Piggly Wiggly
I first heard the astonishing story of Clarence Saunders and Piggly Wiggly from Sarah, who shared with me a passage about the grocery store chain in William Sitwell’s A History of Food in 100 Recipes. Most of the Saunders quotes in this essay, and the quote from Ernie Pyle, come from Mike Freeman’s 2011 book, Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly: The Rise & Fall of a Memphis Maverick. For information about my great-grandfather, I am grateful to my mom, Sydney Green, and my late grandmother, Billie Grace Goodrich, who was incidentally a loyal Piggly Wiggly shopper.
The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest
The George Shea quotations cited here are all from televised introductions to the annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. The Mortimer Matz quote comes from a 2010 New York Times interview by Sam Roberts. The documentary mentioned is The Good, the Bad, the Hungry, directed by Nicole Lucas Haimes. Two histories of Nathan’s Famous also provided helpful background for this essay: Famous Nathan by Lloyd Handwerker and Gil Reavill, and Nathan’s Famous: The First 100 Years by William Handwerker and Jayne Pearl. I did not expect that in my life I would finish two entire books about a hot dog stand, but 2020 was full of surprises, and both the books are quite interesting.
CNN
The first CNN broadcast is available not at CNN.com but on YouTube. To learn more about trends in child mortality, I strongly recommend Our World in Data （ourworldindata.org）。 It contextualizes data on a wide variety of topics—from Covid to poverty to carbon emissions—with the kind of clarity and thoughtfulness that helps you remember that everyone has birthdays. The statistic about 74 percent of Americans thinking child mortality is getting worse comes from a 2017 Ipsos report called “Perils of Perception.” I learned about it from Our World in Data. Shannon, Katie, Hassan: I love you all. Thank you. Long live the cult of Claremont.
Harvey
The Sontag quote about depression is from Illness as Metaphor. The William Styron quote is from Darkness Visible. Both those books have been hugely important to me as I live with mental illness. The complete Emily Dickinson poem, sometimes known as Poem 314, is available in most collections of Dickinson’s work. Bill Ott and Ilene Cooper have guided me to Harvey and so much else in the last twenty years; this essay is my attempt to thank Bill.
The Yips
Rick Ankiel’s memoir about his time in baseball, written with Tim Brown, is called The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life. I first learned about Ana Ivanovic’s yips from Louisa Thomas’s 2011 Grantland article, “Lovable Headcases,” which contains the Ivanovic quote about overanalyzing. Katie Baker’s Grantland piece “The Yips Plague and the Battle of Mind Over Matter” was also helpful, as was Tom Perrotta’s piece in the September 2010 issue of the Atlantic called “High Strung: The Inexplicable Collapse of a Tennis Phenom.” There have been many academic studies of the yips; the one I referred to most is titled “The ‘Yips’ in Golf: A Continuum Between a Focal Dystonia and Choking,” lead author Aynsley M. Smith. （All hail continuums over dichotomies.） The golfing coach referred to is Hank Haney, whose story is told in David Owen’s 2014 New Yorker piece “The Yips.”
Auld Lang Syne
The Robert Burns online encyclopedia （robertburns.org） is a wonderful resource for those looking to learn more about Burns, “Auld Lang Syne,” or Burns’s fascinating friendship with Frances Dunlop. Most of the quotes from Burns’s letters come from the encyclopedia. The Morgan Library and Museum （themorgan.org） has an extensive archive about the song, including Burns’s letter to George Thomson describing the original melody as “mediocre.” Scans of Henry Williamson’s letter to his mother about the Christmas Truce of 1914 are also available online at the Henry Williamson archive; I first learned of the other quotes about the Christmas Truce （and several other details in the essay） from a 2013 BBC article by Steven Brocklehurst, “How Auld Lang Syne Took Over the World.” The Robert Hughes quote is from his book The Shock of the New. After Amy died, McSweeney’s reprinted her columns from Might magazine, so they are now archived online. Amy’s books quoted here are Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The Amy Krouse Rosenthal Foundation funds ovarian cancer research and childhood literacy initiatives. You can learn more at amykrouserosenthalfoundation.org.
Googling Strangers
Years after writing this review, I had a chance to talk with the kid in question, who is now a young man—older, in fact, than I was when I was a chaplain. That conversation—which provided me with consolation and hope that I can’t possibly find language for—was made possible by the podcast Heavyweight. Thanks to everyone at Heavyweight for making that happen, especially Jonathan Goldstein, Kalila Holt, Mona Madgavkar, and Stevie Lane. And thanks most of all to Nick, who evinces the love and kindheartedness that lights the way.
Indianapolis
The data about Indianapolis’s size and population are taken from 2017 U.S. Census estimates. The Indianapolis Star’s 2019 series about the White River and its water quality was very helpful to me. （It’s also the kind of journalism that cities like Indianapolis desperately need.） The parts of the series I relied upon were written and reported by Sarah Bowman and Emily Hopkins. In 2016, WalletHub ranked Indianapolis as America’s #1 microcosm city. The Vonnegut quote about maintenance comes from his book Hocus Pocus; the quote about not being able to get home again comes from Simon Hough’s 2005 profile of Vonnegut in the Globe and Mail, “The World According to Kurt.” The line about the terrible disease of loneliness is reprinted in the book Palm Sunday, a wonderful collage of Vonnegut’s memories, essays, and speeches.
Kentucky Bluegrass
I first learned about America’s turfgrass problem from Diana Balmori and Fritz Haeg’s book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. The book, a companion to Haeg’s ongoing art project involving replacing front lawns with vegetable gardens, changed both my lawn and my life. I also recommend The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession by Virginia Scott Jenkins and Ted Steinberg’s American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn. Oregon State University’s “BeaverTurf” web portal helped me understand which turfgrass is Kentucky bluegrass and where it is widely cultivated. The estimate on the percentage of American land devoted to the growth of turfgrass comes from a study in Environmental Management called “Mapping and Modeling the Biogeochemical Cycling of Turf Grasses in the United States,” lead author Cristina Milesi. The statistic about almost a third of U.S. residential water use going to watering lawns comes from the EPA’s “Outdoor Water Use in the United States.”
The Indianapolis 500
My favorite book about the Indy 500 explores its formation and the first race at the Speedway: Charles Leerhsen’s Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500. I owe my interest in IndyCar to my best friend, Chris Waters, and to other members of our race crew, especially Marina Waters, Shaun Souers, Kevin Schoville, Nate Miller, and Tom Edwards. Our branch of the annual bike-to-the-race tradition was founded by Kevin Daly. Thanks also to IndyCar drivers James Hinchcliffe and Alexander Rossi for giving me an idea of how racing works for the drivers, and how they live with the risks inherent to the sport.