https://www.marekwriting.com/writing daily 0.75 2025-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/693351ed-2f5e-4749-8c64-b975dc8d6c2d/Wimbledon+2024.jpg WRITING - PLAYING TO THE END: A DISPATCH FROM WIMBLEDON The Point | July 17, 2024 I cannot stop thinking about this: how Djokovic, who has secured nearly every important men’s record, raced to return to competition, battling through surgery, recovery, pain and the denigration of crowds. Why would a man disparaged as a villain, as a feaster of broken hearts, continue to fight when he’s already won everything there is to win? How much suffering is the all-time champion willing to endure when he has already secured immortality? … There is something spectacular and heartbreaking about watching the greats fade. […] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/6e437899-f064-4747-b4e7-d3bee71649a4/great-beauty.jpeg WRITING - THE FIRST ENCHANTMENT: TEN YEARS OF THE GREAT BEAUTY The Point | March 8, 2024 The Great Beauty taught me to seek a life of wisdom, vitality and deepened experience. At the same time, the illusions corroding the protagonists enchanted me: I bought white trousers, many-colored blazers, pocket squares and two-toned brogues. I traveled to Rome, the most necessary trip of my life. When I taught a college class for the first time, I could only think to show the students Jep’s final monologue. I was determined to learn the secrets of Sorrentino’s art; I purchased the Criterion edition and sat down to reverse engineer it, scene by scene, pausing every frame to reconstruct the screenplay in a special notebook I bought, as if one could capture the grandeur of the Colosseum by taking it apart brick by brick. […] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/4f9e1786-bb23-45d8-8344-b98dedcfe95d/IMG_0804.jpeg WRITING https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/1a231ea5-e734-4e60-841f-edf3a98594ef/632dd414be0ff20019ddcb2f.jpg WRITING - WHY CLIMATE PROTESTERS ARE FOCUSING ON TENNIS The New Republic | September 9, 2023 I empathize with the bitter masses: tennis is a beautiful joy; adulthood is exhausting, frustrating, and relentless with its responsibilities and disappointments. Yet I cannot forget the repeated image of one or two or three fans standing up from tens of thousands on Thursday night to deliver monologues at the end of the world. I cannot stop thinking about how they were led out of the arena, the audience cursing and jeering, with their heads lowered or raised in defiance. Human-caused climate change has been around for less time than tennis, but it will leave its scars on the earth for longer—much longer, millennia and millennia longer—than the outlines of our hardcourts, than our fleeting forehands, backhands, and break points. […] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/2a2b6ac4-2f55-48c0-92b5-aa1ab734f867/tempImagePHOuNL.jpg WRITING - READING THE BOOKS OF JACOB WITH—AND AGAINST—THE RIVERHEAD READING GUIDE The Los Angeles Review of Books | March 1, 2022 The ideal reader’s guide, then, would not be mass-produced for all readers but would be individualized for each reader. These guides would result from hours of interviews with every reader and intensive research into their lives, the many motivations and failed dreams that determined their character, and the countless unspoken influences they may not be aware of but that the researcher can perceive. The guide would be written in a personal hand, aware of each reader’s likes and dislikes, wants and needs. It would guide us not to the major events on each page but to ourselves. This would be impossible, of course, since we are libraries all; no single guide, even the most well-researched one, could suffice. … If there were a guide for every reader, mine would include notes on being called the wrong name. The reader’s guide to my life would be a guide to being misread, a guide to growing up mispronounced: when they tried my name, strange sounds came from American mouths. […] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/420d3ef0-34c3-4c55-b1f9-e5ab564aa5a7/Madeline-gross-art-1024x648.png WRITING - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/283adfd3-1b56-4205-873d-648a379a2725/pexels-jill-burrow-6858618.jpeg WRITING - THE DESPERATION AND QUIET RESOLVE OF #DAYINTHELIFE TIKTOK HYPERALLERGIC | January 31, 2022 But can the genuine penetrate the TikTok voice? Can we find beauty or peace in washed out filters? Can we be healed by the tools that induce our pain? . . . My personal resolve, to step away from the bacchanal of validation and pain, may seem impractical to the motivators. And we may be bound in knots we can never undo. Instead, I like to picture the reality at the edges of each frame. The day-in-the-life videos feature unpeopled scenes. The few that include a companion reduce him (often him) to an elbow, a leather shoe. You do not have to strain to imagine the life outside the day-in-the-life: the continual pausing at meals to pan over the food; the conversation-stopping apologies (I need this content); the entreaties to do something again; the slow opening of washer and refrigerator doors (for the seventh time, in an apartment, alone); the desperate semi-furtive movements of the filmmaker’s hands, which seize the pro-sized phone, palm for it under tables, throw open purses and jacket pockets for it, and thrust it forward to record. […] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/ba1d3eea-305e-4a95-9a5b-fe55bfc17983/Nye_Bill_lecture22_7342-900x600.jpg WRITING - ON BILL NYE AND OUR SEARCH FOR A SAVIOR AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE UW–Madison Office of Sustainability | May 19, 2022 At the precipice of the end of the world, we are desperate for a perfect hero, desperate for someone trustworthy and honest and noble, desperate for the character of the wise, passionate, communicative scientist we met in grade school. But in our times there are no earthly gods: they grow old, sign brand deals, become angry, tired, self-certain, and vague. The Nye everyone came to see that night was not the Nye sitting on stage. The Nye everyone came to see only lives in our dreams: a perfect savior who will wipe centuries of human cruelty from the world and rescue vulnerable ecosystems, species, and people from the permanent, destructive self-aggrandizement and ignorance of our race. This is what the young shout, wave their hands, clap, scream, and cheer for: not science, not celebrity, but miracle. […] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c23cddf63672088c4754da/b4f12533-a49a-4040-8249-babfa0491727/Novak_Djokovic_Wimbledon_2011_semifinal_win_celebration_-_croped_and_edited.jpg WRITING - UNFORCED ERRORS: THE TRAGICOMEDY OF NOVAK DJOKOVIC THE POINT | January 27, 2022 Every night for two and a half months, Novak Djokovic woke to sirens and fled to his grandfather’s basement as bombs fell on Belgrade. He was an anonymous child in a country without global legends. One night his father placed ten Deutschmarks on the table: this was all they had. In childhood he also discovered sport. A few years earlier, he stood at the fence to watch a tennis camp in the Kopaonik mountains, and the coach, Jelena Gencic, invited him to play. She developed him into a player and man, introducing him to forehands and backhands, Pushkin and Beethoven. She taught him the short-angle crosscourt backhand; when she played Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, goosebumps rose all over his body. 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