so doing, it never takes a risk or displays an intensity. The thought that I had reading this was maybe you can be simplistic and minimal.
“Standings” doesn’t work as a short story, but I also admit I don’t think it was ever meant to. For all I know, “A Tender Age” could be a great book, and given the breath and space that a novel can take, perhaps all of these pieces tie together and it plays like a fine-tuned song. But in the end, this just hammers home to me that not every story should be a short story.
