The Yips

Rick Ankiel’s memoir about his time in baseball, written with Tim Brown, is called The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life. I first learned about Ana Ivanovic’s yips from Louisa Thomas’s 2011 Grantland article, “Lovable Headcases,” which contains the Ivanovic quote about overanalyzing. Katie Baker’s Grantland piece “The Yips Plague and the Battle of Mind Over Matter” was also helpful, as was Tom Perrotta’s piece in the September 2010 issue of the Atlantic called “High Strung: The Inexplicable Collapse of a Tennis Phenom.” There have been many academic studies of the yips; the one I referred to most is titled “The ‘Yips’ in Golf: A Continuum Between a Focal Dystonia and Choking,” lead author Aynsley M. Smith. (All hail continuums over dichotomies.) The golfing coach referred to is Hank Haney, whose story is told in David Owen’s 2014 New Yorker piece “The Yips.”

Auld Lang Syne

The Robert Burns online encyclopedia (robertburns.org) is a wonderful resource for those looking to learn more about Burns, “Auld Lang Syne,” or Burns’s fascinating friendship with Frances Dunlop. Most of the quotes from Burns’s letters come from the encyclopedia. The Morgan Library and Museum (themorgan.org) has an extensive archive about the song, including Burns’s letter to George Thomson describing the original melody as “mediocre.” Scans of Henry Williamson’s letter to his mother about the Christmas Truce of 1914 are also available online at the Henry Williamson archive; I first learned of the other quotes about the Christmas Truce (and several other details in the essay) from a 2013 BBC article by Steven Brocklehurst, “How Auld Lang Syne Took Over the World.” The Robert Hughes quote is from his book The Shock of the New. After Amy died, McSweeney’s reprinted her columns from Might magazine, so they are now archived online. Amy’s books quoted here are Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The Amy Krouse Rosenthal Foundation funds ovarian cancer research and childhood literacy initiatives. You can learn more at amykrouserosenthalfoundation.org.

Googling Strangers

Years after writing this review, I had a chance to talk with the kid in question, who is now a young man—older, in fact, than I was when I was a chaplain. That conversation—which provided me with consolation and hope that I can’t possibly find language for—was made possible by the podcast Heavyweight. Thanks to everyone at Heavyweight for making that happen, especially Jonathan Goldstein, Kalila Holt, Mona Madgavkar, and Stevie Lane. And thanks most of all to Nick, who evinces the love and kindheartedness that lights the way.

Indianapolis

The data about Indianapolis’s size and population are taken from 2017 U.S. Census estimates. The Indianapolis Star’s 2019 series about the White River and its water quality was very helpful to me. (It’s also the kind of journalism that cities like Indianapolis desperately need.) The parts of the series I relied upon were written and reported by Sarah Bowman and Emily Hopkins. In 2016, WalletHub ranked Indianapolis as America’s #1 microcosm city. The Vonnegut quote about maintenance comes from his book Hocus Pocus; the quote about not being able to get home again comes from Simon Hough’s 2005 profile of Vonnegut in the Globe and Mail, “The World According to Kurt.” The line about the terrible disease of loneliness is reprinted in the book Palm Sunday, a wonderful collage of Vonnegut’s memories, essays, and speeches.