Penguins of Madagascar

I watched Penguins of Madagascar for the first time as a favor to my children; since then, they have watched it many times as a favor to me. I am such a fan of the unshakable earnestness of Werner Herzog’s filmmaking, and also of his simultaneous ability to be self-aware enough to make a hilarious cameo in Penguins of Madagascar. As noted in the review, I learned about White Wilderness first from my dad, and then from watching the film itself, which is widely available. I learned much more about lemmings, including our bygone belief that they rained from the sky, from the Encyclopedia Britannica online article “Do Lemmings Really Commit Mass Suicide?” (Just to say it one more time: No. They don’t.)

Piggly Wiggly

I first heard the astonishing story of Clarence Saunders and Piggly Wiggly from Sarah, who shared with me a passage about the grocery store chain in William Sitwell’s A History of Food in 100 Recipes. Most of the Saunders quotes in this essay, and the quote from Ernie Pyle, come from Mike Freeman’s 2011 book, Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly: The Rise & Fall of a Memphis Maverick. For information about my great-grandfather, I am grateful to my mom, Sydney Green, and my late grandmother, Billie Grace Goodrich, who was incidentally a loyal Piggly Wiggly shopper.

The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest

The George Shea quotations cited here are all from televised introductions to the annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. The Mortimer Matz quote comes from a 2010 New York Times interview by Sam Roberts. The documentary mentioned is The Good, the Bad, the Hungry, directed by Nicole Lucas Haimes. Two histories of Nathan’s Famous also provided helpful background for this essay: Famous Nathan by Lloyd Handwerker and Gil Reavill, and Nathan’s Famous: The First 100 Years by William Handwerker and Jayne Pearl. I did not expect that in my life I would finish two entire books about a hot dog stand, but 2020 was full of surprises, and both the books are quite interesting.

CNN

The first CNN broadcast is available not at CNN.com but on YouTube. To learn more about trends in child mortality, I strongly recommend Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org). It contextualizes data on a wide variety of topics—from Covid to poverty to carbon emissions—with the kind of clarity and thoughtfulness that helps you remember that everyone has birthdays. The statistic about 74 percent of Americans thinking child mortality is getting worse comes from a 2017 Ipsos report called “Perils of Perception.” I learned about it from Our World in Data. Shannon, Katie, Hassan: I love you all. Thank you. Long live the cult of Claremont.

Harvey

The Sontag quote about depression is from Illness as Metaphor. The William Styron quote is from Darkness Visible. Both those books have been hugely important to me as I live with mental illness. The complete Emily Dickinson poem, sometimes known as Poem 314, is available in most collections of Dickinson’s work. Bill Ott and Ilene Cooper have guided me to Harvey and so much else in the last twenty years; this essay is my attempt to thank Bill.