The Sontag quote about depression is from Illness as Metaphor. The William Styron quote is from Darkness Visible. Both those books have been hugely important to me as I live with mental illness. The complete Emily Dickinson poem, sometimes known as Poem 314, is available in most collections of Dickinson’s work. Bill Ott and Ilene Cooper have guided me to Harvey and so much else in the last twenty years; this essay is my attempt to thank Bill.

The Yips

Rick Ankiel’s memoir about his time in baseball, written with Tim Brown, is called The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life. I first learned about Ana Ivanovic’s yips from Louisa Thomas’s 2011 Grantland article, “Lovable Headcases,” which contains the Ivanovic quote about overanalyzing. Katie Baker’s Grantland piece “The Yips Plague and the Battle of Mind Over Matter” was also helpful, as was Tom Perrotta’s piece in the September 2010 issue of the Atlantic called “High Strung: The Inexplicable Collapse of a Tennis Phenom.” There have been many academic studies of the yips; the one I referred to most is titled “The ‘Yips’ in Golf: A Continuum Between a Focal Dystonia and Choking,” lead author Aynsley M. Smith. (All hail continuums over dichotomies.) The golfing coach referred to is Hank Haney, whose story is told in David Owen’s 2014 New Yorker piece “The Yips.”

Auld Lang Syne

The Robert Burns online encyclopedia (robertburns.org) is a wonderful resource for those looking to learn more about Burns, “Auld Lang Syne,” or Burns’s fascinating friendship with Frances Dunlop. Most of the quotes from Burns’s letters come from the encyclopedia. The Morgan Library and Museum (themorgan.org) has an extensive archive about the song, including Burns’s letter to George Thomson describing the original melody as “mediocre.” Scans of Henry Williamson’s letter to his mother about the Christmas Truce of 1914 are also available online at the Henry Williamson archive; I first learned of the other quotes about the Christmas Truce (and several other details in the essay) from a 2013 BBC article by Steven Brocklehurst, “How Auld Lang Syne Took Over the World.” The Robert Hughes quote is from his book The Shock of the New. After Amy died, McSweeney’s reprinted her columns from Might magazine, so they are now archived online. Amy’s books quoted here are Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The Amy Krouse Rosenthal Foundation funds ovarian cancer research and childhood literacy initiatives. You can learn more at amykrouserosenthalfoundation.org.

Googling Strangers

Years after writing this review, I had a chance to talk with the kid in question, who is now a young man—older, in fact, than I was when I was a chaplain. That conversation—which provided me with consolation and hope that I can’t possibly find language for—was made possible by the podcast Heavyweight. Thanks to everyone at Heavyweight for making that happen, especially Jonathan Goldstein, Kalila Holt, Mona Madgavkar, and Stevie Lane. And thanks most of all to Nick, who evinces the love and kindheartedness that lights the way.

Indianapolis

The data about Indianapolis’s size and population are taken from 2017 U.S. Census estimates. The Indianapolis Star’s 2019 series about the White River and its water quality was very helpful to me. (It’s also the kind of journalism that cities like Indianapolis desperately need.) The parts of the series I relied upon were written and reported by Sarah Bowman and Emily Hopkins. In 2016, WalletHub ranked Indianapolis as America’s #1 microcosm city. The Vonnegut quote about maintenance comes from his book Hocus Pocus; the quote about not being able to get home again comes from Simon Hough’s 2005 profile of Vonnegut in the Globe and Mail, “The World According to Kurt.” The line about the terrible disease of loneliness is reprinted in the book Palm Sunday, a wonderful collage of Vonnegut’s memories, essays, and speeches.

Kentucky Bluegrass

I first learned about America’s turfgrass problem from Diana Balmori and Fritz Haeg’s book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. The book, a companion to Haeg’s ongoing art project involving replacing front lawns with vegetable gardens, changed both my lawn and my life. I also recommend The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession by Virginia Scott Jenkins and Ted Steinberg’s American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn. Oregon State University’s “BeaverTurf” web portal helped me understand which turfgrass is Kentucky bluegrass and where it is widely cultivated. The estimate on the percentage of American land devoted to the growth of turfgrass comes from a study in Environmental Management called “Mapping and Modeling the Biogeochemical Cycling of Turf Grasses in the United States,” lead author Cristina Milesi. The statistic about almost a third of U.S. residential water use going to watering lawns comes from the EPA’s “Outdoor Water Use in the United States.”

The Indianapolis 500

My favorite book about the Indy 500 explores its formation and the first race at the Speedway: Charles Leerhsen’s Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500. I owe my interest in IndyCar to my best friend, Chris Waters, and to other members of our race crew, especially Marina Waters, Shaun Souers, Kevin Schoville, Nate Miller, and Tom Edwards. Our branch of the annual bike-to-the-race tradition was founded by Kevin Daly. Thanks also to IndyCar drivers James Hinchcliffe and Alexander Rossi for giving me an idea of how racing works for the drivers, and how they live with the risks inherent to the sport.

Monopoly

Mary Pilon’s book The Monopolists is a comprehensive history of Monopoly’s early days and especially illuminating in its portrayal of Elizabeth Magie. I was introduced to the video game Universal Paperclips by Elyse Marshall and her husband, Josef Pfeiffer. I learned of Hasbro’s response to Elizabeth Magie from Antonia Noori Farzan’s 2019 Washington Post piece, “The New Monopoly ‘Celebrates Women Trailblazers.’ But the Game’s Female Inventor Still Isn’t Getting Credit.” That piece also contains the most concise and comprehensible summary of Georgism I’ve come across.

Super Mario Kart

The Super Mario wiki (mariowiki.com) is so astonishingly exhaustive and carefully sourced that it might be the best wiki I’ve ever encountered. Its article about Super Mario Kart gave me much of the background I needed for this review. The interview with Shigeru Miyamoto I quote comes from a Nintendo roundtable; it’s available online under the headline “It Started with a Guy in Overalls.”

Bonneville Salt Flats

Donald Hall’s essay “The Third Thing” was first published in Poetry magazine in 2005; I was introduced to it by Kaveh Akbar and Ellen Grafton. Much of the information about the Bonneville Salt Flats came from the Utah Geological Survey; I am particularly indebted to Christine Wilkerson’s article “GeoSights: Bonnevile Salt Flats, Utah.” I learned about the history of the Enola Gay and Wendover from the artist William Lamson and the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover. The Melville quote is from Moby-Dick, which I read only thanks to the dogged efforts of Professor Perry Lentz. We were joined on that trip to Wendover by Mark Olsen and Stuart Hyatt, both of whom deeply enriched my understanding of the salt flats.

Hiroyuki Doi’s Circle Drawings

I first saw Hiroyuki Doi’s artwork in 2006 at the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition Obsessive Drawing. The untitled drawing I refer to can be seen at its digitized collection at folkartmuseum.org. The Doi quotes and his biographical background come from a 2013 Japan Times article by Edward Gómez, “Outsider Drawn to the Circle of Life,” from a 2017 Wall Street International review of a Doi exhibition at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, and from a 2016 review in Brut Force by Carrie McGath called “The Inscape in Escape Routes: Five Works by Hiroyuki Doi.” The study “What Does Doodling Do?” was published by Jackie Andrade in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2009.

Whispering

The idea for this review came from a conversation with my friends Enrico Lo Gatto, Craig Lee, and Alex Jimenez. I don’t remember how I learned that cotton-top tamarins whisper, but a 2013 paper in Zoo Biology by Rachel Morrison and Diana Reiss details “Whisper-like behavior in a non-human primate.” The authors noted that a group of cotton-top tamarins whispered (or, technically, engaged in whisper-like vocalizations) when in the presence of a human they didn’t like, which is the sort of detail that reminds me that humans are just primates trying to make the best of a very strange situation.

Viral Meningitis