Some Lists About Things
In this newsletter: Lists, reader mail, healthcare news, and words of advice.
Part I: Thirteen Lists For a Summer Weekend
Below, some lists that may or may not be of interest to the general reader.
List number one: Three objects I would bring if I were going to Coney Island this weekend, which I am not.
The 1970s-era Univega road bike that I bought used twelve or fourteen years ago and rode last week for the first time in like five years, and which really rides great, though the shifters are kind of a wreck, but still, not bad for a fifty-year-old machine.
A kite, though honestly maybe not; crashing even the flimsiest, lightest, supermarket-impulse-buy plastic kite onto someone’s head at Coney Island is my nightmare.
My dishwasher safe Contigo stainless steel travel mug.
List number two: Three times I was betrayed by my dishwasher safe Contigo stainless steel travel mug, which was purchased 2019 to replace a similar Contigo travel mug which was not dishwasher safe, and which went through the dishwasher.
One morning in very late 2019, or maybe very early 2020, I was sitting on the bench in the front hall putting on my shoes to go to work, and all of a sudden I felt this horrible pain in my side and then this sensation of wetness, and I thought maybe my body had exploded. But then I investigated and it turned out that my brand new dishwasher safe stainless steel Contigo travel mug had spilled very hot tea all over me.
Another time, maybe in late 2020 or perhaps early 2021, the Contigo stainless steel travel mug fell hard on the pavement and some aspect of its lid broke just enough so it no longer works perfectly, but not enough that it needs to be replaced, so I haven’t replaced it, and instead have grown so intensely attached to it that now I’m resigned to being stuck with a sub-optimally operational travel mug lid because I can’t, at this point, imagine ever parting with my Contigo stainless steel travel mug.
This is not a time I was betrayed by my Contigo stainless steel travel mug, but rather a reflection on the last time I felt as irrationally attached to an object as I do to the Contigo stainless steel travel mug, which was when I had this pair of sunglasses I’d bought with $180 cash I had won at the races. Those sunglasses lasted from late 2014 until last summer, when I accidentally crushed them under the front left tire of the car, the ultimate betrayal.
List number three: Four brands of root beer, in descending order of personal preference.
Virgil’s, though I’ll note that I haven’t had this since, I’m gonna say, the summer of 1998, as one element of what I’m pretty sure was The Ideal Lunch: The bottle of Virgil’s, a turkey sandwich with mayo on white, and a bag of Lays. I recognize that, in its specifics, The Ideal Lunch sounds mundane, but it was the Virgil’s that tipped it over the line from great to perfect, and I really don’t think I’ve seen a Virgil’s bottle since that day, which, again, I’m guessing was in the summer of 1998, but really could have been as early as 1995.
Stewart’s, which I feel like is the one you see around the most these days, when you’re in the kind of place where you’re thinking about getting a root beer?
Barq’s, the soda you get on special occasions at overnight camp. (Overnight camp or sleepaway camp? Is sleepaway camp a regionalism?)
A&W, I guess?
List number four: Three books I read eleven summers ago.
“Sailing Alone Around the World,” by Joshua Slocum, a memoir by a guy who figured out that his boat could basically keep on sailing in a straight line if he tied the wheel in a certain way, and, in 1894, became the first person to sail alone around the world.
“House of Mirth,” published five years after “Sailing Alone Around the World.” Did Edith Wharton ever meet Joshua Slocum? Slocum tugged the boat on which he had sailed alone around the world to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, where President McKinley toured it hours before he was shot. Was the Pan-American Exposition the sort of thing Edith Wharton would have attended? Probably not.
Nat Hentoff’s “A Political Life: The Education of John V. Lindsay,” which I think I found in that used book store down on Columbia Street, which had, and maybe still has, a great New York City section.
List number five: Three reasons not to keep a list of every book you’ve read since 2010.
The steady drop in the number of books read per year marks the inexorable progress of the worms turning your prefrontal cortex into a block of Jarlsberg; the list itself prima facie evidence of your own cognitive decline. Better not to know for sure how much your intellect has shriveled.
Sometimes you look back over the list and you see a book and you’re like, yeah, I read that one pretty recently, and then it turns out you read it in January of 2016.
Other times you look back and see that your sole recorded comment upon completing the first volume of Caro’s LBJ biography in the summer of 2012, notionally before the worms had done much damage, was, “Whew. That took a while.”
List number six: Five comments that appear under entries I shall not identify in the list of every book I’ve read since 2010.
“Jeesh, this stunk.”
“Not a good book.”
“Not my favorite le Carré.”
“Not my favorite Auster.”
“Not my favorite.”
List number seven: Three observations upon rereading an extremely long first-person narrative feature I wrote like eight years ago, which was published with original illustrations that featured me as Don Quixote on a black charger, carrying an enormous yad in the place of a lance.
I spent a lot of words describing what people were wearing, as though I’d heard somewhere that you want to build characters, and thought that meant mentioning that one guy had “a goatee and a black polka-dot scarf,” and one woman was wearing “a black fleece vest over a pink shirt.”
For all my efforts, the only character who really emerges from the story is me, a sweaty schlemiel who found all the least pleasant people on the Iberian peninsula and interviewed them one-by-one.
One thing that happened on that reporting trip that I didn’t put in the story, but which would have really heightened the sweaty schlemiel effect, was that I went one day to a public library in Madrid to type up some notes, and in trying to move a recording of a very important interview from my phone to my laptop accidentally deleted it. The interview was more or less the one I had flown across the ocean to conduct; without it, I might as well have flown home, repaid my employer for the expenses incurred on the trip, quit journalism, and moved to a hermit cabin in Montana. I went into some kind of fugue state, Googled, downloaded, and somehow, just as my soul began leaving my body, recovered the interview.
List number eight: Three lists I thought about including in this series of lists.
Four things I’m planning to do if I see a bear while biking on a narrow dirt road.
Four ways you could probably die sailing a Sunfish on a not-very-large-but-surprisingly-deep New England lake.
Three amazing details from the 1947 photo of the crowd at Nathan’s in Coney Island at the top of this list of lists, starting with that Errol Flynn mustache on the guy in the middle.
List number nine: Three funny birds I’ve seen this summer.
The massive turkey at the petting zoo in the Bronx Zoo, who they let walk around in the open, exuding fury and menace and terrifying the children.
A blue jay that I watched fly around the other day, crash-landing on each branch as noisily as that SpaceX rocket that touches down vertically on its tail, and sometime explodes.
The crowd of wild turkeys hanging out on the bike path the other morning that disapproved very strongly of me, or my bike, or maybe the fact that my socks did not match.
List number ten: Actually, changed my mind. Here’s the list of four ways to die sailing a Sunfish on a not-very-large-but-surprisingly-deep New England lake.
Incinerated by lightning during an afternoon storm.
Drowned after a gust throws you into an unexpected jibe and the boom cracks you on the head.
Sucked to the bottom when your boat spontaneously dissolves and sinks.
Torn to pieces by a the six-inch incisors of a prehistoric giant beaver, freed from the permafrost in the lake’s darkest depths and out for vengeance.
List number eleven: Five emerging themes of The Black Umbrella.
Ghosts.
Money.
Divination.
The Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Extinct North American megafauna of the Pleistocene.
List number twelve: Four creatures I considered as potential devourers of the Sunfish in place of the giant beaver.
A mosasaurus, the gigantic swimming dinosaur with very large and sharp teeth from one of those Jurassic Park sequels.
A hundred-pound grass carp, grown bored of subsisting on milfoil and wanting to try something a bit more crunchy.
A moose.
A great blue heron, the closest living relative of the mosasaurus (probably?).
List number thirteen: Three important developments since I wrote the above twelve lists.
On Tuesday, while out for a walk, the dishwasher safe Contigo stainless steel travel mug discussed at length in list two, and mentioned in list one, fell to the ground. When I picked it up again, water was pouring from its spout. I fiddled with the mechanism, but it was no good: The lid seemed actually, truly, permanently broken.
And then Tuesday night, before throwing the lid out, I tried it again and it seemed to work? A brush with disaster, and a reprieve.
I have not touched it since. Is the dishwasher safe Contigo stainless steel travel mug, the object to which I feel more irrationally attached than any since the sunglasses I drove over and smashed last summer, finally betrayed? For now, it’s like the cat in the box: Dead, but also not.
Part II: Reader Mail on Scams
Two weeks ago in this space, I established that crime does, in fact, pay, by thinking through the economics of the golden ring scam, which a guy tried to pull on me last fall. In response, a number of you wrote to tell me about similar and unrelated scams other guys had tried to pull on you. Two of your letters are below. Taken together, they make an important point: Scams are fun and interesting to talk about, until you get scammed. Then they are not very much fun at all.
(A note: Although I have used the receipt of reader mail as a device in the very much invented, entirely fictional P.D. Rapaport stories that have appeared in past editions of this newsletter, I want to assure you that the below letters represent actual, real, non-imaginary correspondence from actual, real, non-imaginary subscribers. I’ve edited them only very lightly and withheld their names in accordance with their wishes.)
A lottery scam
Years ago in Brooklyn Heights, I had some Armenians try a confidence game with me. They “won” $5,000 in the lottery but were all here illegally, so they needed someone clean to cash it at the office. They’d give me $1,000 for my time, but as insurance that I wouldn’t cut and run with their ticket, I had to give them $200 in cash that instant. So I stalled, messing with them, and quizzed them on famous Armenian writers (turns out one of them could recite hundreds of Armenian poems from memory, plus obscure Tupac lyrics). After about ten minutes they realized I wasn’t going to fall for their scam, and offered me pot and vodka and the number of a priest who could tutor me in Armenian so I could read the poets we discussed in the original. Good times.
— Anonymous reader
A subway scam
I was scammed recently. I was on the subway platform, separated from the card machines by just a grate. The guy asked for change for $20 because the machine wasn't taking his bills. At first I just said no reflexively, but then I remembered that I did actually have cash, and the change he needed, for once. I went through this internal journey all about why I would be so unwilling to help out when I could, and I was just stuck waiting for the train anyway. So I doubled back and passed him the bills through the grate and he passed me a bill. It felt off on my hand, and when I looked up he was already gone. Obviously a fake bill. I felt really sad about it. Makes you never want to do anyone a favor again.
— Another anonymous reader
Have any anecdotes of your own, about scams or any other relevant topic? Send it along and perhaps I’ll include in a future newsletter.
Part III: Some Healthcare News Updates
A few notable items I wrote for Barron’s recently.
I wrote on Thursday and Friday about a strange thing that happened where the market values of a few big drug makers fell by tens of billions of dollars because of concerns about lawsuits over the heartburn drug Zantac, despite nothing new happening related to the lawsuits.
I wrote about how Pfizer and Moderna are making very different decisions about what to do with the money they made off of their Covid-19 vaccines
I spoke with the executives of the company that makes the antiviral used to treat monkeypox about their plans to get emergency use authorization for their drug.
I spoke with Moderna’s CEO, who told me that he’s not feeling any pressure to make acquisitions with the $18.1 billion in cash his company has on hand.
Part IV: Words of Advice
“Sailing Alone Around the World” is worth reading. (I think! I read it eleven summers ago, as you know!) So is “House of Mirth,” for that matter, but you probably knew that already.
Here’s a great photo from the other night of lighting around the Verrazano.