The newsletter will be off next week and will return on Mon., June 29. If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here. I’m fascinated by the fathers my brothers became
I’ve never shared this with my brothers, but I’m often riveted by their conversations with their children: the range of topics, the time lavished on each, the intimacy of the details, the ease of it all. My older brother, Mark, has two sons and a daughter, ages 26 to 29, and he knows them in a way that our father never knew us during that (or any) chapter of our lives. He’s fluent in why they’ve chosen their jobs, their mates, their neighborhoods, their outfits. I’m not sure how he keeps all of those details in his head, given his own work and home and marriage, but something about fatherhood has expanded his hard drive. It has more gigabytes of memory than mine. My younger brother, Harry, has three daughters and a son, ages 24 to 30 — same deal. In the span of a weekend, I’ve eavesdropped on his chats with one of them about the underappreciated wonders of wallpaper, with another about the compromises that a durable romance demands, with yet another about the proper balance and bounty of dishes at a dinner party. Our father gave us values, but Harry has one-upped that. He has given his children values, plus tips for the perfect roasted beef tenderloin. (Sear the outside on a griddle slathered with herbed butter.) None of that is a knock on Dad, who recently turned 91. He’s a caring, principled, extraordinary man. But he always saw himself as more a provider and an authority figure than a solace and a confidante. His job was to steer and cheer Mark, Harry, me and our younger sister, Adelle, not to dry our tears or keep our secrets. Mom was available for that. I guess I’m saying that he’s the product of his generation. Mark, 63, and Harry, 59, are the products of theirs. I’m not a father myself, but I have enough fathers around me to notice how much their roles have changed. That’s on my mind because Father’s Day is drawing near and because of two recent articles that examined men’s altered attitudes about their children. The first, by Derek Thompson and Aziz Sunderji, appeared in Thompson’s newsletter, and it charted a rise over recent decades in how many minutes each day American fathers devote to child care. They head to the office later, or leave it sooner, than they once did. That’s often by choice. They say that being with their children beats being at work. The second article, by my Times colleague Jessica Grose, posited that an underappreciated factor in declining fertility rates is men’s desire to give any children they do have a suitable amount of attention. They want to be present. They want to be involved. My brothers always felt that way when their children were young and still at home. And they weren’t outliers: They saw and sensed the same inclination and priorities in the men at the desks around them and in the stands at youth soccer games. All these dads were part of an unannounced, informal movement, following a tacit rather than explicit script. They were creating new expectations and a new ethos for fatherhood. Mark encouraged his children to let him in by inviting them to understand him. He made sure that they met and mingled with his adult friends and thus observed how he tended relationships and what they meant to him. He also showed his children his passions. “I took Frank to a Grateful Dead concert when he was 12,” Mark told me, referring to his oldest son, who, like me, is named after my father. But that outing wasn’t just characteristically ardent Deadhead evangelism (and, well, unorthodox parenting). It reflected Mark’s sustained effort to expand the time that he and Frank spent together. The more hours, the more conversation. The more conversation, the greater the likelihood of serendipitous revelations, real familiarity, deeper connection. Harry told me that he modeled himself as much after our mom — who died three decades ago, at 61 — as after our dad, and he resolved to gush around his children, to the best of his ability. “I told them I loved them often, sometimes when they did not expect it, and hugged them, even if my hugs were often brief and usually characterized by a quick double tap on the back signifying the hug was over,” he wrote to me in a recent email. He was playful with them and they with him. I frequently flash back to the toast he gave at the wedding of his firstborn, Leslie, five years ago: “Leslie did not bring many boys home. She had a lot of male friends, but I think they had watched too many Scorsese movies and episodes of ‘The Sopranos,’ and were a bit afraid of any father with an Italian last name. Of course, I might have contributed to that because I liked to meet any potential boyfriend of hers before each date in my darkened office, seated behind my desk, wearing a tuxedo and petting my cat.” Harry’s toast also demonstrated his ability to see inside his eldest daughter. Remembering her initial refusal, in college, to call her future husband a boyfriend, he said that she was “scared because she knew she had met someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with” and realized “how much she stood to lose if things did not work out.” Our dad couldn’t trace the contours of our hearts like that. Mark’s and Harry’s intimate presence in their children’s lives affirms our culture’s fitful movement away from archaic, cinching gender roles. And it challenges any idea that women’s career gains are men’s losses. The arithmetic is more complicated than that; it includes a relaxing of stereotypes and a sharing of power that free many men to have treasured experiences less available to them before. In an earlier era, Mark’s and Harry’s relationships with their children probably wouldn’t have been nearly as expansive and tender as Adelle’s with her son, who’s 25, and her daughter, 23. Today, I get to marvel at what profoundly engaged, sensitive parents all three of my siblings are — and to see more likeness than difference in the love they give. Forward this newsletter to friends … … and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Monday. For the Love of Sentences
In The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson charted the decreasing number of people who care to be associated with an increasingly unpopular president. “Celebrity-wise, Trump is down to his hard-core groupies: Kid Rock, a 55-year-old white rapper who cannot figure out which is the front end of a fedora, and Lee Greenwood, a guy older than Joe Biden (really!) who is known for one treacly anthem so deeply impregnated with artificial sweetener that it’ll probably give listeners cancer through their hearing aids,” Williamson wrote. (Thanks to Michael Smith of Georgetown, Ky., for nominating this.) In The Atlantic, Megan Garber recognized the oddity of President Trump’s use of a term of endearment for NBC News’s Kristen Welker as he viciously insulted her. “‘Darling’ was incoherent, given the context: an epithet that seemed plucked from the wrong playbook, as if some prankster had slipped a guide to modern chivalry inside the president’s well-worn copy of ‘Demeaning Women for Dummies’,” Garber wrote. (Kent Arnold, Boulder, Colo.) Also in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols put his finger on one of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s most repellent traits: “It is the overbearing corniness that comes from trying to mimic deep sincerity, and it tends to end up sounding like a cross between a late-night-television preacher and an arrogant luxury-car salesman: Jesus brought you here, my brother, so what’s it gonna take for you to fly home in one of these super-lethal F-35 babies today?" (Peter Schmolka, Ottawa, Ontario) In The Stamford Advocate, Colin McEnroe mulled the currency of ignorance in politics today: “There may never be another moment like this: when all the things you don’t know are actually points in your favor. (I’m looking at you, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) It’s like ‘Reverse Jeopardy!,’ where correct answers subtract from your winnings.” (Bruce Mac Nair, Stamford, Conn.) In The Financial Post, William Watson wondered how Canada, “a country so proud of its woke devotion to peacekeeping, harmony, cooperation and nonaggression,” embraced “brutal and violent” hockey as its national sport. The National Hockey League rulebook, he added, “has eight mentions of ‘blood,’ including the stipulation that ‘high-sticking’ merits a four-minute penalty, not two, if injury results, ‘in the manner of drawing blood or otherwise.’ A glossary specifies that ‘blood does not have to be visible to consider it an injury’ and that ‘severe bruising, abrasions, a welt, cutting of the skin or damage to teeth' also qualify. How many other sports have rule books written partly by pathologists?” (Louise Klein, Landenberg, Pa.) In The Times, Nitsuh Abebe marveled at the marketing behind “PepsiCo’s denuded ‘Simply NKD’ Cheetos and Doritos, ‘now reimagined without any colors or artificial flavors’ — as if freshly picked from the Dorito bush and crisped in an elderly doritero’s brick oven.” (Laurence Whitlow, Catron County, N.M.) Also in The Times, Michael S. Rosenwald recalled the upset in 2011 when it was revealed that the Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben would excise the hundreds of appearances of a racial slur from forthcoming editions of Twain’s most famous novels: “The literary establishment shrieked like the whistle on a steamboat chugging down the Mississippi River.” (Phil Pullella, Rome) Gia Kourlas savored an especially mesmerizing performance: “There are dancers, and then there are dancers — the kind that shoot sparks through your insides, the kind that erase the tired from your eyes, the kind that quicken your pulse to the point that you feel you’ve just danced yourself.” (Mary Stagaman, Cincinnati, and Mike Silk, Laguna Woods, Calif.) And Wesley Morris paid tribute to Steven Spielberg by recalling how much one Spielberg classic affected him as a little boy: “The man who made ‘E.T.’ was eerily reminiscent of the woman who took me to see ‘E.T.’ Both of them have in common a special intuition to anticipate needs we don’t know we have. My mother did it for a household. For more than half a century, Spielberg has been doing the same for a planet.” (Daniel Fleisher, Baltimore) To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence. What I’m Reading, Writing and Doing
Dictation Gone Wrong, Pt. 3
I always assumed that the Red Cross showed gratitude and offered modest incentives to those who give blood. But I can’t endorse the encouragement that Tim Maxton of Barrington, N.H, received. The Red Cross promised that “if I donate blood again, they will spank me with a $5 gift card,” he wrote in an email to me. That wasn’t the organization being kinky. It was transcription being hinky. Maxton was reading, not listening to, the voice mail in question, and the spoken “thank” had taken a naughty turn. In one edition of the newsletter in April and then in another in May, I shared readers’ funny examples of dictation and autocorrect gone wrong. Today I present a few more. I may do a final batch later this summer. The botched transcription that amused Maxton pales next to the one that puzzled Lynn Witt of Manhattan. It began by identifying the caller as “wild porno medicine” (would that be high-dose Viagra or some turbocharged antibiotic for sexually transmitted diseases?) and ended by changing that reference to “wild criminal medicine” (pain killers procured without a prescription?). Really, it was from Weill Cornell Medicine, which apparently clumps together too many proper nouns for modern technology to process. Transcription and autocorrect have trouble with names. Several readers — including Eliza Laffin, of Woodstock, Vt. — drew attention to mangled identifications of President Trump’s former homeland security secretary, who might appear in the subtitles or readout of a podcast or television news segment as Christian Gnome. That’s better than she deserves. Godless Ghoul would be more apt, but transcription seldom goes that far phonetically askew. Thomas A. Clements, a lawyer in Hammond, Ind., said that his secretary sometimes dictates the messages she sends him and that her instruction that he call back “Mr. Istrabadi” became a request to get in touch with “Mr. Easter Bunny.” Which I presume he did, right after finishing his conversation with Santa Claus. A man done wrong by dictation can take edible form, as Amy Kerr of Cleveland learned when, in a group chat, “Poor Clem” was butchered into “pork loin.” Clem’s pals call him Pork Loin to this day. Let’s say they’re roasting him. Speaking of cooking, Mark Zimmerman of Melville, N.Y., got to the kitchen before his wife did one morning, so she texted from another room: “Could you please wrap my belly in foil and put it in the toaster oven to warm it up?” That surgically daunting on-ramp to cannibalism was, of course, a failure of autocorrect. His wife wanted her bialy wrapped and heated. That’ll teach her not to stray from the more common and easily recognized bagel. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Send me a note at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com.
|
