TOBI'S DESK

Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond, Hampstead Heath. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons , Licensed under CCO 2.0. It was the full-body ache of our hangovers and the cigarette smoke stagnating in our hair that compelled us toward the pond. We were sat in the debris of a house party, on a sofa that had recently doubled as an ashtray, when Janique said we should go for a swim . I suggested the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, which is free of men and harsh chemicals.  There are five ponds in a row on the eastern edge of Hampstead Heath. They run (from south to north): the Highgate No. 1 Pond, the Highgate Men’s Pond, the Model Boating Pond, the Bird Sanctuary Pond, and, finally, set slightly apart from the others and sheltered by trees, the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. It is accessed by a long path, behind a gate with a sign that reads WOMEN ONLY / MEN NOT ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. There are two holding pens off to the side of the path, one for chaining bicycles, the other for chaining dogs. There is no p...

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0. I seem to find a reason to go to CVS several times a week. Sometimes these reasons are medical, but much of the time, I am tracking down some household item or another—especially when I need something faster than it can be delivered, or I don’t want to be party to the low-level violence of same-day delivery, and I don’t feel like subjecting myself to the psychic keelhauling of a Target run. There is a unique air of desperation to most CVS locations. This is probably because CVS, as a health-care company stapled to a convenience store chain, blends the special emotional terroirs of the hospital and the gas station snack aisle. It could also be because the stores are often seriously understaffed, presumably in part due to the corporation’s recent move to slash pharmacy hours at thousands of locations. The decor is what you might call austerity-core. It is both corporate-loud (garish displays of next season’s decorations) and minim...

Hubert Robert, detail from “Fire at the Paris Opera House of the Palais-Royal.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC0 2.0. Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a writer in Korea during the thirties, when the country was under the rule of the Japanese empire. His poems, stories, letters, and essays, written in both Korean and Japanese, are celebrated as some of the finest Korean literature of his time, and bear wide-ranging influences: the Chinese classics, the general theory of relativity, and Dadaism and surrealism, both of which he is credited with introducing into the Korean literary lexicon. He wrote during a period when Koreans could be jailed without trial on the basis of mere suspicion of thought crimes, and, shortly after being imprisoned in Tokyo by Japanese authorities in 1937, succumbed to tuberculosis in a hospital at the age of twenty-seven.  Nearly ninety years after his death, Yi Sang is perhaps best remembered for his intricate poetry, which features striking, co...

Diana Markosian, The Arrival , from Santa Barbara , 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery. I lived in Moscow during the summer of 1992, just after I graduated from college. The attempted coup by hardline communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev had failed, the USSR had collapsed, Russia was officially open to the West, and religious organizations were flooding in—including the one I’d signed up with at my university. We were there to teach English using a simplified version of the Gospel of Luke, a strategy I didn’t question back then. Most of my students wanted to learn American slang. One young man brought in a  Sports Illustrated  he’d purchased on the black market. He asked me to read aloud phrases he’d highlighted, then repeated what I said, copying my accent and cadence. Those were my favorite sessions. What a time to be there, amid the influx of Westerners shopping in the dollars-only markets. Not the people I was with. The mission organization believed, rightly, that we were ...

Rare blue supermoon. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CCO 3.0. August is coming to its end—a blessing or a curse, depending who you ask. Here’s what the Review ’s staff and friends are doing these days, before we all go (metaphorically) back to school. Summer Streets, Saturday, August 26: It is the last weekend of New York’s Summer Streets, so take advantage now, runners, bikers, and amblers. Huge stretches of the city will beshut down between 7 A.M. and 1 P.M. in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Vendors will be hawking wares like coconut water, ice cream, and Coca-Cola; oddly enough, there is even a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem immersive experience along the way. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, will be jogging merrily along the car-free expanse of Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. New York Liberty vs. Las Vegas Aces at Barclays Center, August 28: Our assistant editor Oriana Ullman encourages everyone to turn out for the tail end of the WNBA seaso...

From Elements , a portfolio by Roger Vieillard in issue no. 16 (Spring–Summer 1957). I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing something, I’m often tempted to pick one up that has nothing to do with my subject. I’ve always wanted to read this, I think, idly flipping through, my eyes fixing on a stray phrase or two. Maybe it will give me a new idea. In this moment of mild delusion, I’m distracted. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about distraction, I think. Add it to the laundry list of incomplete ideas I continue to nurse because some part of me suspects they will never come to fruition, and so will never have to be endured by readers. These are things you can keep in the drawer of your mind, glittering with unrealized potential. In the top row of my bedroom bookshelf is a copy of Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuche...

Tom Cruise at Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One premiere. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CC0 2.0. When asked whether he was going to watch Barbie or Oppenheimer first, Tom Cruise responded with, and I quote, “What’s great is you’re going to see both on the weekend.”  “It’ll probably be Oppenheimer first and then Barbie ,” the greatest living actor continued. “ Oppenheimer ’s going to be on a Friday—do you know what I mean? I’ll probably see it in the afternoon; you want that packed audience. And then I wanna see Barbie right afterwards, with a packed audience.”  But first, I was going to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One on a Monday. I wanted that packed audience, so I picked the earliest screening possible at the TCL Chinese Theatre—a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and home to one of the largest commercial movie screens in North America. Despite various rounds of rebranding, the TCL Chinese Theatre—formerly ...