Smooth pages

by Anton Zuiker on August 24, 2025

The Aug. 25, 2025 issue of the New Yorker was delivered to the mailbox yesterday, but I only retrieved it this afternoon, just before Erin and I were to go to an early dinner at próximo, a newish tapas restaurant on Franklin Street. I had an hour before we were to leave for our impromptu date, so I sat on the side porch under the fan, and started to read the magazine.

Looking at the table of contents, I thought I’d first read the Takes piece by Adam Gopnik, about Joseph Mitchell’s classic observances of the eccentric Joe Gould. Instead, I turned deeper in the pages to read the feature, by Paige Williams, about the new UNC football coach, Bill Belichick. Mitchell was from North Carolina, and I smiled at the cleverness of the New Yorker editors for putting the pieces in the same issue. I only realize now that the cleverness comes from the parallelism of Gould and Belichick, two characters profiled in the magazine’s pages.

Williams piece about Belichick, college athletics and N.I.L., and the UNC environment is quite good.

… Franklin Street, the backbone of Chapel Hill’s historic core, where one need only step over a low stone wall to be on campus. U.N.C., the oldest public university in the United States, opened in 1795, predating the town that grew up around it. Chapel Hill, which is closer to Virginia than to South Carolina, sits midway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, in forests so dense that, this time of year, one can lose sight of the horizon amid a disorienting spectrum of sun-soaked green.

Having spent a few hours today clearing piles of dead branches beneath the tall oaks and pines around our house, I appreciated this description of the dense forest. And after a delicious meal at próximo, Erin and I walked to our car parked on Franklin Street next to the low stone wall Williams describes. We had parked just a few feet past the historical marker explaining the 1795 founding of the university.

In the car, Erin said she wanted to stop in to talk with her sister, who lives down the gravel road. (They have less trees on their property, and so can have a proper garden for vegetables and flowers.) I needed to get back to my desk, to write this post, because I wanted to describe the sensation in my fingertips as I held the magazine in that first hour of reading. The paper had felt so clean, so smooth, so silky. Opening a new issue of any magazine, but especially the New Yorker, is always a joy for me. Partly this is because my first jobs were for magazines, so my body remembers the writing, the late-night story designs and proofreading, the press checks and the boxes of each issue delivered to the office.

As I read about Belichick, I was aware of the narrative flow of the article and how I was responding, emotionally and curiously, to this subject so close by, and at the same time I was observing the sensation of touching the pages. I know that in the days ahead, as I read more of this issue, some of the facts and the stories inside will stick in my brain—see my own take on a classic New Yorker piece, in my post A return to El Mozote as the pages get sticky, creased, and dirty as I take the issue from my backpack to the lunch table or outside bench. Now I’m holding the Aug. 11, 2025 issue, it’s cover curling in one corner and loose from one of the staples, the piece inside about perfectionism one that helped me see how self-oriented perfectionism often contributed to my procrastinating on finishing my magazine assignments.

First goal

by Anton Zuiker on August 23, 2025

Recently, I joined a pick-up soccer game in Cary, my first time with this group for their Friday mid-day game. I arrived early so I could introduce myself to the players before they got started, so I chatted up the first guy, wanting to show that I was a friendly bloke. I asked him when he got started in the game, and he said he’d been playing since his youth, and I told him I first kicked a soccer ball in Idaho, when I was 11 or 12.

The game that day in Cary was fast, fun, and hot. I returned home, showered and dressed, and got back to work.

The next time I played, at the regular Wednesday night pick-up game in Chatham County, I took a ball to the face, my glasses smashed against the side of my head. I took myself off the field, cleared my head, drove home. In the mirror, I saw a bright bruise at my temple. Later, my ophthalmologist checked my right eye for damage, gave me an ‘all clear’ but suggested I take a break for a month. It’s going to be hard to stay off the pitch.

Today, while I was digging into the bins that hold the papers and books and mementoes of my life, I came across the photo at top, me with my first soccer team, in Caldwell, Idaho most likely in summer 1982. I’m in the top row, second from left, with the long blonde hair. I can still remember the first goal I scored in that uniform, a clumsy breakaway on a dusty field.

Suspended in the world

by Anton Zuiker on August 23, 2025

Pleasant weather this past week allowed me to take my morning coffee onto the porch, where I positioned an Adirondack chair to look out through the wire railing into the forest behind the house. Inside, I’ve been reorganizing my desk space to address the clutter, and I’d uncovered a small book with a blue cover, Think Little, by Wendell Berry. I first encountered the farmer-novelist-poet Berry in the pages of Modern Farmer magazine in 2016 (a quote about the joy of “people who talk for pleasure, as opposed to people who talk to communicate”), and I’ve had this book for a few years, so it felt right to spend a few minutes each morning reading the two essays in lieu of of my normal meditation.

The second essay, A Native Hill, was the more interesting of the two. Berry wrote that in 1968, two years before I was born, but the essay felt fresh, as if Berry was telling me in real time about his walk along the creek near his home in Kentucky.

I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things – the wild plants and animals, the natural processes, the local places – and to articulate my observations and memories.

That reminded me of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s instruction: “It’s your business to know the names of things, to recover them if necessary and use them.” I blogged here about how Klinkenborg’s book “Several short sentences about writing” inspired me to look closer at the trees and plants and animals around our house.

What I noticed this week while reading from the porch was that our forest is currently inhabited by many American robins (Turdus migratorius), which hunt along the ground and then hurriedly return to mid-level branches in the tall oak trees (many different varieties of white oak).

I also noticed how different I felt by the end of the week, having finished the book, spent time outside, and realized I had had the space, both physical and mental, to be suspended in the physical world. On page 88, Berry writes about humankind’s conceit that we can make and mold the earth to our violent wishes.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us.

I enjoyed my morning seated reading meditation this week. The woods beyond kept calling me to walk, so that’s what I plan to do next week, with early-morning tour of the forest as the robins begin to stir.

Teeth talk

by Anton Zuiker on August 21, 2025

After two and a half years, I’m finally done with the Invisalign orthodontia that aligned my teeth. The buttons and clips came off today, the doctor said my bite looked great, and I walked out satisfied.

In the waiting room

by Anton Zuiker on August 21, 2025

Last night, we went as a family to see A Good Boy at Playmakers Repertory, the theatre on the UNC campus. A Good Boy is a music about three women and a man in a Midwest prison holding room as they wait with an overworked, surly guard to get word that they can see their loved ones, all prisoners on death row.

This story was written by Lynden Harris, the founder of Hidden Voices, an amazing organization with the mission “to challenge, strengthen, and connect our diverse communities through the transformative power of story.” A Good Boy draws from the real stories of inmates and their families.

After the show, a short Q&A featured the actors and two women, one the sister of a man executed in Arkansas, the other the mother of a man on death row for nearly 25 years before he was exonerated and released. Noel Nickle, executive director of The North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, moderated the discussion (probably the best moderation of a panel I’ve ever witnessed). Another man, sitting behind me, had the final comment of the discussion. He, too, had been wrongly convicted and then exonerated and released, after 14 years in prison.

A few important numbers:

121 people are currently on the North Carolina death row. Over the past decades, 12 innocent people have been exonerated and released from death row; 11 of those 12 are men of color.

A Good Boy was a powerful play and it was a charged night. I’ve always been opposed to the death penalty. Erin actually has visited with an inmate on North Carolina’s death row. We’ve read Helen Prejean and watched the movie version of Dead Man Walking.

The death penalty is immoral. It is wrong. It needs to be ended.

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