Madonna has a new studio album, her first since 2019, and, according to our critic, it’s an ode to the dance club, a collection of 16 tracks characterized by “sweaty uplift.” This seems a reasonable aim for the season: If we must be sweaty, let us also be uplifted. Here are a few more things to uplift you, whatever your body temperature.
On this week’s list:
1. Where phones can’t go
2. Remember your colors
3. L.A. Metro’s moody music
4. Running without headphones
5. Pinball map
6. Stressed desserts
1.
Where phones can’t go
It was terribly hot in much of the U.S. last weekend, and I, like any sane person, spent as much of it as I could in the water. After my second hour floating blissfully in a friend’s pool on Friday, I realized how rare it was to go this long without anyone consulting their phone.
Outside the water, in the everyday, togetherness is discontinuous. You’re socializing, connecting, but the phone always beckons: to confirm a fact, to send a quick text, to just reflexively check what’s happening elsewhere. It’s an unconscious tic for many of us. But it punctures whatever bubble of closeness we’ve established. When the phone appears, the conversation stutters, and now we must reset.
“Get off your phone / Your phone doesn’t love you like I do,” goes the dreamy song “Body of Water,” by the band Spectator Bird. It’s a declaration of longing to be “just a body and a body in a body of water.” But one can’t always count on a pool or a lake to appear! There must be other locales, on dry land, where we might be compelled to observe sustained periods without our phones.
2.
Remember your colors
I got what I considered a respectable 42.97 out of 50 on this test that measures your ability to remember and recreate specific hues. (“Good, not great” was the test’s tepid description of my score.) I find challenges like this interesting but slightly stressful: I can see the color so clearly in my mind, and I have to rush to make the shade on the screen match it before it’s gone forever. Come on, memory! Don’t fail me now!
If that’s you, too, you might try perusing these “overly descriptive color palettes” instead. (I intuitively get “one-on-one clear blue,” but “hexahedral butterscotch” is lost on me.) And if it’s been a particularly hyperstimulating day, there’s always this random color generator.
3.
L.A. Metro’s moody music
I once spent a month in L.A., much of it behind the wheel of a faux-bois PT Cruiser, partaking of what Joan Didion called “the freeway experience, which is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.” I confess I was mostly ignorant of the city’s public transportation system. But for the last two days, I’ve been listening to a tranquilizing soundtrack of ambient music generated by this network while I work, thanks to the sound designer Jack Weiss.
Weiss, who does audio for film and TV, assigned each of the city’s light rail and bus lines its own “synthesizer voice,” with notes created each time one arrives in a station. The music is more dense during rush hour, quieter late at night. “Conductor” mode allows you to assign different sounds to each line, or mute a line entirely, but I prefer to just let the locomotives sing. (The project was inspired by the game “Mini Metro,” the work of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, and Train Jazz, which was featured in a previous edition of The Good List.)
4.
Running without headphones
I made the terrible mistake of forgetting my headphones when I went for a jog last week and was forced to listen to my own breathing and footfalls as I eked out three lonely miles on a woodsy trail. I’ve grown so attached to my routine of tuning out everything but my carefully curated running mix that hearing only the sounds of my own body in motion felt strangely intimate. I had no idea my breathing becomes so syncopated, that my hamstrings start to ache when I slow my pace. Never mind all the cyclists calling “On your left!” when they passed — I’d never noticed their scrupulous trail-sharing etiquette!
Mostly, though, I kept thinking of this video that I’ve always loved, for the Dirty Projectors song “Impregnable Question.” It features a man running alone in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. He runs without AirPods or fancy shoes, through spectacular vistas and a wide open road, as he races to reunite with his true love. It’s such a romantic depiction of jogging! Not enough to make me intentionally leave my headphones behind, but enough to add the song to my playlist. (The video’s ending hints at a not-so-happy conclusion for the lovers, but I choose to believe otherwise!)
5.
Pinball map
From 1942 to 1976, pinball machines were illegal in New York City. Thousands of machines were seized, part of the city’s “crusades against gambling devices.” The games’ “intricate mechanisms and gaudy trimmings” were melted down to make munitions for the war effort.
Now the tables, with their flippers and flashing lights, seem like quaint, lo-fi relics of a simpler time. Depending on where you live, you might be hard-pressed to find a coin-op game. Enter Pinball Map, which makes it easy to locate all the machines in your vicinity. There’s even an app, for when you’re on the road and need a silver-ball fix.
6.
Stressed desserts
I hope you find it as interesting as I do that there is a word for a word that, when its letters are reversed, spells another word. Dog and god, evil and live, diaper and repaid are all anadromes, or, if you prefer, “semordnilaps,” from “palindromes” spelled backward. (A palindrome, of course, is a word that reads the same when reversed.) I learned about all this from Dale Hoffman, a reader from Sarasota, Fla., who woke at 2 a.m. wondering what such words were called. Dale, we are the same variety of insomniac. The long ones are particular satisfying: stressed and desserts! Gateman and nametag!
Invented anadromes are a Wikipedia rabbit hole all their own (“tink” means “to unknit”; an “allerednic” is a riches-to-rags tale). Stevie Wonder’s name wasn’t printed on the cover of the original release of his album “Eivets Rednow.”
I got my hair cut at a salon called Riah for years before I realized the name was “hair” spelled backward. Now I’m wondering where else anadromes are lurking in plain sight.
One more thing: Amber Benjamin, a reader from Folsom, Calif., writes of a virtuous cycle between neighbors:
Last month, I tried to do something small but meaningful. I slipped a few scratch-off tickets into a Vietnam veteran neighbor’s mailbox as a gesture of appreciation and connection, as I’m new to my neighborhood. What I didn’t expect was what I’d find inside: a note and a cupcake he’d left for our mail carrier. It stopped me. Here was someone already living in his own quiet rhythm of generosity.
Since then, we’ve fallen into an unspoken exchange. If he wins anything from the tickets, he turns it into something to share, like little treats or trinkets sent back my way for my small kids. It’s nothing grand, but it’s real. A simple loop of kindness between two people who might otherwise have just passed each other by.
If someone leaves something good in your mailbox, do let me know in the comments. Or, you can always email me. If you want to get The Good List in your inbox, sign up here. And you can browse past editions of The Good List anytime. I’ll be back next week. — Melissa
The editor of The Good List is Jodi Rudoren. Eli Cohen handles the photos.
