The Old Man and the iPhone
Beginning June 23, this newsletter will be published on Monday mornings.
Like many people I know, I decided about a month ago to get a new iPhone. President Trump's tariff threats, tariff realities and tariff tempestuousness portended higher prices, and I was due anyway. My old iPhone's bells and whistles were at this point whimpers and wheezes. Its battery was a joke. Off to the Verizon store I went. I'd made an appointment and was assured I'd be in and out in a jiff.
Some jiff. The sales rep's explanation of pricing and plans lasted longer than many of my lectures. It was 10 times as hard to follow. I placed my order anyway, and when I returned three days later to swap my sputtering clunker for its shiny upgrade, a data-transfer process that was supposed to take 60 minutes crested three hours. Then there were days of text messages and emails with the sales rep to iron out all the kinks.
Ah, the paradoxes of progress. The ironies of efficiency. Multiplying conveniences come with metastasizing inconveniences. The very gizmos, gadgets, hacks and programs meant to simplify tasks also complicate them. You must download this. You must upload that. You must take a photo. You must digitize a blood oath. You must enable cookies. You must disable cookies. You must configure this setting and then that setting, and have you updated the app? Update the app! Because then you'll be able to customize your experience even further, provided you have the time and patience to educate yourself on the infinite customizations.
And just when you fall in love with a new bit of technology, it betrays you. My Ring doorbell, for example. I relished how it permitted me a nanny-cam glimpse of whether a package had arrived, a service provider had shown up or my dog was staying put and behaving in the front yard. All this on my iPhone, wherever I was! My old iPhone, I mean, because my new one refused to accept my Ring password, even as my laptop validated its correctness. The app gave me inscrutable and contradictory reasons; several weeks elapsed before I summoned the fortitude and concentration to solve the riddle and set things right. Don't get me started on my new app-controlled lightbulbs, whose setup consumed an entire afternoon.
Yes, I'm old, and younger sorts are more adept at the various facets of our wireless ways. Codgers and technology go together like peanut butter and sardines. But it's also true that baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z alike muddle through a morass of inputs, outputs, passwords, password validations, password resets, QR codes, notifications and nudges that didn't exist a quarter-century ago. Those cyberannoyances accompany innovations that undeniably streamline a range of experiences — summoning a ride, plotting a route, buying a movie or concert ticket, changing the thermostat, checking in for a flight — to a degree that I wouldn't be foolish enough to wish away. But the innovations seldom live up fully to their promises of ease and expedition, and they introduce intricacies and imperfections all their own. The troubleshooting accretes; for every three minutes you gain, you give one back. And your head fills with a kind of noise that can sap your energy with a special and sinister potency.
Several times a week, I find myself ordering something on the internet that requires more decisions and discernment (red or gray or blue, six-pack or eight-pack, one-time or recurring delivery, wrap or bun) than the selection of a spouse. Or I scrutinize online counsel for solving a problem with one of my devices that bears no relation to the words and images that the device is actually showing me. I search in vain for different, better instructions, my cyber-roving leading me to a dead end that puts me in mind of calling a company help line for a conversation with a bona fide human being, except good luck reaching that apocryphal creature, because the voice mail maze is designed to prevent it. By the time I resign myself to the futility of my quest, I've lost another 15 minutes atop the 15-minute chunks I sacrificed to the hiccups and stutters of the many other conveniences that purport to diminish my stress.
Almost every day, I struggle to reconcile the format of a digital document someone has given me with the format in which I work. Or I send or receive an email involving my or a colleague's need for help figuring out some fancy online interface that our workplace or profession has just implemented, ostensibly to optimize our performance.
Speaking of emails, there's no staying on top of them, not when there are also text messages and WhatsApp missives, and I even know some people who are not Pete Hegseth using Signal. Corresponding is so much less tortured than in the quill-to-parchment days of yore, which has merely succeeded in making it a greater torture than ever.
I understand and envy people who unplug, tune out and drop off the grid — well, apart from the hygiene challenges and the loss of the best streaming services. It's not blissful minimalism or high-minded asceticism to forgo hot water and classic 'Sex and the City' episodes. It's feral.
But then I do renewed battle with my wireless, app-controlled Sonos sound system — the volume controls work only when they're in the mood to, and the speakers seem to belong to some union that mandates erratic five-minute breaks — and feral is tempting. The music of nature. All that fauna and flora. I hear they're enjoyable and sometimes even identifiable without some glitchy app or a pained sequence of questions that Siri, ever fickle, keeps misinterpreting.
For the Love of Sentences
In The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr defined curiosity's sweet spot: 'In science, and in intellectual inquiry more broadly, where you draw the line matters enormously. Keep things too open and you're endlessly debating whether Bush did 9/11. Close them too quickly, though, and you turn hasty, uncertain conclusions into orthodoxies.' (Thanks to Stan Shatenstein of Montreal for nominating this.)
In The Atlantic, George Packer pondered the lessons of JD Vance: 'Few people are capable of conscious, persistent self-betrayal. A change that begins in opportunism can become more passionate than a lifelong belief, especially when it's rewarded. Ventriloquize long enough and your voice alters; the mask becomes your face.' (Michael Albert, Canton, Mass.)
Also in The Atlantic, Stephanie Bai sought a new metaphor: 'Many analogies have been made of friendship — it's like shifting seasons, or a plant, or a really good bra — but I picture friendship most clearly as a house, jointly occupied. Each party agrees to perform their end of the upkeep, and the result is something shared that can last.' (Paul Gillane, San Clemente, Calif.)
In Esquire, Dave Holmes marveled at Senator Lindsey Graham's suggestion, in a social media post before the conclave, that cardinals consider the idea of Trump as the next pope: 'I guess he had not yet closed the day's humiliation ring on his Apple Watch.' Holmes added that while Graham was probably joking, 'You can't be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.' (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)
In Sports Illustrated, Jon Wertheim plugged the French Open tennis tournament: 'Contrary to reports, the French are, collectively, awesome. And they don't regard the English language as a sound the devil makes.' (Mark Flannery, Fullerton, Calif.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay investigated the significance — for the sport of basketball, for the Big Apple — of the New York Knicks' surprisingly strong season: 'Nothing turns up the sport like a Knicks run. Nothing turns up New York, clearly — not the Yankees, not the Mets, not the Rangers, Islanders, Giants or Jets. Those teams are tribes, inheritances, choices. The Knicks are everyone's, a shared asset and perpetual headache like the subway.' (James Brockardt, Pennington, N.J.)
In The Economist, an article without a byline examined the Church of England's choosing of a new leader: 'The process is as eccentric as one might expect of an institution that dates back half a millennium and which has had, in its time, not merely bishops but also kings, queens and castles — less a church than a chess set.' (Harold Gotthelf, Fords, N.J.)
In the quarterly journal Sapir, Bret Stephens made a kind of peace with the heavily partisan slant of so much cable television news: 'To demand scrupulous impartiality on their broadcasts is like expecting fancy linens at a Motel 6.' (Naomi Lerner, West Orange, N.J.)
And in The Times, Matt Flegenheimer puzzled over the communication style of 'America's best-known sports-talker,' Stephen A. Smith: 'He is a first-person thinker ('When I think about me. …' he said, twice, on the podcast, 'The Stephen A. Smith Show'), third-person talker ('Stephen A. Smith is in the news') and occasional simultaneous first-and-third-person thinker-talker. 'Calling things like I see them,' he wrote in his memoir, 'is who Stephen A. Smith has been my entire life.'' (Frank Bruni, Chapel Hill, N.C.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in 'For the Love of Sentences,' please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
On a Personal (By Which I Mean Regan) Note
I often say that if they ever remake 'Sophie's Choice,' Regan should get the Meryl Streep role. Of course I'm joking. At 11, Regan's too old for the part. She would have been perfect a while back but — you know — Hollywood ageism. Now the only auditions she gets are for the sassy mother-in-law or doddering dowager.
Do animals act? I don't mean all animals, but the bigger-brained, smarter ones? They certainly play, and such games depend on a degree of make-believe. Plus, I've witnessed histrionics and manipulation that are maybe three parts Pavlov but definitely one part Stanislavsky.
Instagram brims with videos of dogs pantomiming a magnitude of hunger that can't possibly be real — they angrily fling their empty bowls across kitchen floors or nose them pathetically in their negligent caretakers' directions.
Sometimes, when Regan doesn't want to accept 'no,' she pouts theatrically, averting her gaze and doggy-stomping back to her bed, where she doesn't so much lie down as collapse in a heap of dejection and despair. I am perhaps anthropomorphizing but I really think not, especially when I remember her brawl with a peevish pinscher about five years ago. For perhaps 20 seconds that felt like 20 years, the two lunged and snarled and snapped; after I and a few onlookers managed to pry the gladiators apart, Regan limped away, rolled onto her back and made the saddest, scariest sounds. We hovered over her and searched for a twisted limb, an open wound, something to explain her anguish. Then her ears twitched, her eyes swiveled, her head popped up and — whoosh! — she darted toward a nearby fence, leaped over it and nearly caught the squirrel on the other side before it scampered up a tree. The crying was over. The limp was history. And that was that.
So what am I to think these days when she readies herself to jump up to the back seat of the car, stops suddenly, then does this probing gesture with her front paws that signals effort without exerting so much as an iota of it?
Could be her arthritis. Could also be her Oscar bid — outstanding performance by a canine who prefers to be lifted and has correctly pegged her human as a patsy.
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