It's a holiday week: Can I interest you in some pictures and back issues?

Today... we celebrate... my decision to not write a full essay!

It’s July 5th! Thanks to the 1996 documentary film Independence Day, you already know that today is the anniversary of the morning when the world celebrated its salvation from alien-based destruction.

I don’t have to tell you which nation was responsible for all that salvation, but you’re welcome.

As the author of a newsletter about race, Independence Day has always held great meaning to me, thanks in no small part to its poignant distillation of American race relations. As our Founding Fathers intended, our nation will always be able to turn, in its time of need, to two men— one Black and cool, the other White and good at computers.

You’re not getting a full White Pages this week (though I’ll likely still do a subscriber’s thread tomorrow) because I’m at my folks’ place in Montana and it has been the best. We’ve eaten a metric ton of ice cream and stared at a whole bunch of pretty mountains and my son and daughter have had to hear me say things like “hey, look at that fancy restaurant that used to be a punk club that I was never old or cool enough to go to.” The other night I saw some high school friends for the first time in literally twenty years. My kids had a blast with some of their kids and holy cow that’s extremely lovely. I am, officially, not complaining.

I’ve already written about my home state a bunch— suffice to say, it’s a place that I love and that also breaks my heart. I won’t go on about that now. Instead, want to see my daughter pointing at the spot where—just a few seconds previously— we had seen a family of mountain goats?

How about me in front of the remnants of Missoula’s legendary Northside Guerrilla Peace Sign?

Or one of many, many pictures I took of Glendive, Montana, a town that is Very Into Dinosaurs?

That’s enough pictures for now (though if you want more, I’ve been having some fun on Instagram, a social media site with many faults but at least isn’t fully broken).

I hope that you’re enjoying a lovely summer week yourselves— whether that’s a week filled with work or leisure or something in between. I hope that if you live in the United States and you like fireworks, that last night was fun. I hope that, if you live in the United States and hate fireworks, that last night was tolerable. In any case, you probably don’t need more to read, but if you’re jonesing for some back issues, may I suggest catching up on the current movie series? They’re all pretty evergreen.

-Last week’s essay, by Susannah Barlow on Pretty In Pink, has left me with so many thoughts (especially as I’ve been back home in a very White place with its own dynamics of who fits in and who doesn’t). It’s such a winner.

-The Dangerous Minds essay is probably the most honest I’ve been about my own teaching experience, whereas the Forrest Gump essay surprised me because I didn't know it was going to be about Joan Didion until I got into it.

-Finally, I was reading Jay Caspian Kang’s (really interesting) piece about affirmative action and the Supreme Court this morning and it made me realize— oh, I actually DID just write an affirmative action essay, only it was disguised as a Rocky essay. The ghost of Bakke vs. Regents of the University of California haunts us all.

I know I’m biased, but I think they’re all worth reading! And more still to come in the upcoming weeks. Some of those essays will be free, others will be paywalled, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I have a subscription sale running through tomorrow, which means that now would be a great time to get yourself some White Pages on the cheap.

As for a song of the week, since I was just up on the Blackfeet Nation, let’s turn back the dial a decade or so and listen to some goddamnitboyhowdy, a bunch of young Blackfeet punks whose stuff still rules so hard. They’ve been broken up for a while now, but their lead singer— Joseph Running Crane— still puts out some equally great folky tunes under his own name.