Young, who has never been a graceful stage presence, lurched to the front. He is old — he began playing in this town more than 40 years ago — and bent over his guitar, but he is not old and bent. Young has never been physically whole, but that brokenness has annealed rather than slowed him. He is anything but a frail man when he has a guitar in his hand.

Every time I looked up from the book, there were more people in and by the pool, as if they were surfacing out of the water, out of the ripples. I had black sunglasses on, so after a while I propped myself at an angle at which I could seem to read the book but really be moving my eyeballs, staring at everybody. God, the human body! It was Speedos and bikinis, no matter the age or body type. You would never see a poolside scene in the United States with people showing this much skin, except at a pool where people were there precisely to show off the perfection of their bodies. The body not consciously sculptured through working out has become a secret shame and grotesquerie in America, but this upper-class Euro-Latin crowd had not received that news, to my distraction. I took in veins and cellulite, paunches and man-paps, the weird shinglelike sagging that starts to occur on the back of the thighs, cleavage that showed a spoiled-grape-like wrinkling, the ash-mottled skin of permanently sun-torched shoulders, all of it beautiful. All of it beautiful and tormenting. You watched an 18-year-old Argentine girl in her reproductive springtime walk past an ancient Soviet-looking woman, her body a sculpture of blocks atop blocks, and both of them wearing black bikinis, the furtive looks they gave each other, full of emotions straight from the Pliocene, from the savanna. The old men scowled from behind mirrored shades. The young men tensed every muscle in order to seem not obsessed with how the girls saw them, a level of self-consciousness I found I could no longer really re-enter, as if it had been a drunken state. Everybody was stealing looks at one another, envying or disdaining or gazing, like me. We were all inside a matrix of lust and erotic sadness, all turning into versions of one another, or seeing our past selves.

As you know, I love the stat nerds and consider myself an honorary stat nerd — kind of like how Robert De Niro got an honorary doctorate from Bates College a few months ago and could list himself in movie credits as”Dr. Robert De Niro, Ph.D." if he really wanted. 

And apart from destroying an entire planet, did you ever see any real evidence that the Empire was all that terrible? There were still bars open. 

Today, someone asked me, ‘Do you have to win the U.S. Open to put the Olympic disappointment behind you?’ I was like, ‘Are you for real?’ The Olympic disappointment? I’m so happy I got the medal. I genuinely believe it was the best result I could have done, Murray was better than me, that’s it, boom, I go on vacation, take a few days off, pack for another few months on tour and it’s behind me.

Because Augusta is a golf course, and because it hosts the Masters, the announcement that the club was taking women was treated as a sports story. It’s actually a business story, and if it says something about women in American culture, then it says something about the rise of women in finance and politics.

Louisa Thomas, ladies and gentlemen

And sorry for the parts where I made it about me. I hope if you do decide that this is for you, you go out there and make it about you. Enjoy the process. Enjoy the failure. Learn to love the fear. Like a rollercoaster or a horror movie or like driving around New Jersey breaking into abandoned mental hospitals to look for ghosts in underground tunnels, learn to love the fear.