The June issue of The Atlantic has arrived. Say it with me: Subscribe! I read the "actual" (printed) magazine cover-to-cover last night, on the DC-NY train and then after arrival; it's full of good stuff. In my hypothesized "spare time" some day I will intend to do a story-by-story gloss. For the moment I'll just touch on a few in-house features:
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the encounter-with-French-language-and-the-French-people-eux-mêmes he has previewed on his site;
- Benjamin Schwarz, on the disappearance of "charming" men, an essay I loved despite specific disagreement with one sentence;
- Carl Zimmer with a fascinating extension of a grisly-fascinating discovery (people ossifying) reported 15 years ago in our pages;
- and a lot more.
This is by way of segue to two extra in-house aspects of the issue that involve me. One is a long story by me about the past-present-and-future governor of my original home state, Jerry Brown. I'll do a follow up item here soon, but the two points I tried to convey in the story are what is unusual (and impressive) about Brown as a person, and what is unusual (and instructive) about the predicament of California as a state. For now I'll say that I really enjoyed doing this story, except the always-tedious "writing" part; and it helped me come to terms with the changes for good and bad in California between my time growing up there and my sons' time there now.
