Readers in the Wild

Will reading disappear? My book club wrestled with this question on Tuesday as we gathered in our usual circle, reliving bits and pieces of our latest selection and debating the merits of text and author. One member had just finished a class on AI, in which the instructor lauded the ability of AI to generate concise summaries of any book, thus eliminating the need to read the actual work. We all groaned—the author's perspective lost, the brain stimulation and attention span workout avoided. A collective "say it ain't so" moment rippled through the room.

I brought good news from our recent family trip to New York: on the subway, you can observe humans reading actual books in the wild, turning real pages as the train zips from stop to stop. When I told William how wonderful I found this, he rolled his eyes and noted that almost everyone else was reading, too—but on their phones. My older kids dismissed physical books as "performative," done to win approbation from strangers like me who find visible reading attractive.

Performative doesn't bother me. I told my son to go ahead and read his book club selection in the flesh—who knows how many other (much younger) people find an open paperback irresistible? My husband reads on his iPad at night, using the app Libby to borrow books, and I find that attractive too. Reading in bed seems infinitely more conducive to sleep than watching movies or scrolling through ultra-short videos that leave the brain spinning.

On a hopeful note, William belongs to a book club called "Millennials and Gen Z Read the Classics." He's met people with similar interests and abilities—reading an actual book from cover to cover constitutes a genuine skill in these days of texts, TikTok, and Instagram teasers. When we visited MoMA, we spotted Sunday readers scattered throughout the subway cars and art lovers of all ages standing transfixed before the museum's walls, gazing at Monet and Van Gogh and Pollock with the kind of sustained attention that can't be replicated by a screen's flicker.

Art can't be summarized by AI, can't be reduced to bullet points, can't be skimmed. The experience of standing before The Starry Night—the texture of the paint, the swirling depth that photographs flatten, the collective hush of strangers sharing the same arrested breath—this remains irreplaceable. Let's keep making art, seeking it out, celebrating it. Our brains and future generations depend on our insistence that some things are worth the full attention, the unrushed encounter, the turning of actual pages. The subway readers give me hope. So do the museum-goers, the book clubs, the people who still believe that some experiences can't be outsourced to algorithms—that presence, attention, and the slow work of reading remain worth protecting.

Miracles in Manhattan

After last week's post about hiding in tales of 19th century England, I committed further by downloading Season 1 of Victoria on Netflix. The caprices and romances of the young queen captivated me on the flight to New York City, where the whole family converged at William's Brooklyn apartment. From hiding in the past, I dove into living minute-by-minute on a non-stop family weekend—savoring both William's curated tours and the spontaneous, serendipitous moments no one could plan.

The magic started on the subway to the Financial District Friday evening when I received an out-of-the-blue text from my college roommate Laura, who lives on Long Island and works in the city. We text only a few times each year, so her message arriving as we rattled toward Manhattan felt like the universe orchestrating a reunion. We made plans to meet the next day.

Saturday unfolded like a series of small miracles:

• Gluten-free bagels that actually tasted like bagels (a benefit only NYC can deliver)
• Laura appearing in Central Park, strolling with us through the park environs and down to midtown, catching up on our families —a sunny, windy, joyful reunion that shimmered with unexpected grace
• An indoor table at the all-gluten-free Italian restaurant where we had dinner reservations (we were supposed to be outside in the cold)
• The restaurant being cash-only, all of us subtly ransacking purses and wallets, then my discovery of a gift from Mom I'd forgotten to deposit—dinner procured through Nana's generosity
• Exiting the restaurant at the appointed time, catching the subway to Broadway, watching a superb production of Hamilton (aside from the young woman in front of William receiving a breakup text in Act Two, then departing with her crew immediately after—we were riveted)

A thirteen-hour day that ranked among our most magical travel days ever.

Sunday brought William down with a cold, though he heroically accompanied us first to brunch at Kellogg's Diner where we reunited with my cousin Justin (for the first time in six years) over crisp bacon and New York recommendations, then to Domino Park and lastly over to MoMA. We started on the museum's fifth floor and found ourselves floored by what hung there: Monet, Dalí, Picasso, Picabia, O'Keeffe, Pollock, Van Gogh. The Starry Night waited for us—we hadn't known it would be there—and we stood before it in grateful awe, nudging one another and celebrating our luck in whispers.

At day's end we learned via text that our flight was canceled. Brief panic ensued as everyone scrambled to reconfigure Monday schedules. Daniel flew into terror over missing a midterm exam and had to embark on a solo thrifting mission to reclaim his equilibrium. We rallied to an airport hotel and said goodbye to William, hoping he'd heal quickly and visit soon.

The weekend reminded me that the best moments can't be scripted—they arrive as gifts. A text from an old friend. Cash discovered at exactly the right moment. Art that stops your breath. Even a canceled flight becomes part of the story, part of what makes a weekend not just good, but magical. Sometimes hiding in Victorian England is exactly what you need, and sometimes you need to be thrust into the chaotic present, surrounded by the people you love, open to whatever grace the universe decides to deliver.

A Victorian Escape

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Pax est melior quam bellum — Peace is better than war

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I lost myself in the Victorian era last week, reading Beth Brower's delightful series The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion (books 1-8) before bed and watching "Young Sherlock" on Prime whenever I could steal the time. The Latin quote above comes from one of Emma's journals, a simple declaration that echoes with particular force against the backdrop of today's headlines.

Were Victorian times simpler? Not for women. They couldn't own property until 1870, and even then couldn't keep property from before marriage until 1882. Brower's Emma—first encountered in 1883—chafes under society's mandate that she engage a chaperone. When she turns twenty-one and comes into her inheritance, she discovers a distant male relative has drained most of her scant funds. Of course he had access—he was male.

In "Young Sherlock," the protagonist's mother has been drugged and declared insane after losing a child, allowing the father to claim the deed and estate to salvage his failing businesses. Mrs. Holmes—locked in an asylum for twelve years—emerges wholly sane and blazing with righteous rage, freed by sons who learned dubious lessons about treating women from their manipulative father.

The Victorian era was no golden age. Women remained dependent on husbands for stability, reputation, and survival. Brower's beautiful books introduce strong females who buck that tide and stand on their own feet, while depicting the enormous struggle such independence required compared to male counterparts. Yet if one was fortunate enough to possess funds and education, there existed a longing for scholarship—for reading and writing and conversing with friends over intellectual pursuits. We allow ourselves to be robbed of such goals and habits now, distracted by endless scrolling and manufactured urgency.

Though "Young Sherlock" contains fighting over government weapons, violence and espionage, the destruction feels manageable compared to what we witness in today's wars. The Latin quote surfaces each time I read the headlines and recoil from the devastation we inflict on innocents from hundreds of miles away. We don't fight hand to hand anymore, but from joystick and screen to target on the ground—sanitized violence that I suppose makes it easier to unleash.

Pax est melior quam bellum. Peace is better than war. I don't wish to return to the Victorian era with its corsets and constraints, its cruelty to women and rigid hierarchies. But for one week, it offered a refuge—a place to hide while the world outside grows increasingly unrecognizable, increasingly brutal. Sometimes we need these escapes, these reminders that humans have always struggled toward something better, even when better feels impossibly far away.

Stacking the Ribs

The end of high school swim season brought my annual collapse—the familiar inability to rise from bed, drag myself to workouts, keep appointments I'd marked on the calendar weeks before. This year it lasted only a week, mercifully brief compared to the three-week recoveries that followed prior seasons. With help from acupuncture and physical therapy, I've clawed my way back toward normal. I've learned that bad posture and the resulting shallow chest breathing bear responsibility for my lingering back pain and breathlessness during swim workouts—problems I can address, or so I hope. My fifties have not been kind to either workouts or recovery.

The gentleman who administers my PT sent me a video on how to stack ribs over pelvis, accompanied by a loud Flo Rida song that made my husband execute a comic double-take. I'm attempting this rib-stacking, though decades of bad habits render the practice a chore. The will to improve gets fortified by long hours standing on concrete pool decks and such painful morning stiffness that I hobble to my dresser as a way station en route to the bathroom—a journey that shouldn't require strategic planning.

As I lay prone one day last week, willing my back to release and reflecting on my fleeting energy reserves, I stumbled across Lisa Miller's essay "How I Learned to Love Lifting Heavy" in the New York Times. Miller reveals she lifts heavy weights for the anxiolytic effect, a term I had to look up. "Anxiolytic"  describes several classes of drugs that reduce anxiety, but I love its application to weightlifting. Exercise has served as my preferred method of reducing stress and outrunning anxiety since I was thirteen, before I even had vocabulary for what I needed to escape.

In recent years, I've embraced lifting heavy. I've wandered in and out of weight rooms since high school, though usually with ill-conceived routines and less than ideal target weights. When I was coming up in swimming, we operated under the philosophy that swimming massive yardage would make you faster. While this approach might work for the 500, I never found it particularly helpful for the 50.

My son and daughter educated me on form, maxes, and exercise combinations that translate to pool performance. They learned from their club coach—with whom I now work—then refined their knowledge in college. With my daughter spotting me, I hit a lifetime best on bench press recently. I felt immense pride—followed by immense exhaustion. The exercise routines I'd been using to manage the stress of coaching  had been drawing from the same limited energy stores, precipitating the inevitable collapse.

My healers help immensely, as does rest. Today I learned a new practice called "sweeping," developed by Buddhist monks, which focuses on mental release rather than physical manipulation. I need to practice this technique before describing it in full or recommending it—I've tried it only once—but I'm intrigued by the possibility of putting my mind as well as my body to rest. Spring and summer wait just beyond the corner, and it's time to emerge from this mini-hibernation, ribs stacked, breath deepened, ready to meet whatever comes next.

The Joy of Alysa Liu

"My family is out there. My friends are out there. I had to put on a show for them. And when I see other people smiling, because I see them in the audience, I have to smile too, you know?" — Alysa Liu, 2026  Olympic Gold Medalist, Women's Singles Figure Skating

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God bless Alysa Liu for boosting the entire country with a shot of her infectious joy. Watching her gold ponytail spin—one more layer of brilliance—above her shiny, tasseled skate dress, taking in her wide smile as she bedazzled the Olympic audience, I hid tears from my husband. As an athlete who coaches athletes just a few years younger than Liu, I recognize that pure happiness that comes from doing what you love without expectation or attachment to outcome—such a rare and precious commodity.

Every Olympics fan now knows Liu took two years off from skating before rekindling her love affair with the sport. She is an artist, and her routines constitute incomparable art - shared with millions. On the Olympic ice during Thursday's free skate, she never stopped smiling—even during warmup, those tense fifteen minutes where competitive skaters swirl around each other trying to avoid collisions and falls. Her routine personified a freedom, a joy, that drew the audience to its feet in explosive appreciation at the end of her four-minute dance with destiny.

Liu called herself "over the moon, the luckiest girl ever" in her post-competition interview. She shared gratitude with the Japanese skaters who took second and third place, holding seventeen-year-old bronze medalist Ami Nakai after the young skater realized her medal position and burst into tears. Their heart-shaped arms framing beaming faces blessed me in the aftermath—another image to carry forward.

Sisterhood on the podium resonated this week as the high school girls I help coach won their sixth consecutive State title in swimming. Two sets of twin sisters stood on the podium together, along with many other teammates sharing bright smiles with friends and families. Despite nerves, every girl handled business while also offering big hugs, waves, and dance moves to athletes on deck and spectators in the stands. Our head coach notes that the girls swim faster when they're having fun—and I agree wholeheartedly. Our practices get interrupted by social kicks, sing-alongs, coordinated clapping, the freeze challenge —anything we can do to weave competition with companionship.

You can see a mix of emotions on any athlete's face at the end of a race or performance: relief at completing the journey, knowing hard work paid off; sheer exhaustion; disappointment at results that fell short of expectations; frustration at complications; shock and awe at outcomes exceeding wildest dreams. All valid. Every athlete's journey winds over different terrain, carries different motivation, seeks different fulfillment. How lovely this week to witness two stories that ended in joy—proof that sometimes the rainbow's end delivers exactly what it promised.