While my free time lately has mostly involved buying chainsaws and watching paint dry, I have still been able to read a few interesting things.

In The American Scholar, André Aciman intentionally gets himself lost in St. Petersburg as he walks in the footsteps of characters in great Russian novels. Now this is how to tour a city, and how to write about it when you do.

Roger Berkowitz of the Hannah Arendt Center uncovers a 1975 letter by a young senator from Delaware, one Joseph R. Biden, Jr., who wrote to Arendt asking that she send him a paper she delivered as a lecture at Faneuil Hall in Boston that year. Aside from being a fascinating look back at a world before recorded lectures and new perspective of just how long the Democratic nominee for the presidency has been in politics, it is a reminder of how little things can change. We don’t know if they ever had a full correspondence (Arendt died abruptly shortly thereafter), but if Biden ever did get his hands on “Home to Roost,” he would do well to reread this all-too-familiar-sounding diagnosis of Nixon era America.

In the interest of stirring the pot a bit, here is reliable provocateur Matt Taibbi tearing apart White Fragility, which has reached bestseller status in the wake of the George Floyd protests. It’s over the top and I have my beefs, but it made me think, so it can join the party here.

In the New York Times, Andrew Keh tells the tale of three high school graduates who are crossing the country by bicycle. Fresh off my own (far more modest) coronavirus era trip across the country, the emotions here resonated, though my experience was far less raw than that of these kids to date.

The New Yorker makes two contributions to this week’s edition, both on themes from the other pieces linked to here. The first, from Dan Kaufman on the election theme, travels to an area I know well: the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, long a rural blue holdout that swung Trumpward in 2016, and may be one of the keys to the 2020 race.

The second is a personal history by Jon Lee Anderson, a longtime New Yorker correspondent best known for his chronicles of famed Latin Americans. I’d always been vaguely intrigued to know how he came to cozy up with controversial figures so easily, and in reading this piece learned he’d give The Most Interesting Man in the World a run for his money. One we get past his casual account of his childhood spent wandering off in Africa for a few months on his own, he tells the tale of a journey to an island off Alaska in his early 20s, in which he pursued guided only by the allure of wealth from musk ox wool and a New Yorker article by Peter Matthiessen. You never know what reading an alluring piece of journalism will lead you to do. For Anderson, it meant a radical pursuit in an inhospitable wilderness…and provided a launching point into a lifelong mastery of prose.