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Monday, July 3, 2023

Bitter Rivals. Beloved Friends. Survivors., by Sally Jenkins, Washington Post

They have known each other for 50 years now, outlasting most marriages. Aside from blood kin, Navratilova points out, “I’ve known Chris longer than anybody else in my life, and so it is for her.” Lately, they have never been closer — a fact they refuse to cheapen with sentimentality. “It’s been up and down, the friendship,” Evert says. At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova have found themselves more intertwined than ever, by an unwelcome factor. You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time.

“It was like, are you kidding me?” Evert says.

I Miss The Beautiful, Heady Chaos That Unfolds Inside A Dressing Room, by Paola de Varona, Slate

There are obvious benefits to moving away from in-person shopping. For one thing, sizes often not offered in stores are much more accessible. And scrolling through an online catalog helps me envision the potential of an outfit. But I can’t help but feel that a major way we’ve come to relate to style and fashion is being lost. I’m trying to hold on, but sometimes I think I’m totally alone in having actually positive memories of these spaces.

'No Two Persons' Tells Pithy, Powerful Stories, by Jay Strafford, The Free Lance–Star

A tour de force that reminds us why we read fiction and how it can touch our hearts, engage our minds and enrich our lives, Bauermeister’s latest novel melds her imagination, acumen and humanity. And as she embraces the circle of life, she evokes tears, awe and gratitude.

Paul McCartney’s Photos Of The Beatles At Their Peak, by Charles Kaiser, Washington Post

For McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and all the under-30s among the 73 million Americans who tuned into CBS that night, that moment was Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It’s a moment that’s been recalled countless times, but here we see it from a new, candid angle, thanks to McCartney’s lens: a shot of Ringo Starr setting up his “precariously perched drum kit” for a rehearsal of the show.

‘Burnt’ Gives Inside View From A Top Female Firefighter, by Joan Gaylord, The Christian Science Monitor

"Identify it. Own it. Fix it."

Clare Frank received this advice when she was a rookie firefighter in the 1980s. Offered to her by a captain who became an important mentor, she took the words to heart as she climbed the career ladder to become one of the highest-ranking female officers in California’s history. “Burnt, A Memoir of Fighting Fire” is her story.

The Days Were Long And The Years Were Longer, by Eleanor Henderson, New York Times

This is a book about the aloneness of motherhood — the limits of maternal attention, the dissolution of self, the mind-numbing tedium of raising small children — as much as it is about the pandemic. It’s a book about a “life inside” — not just inside the home, but inside the mind. Zambreno’s writing is sharpest, most emotionally alive, when it drills into that interior landscape.

Why Is George Orwell So Difficult To Pin Down?, by Alexander Larman, The Spectator

In Orwell: The New Life, the critic and biographer D.J. Taylor painstakingly notes the myriad occasions that the writer rubbished his own work. When he submitted his first novel Burmese Days to his literary agent, he pronounced himself “very dissatisfied” with it; even up until the end of his life, he was informing friends that Nineteen Eighty-Four was “an awful book really.” “I am not pleased with it,” he remarked, “but I think it is a good idea.” Little wonder that a reader’s report of Burmese Days for the publisher observed “I know nothing of Orwell, but it is perfectly clear that he has been through hell, and that he is probably still there.”