Don't despair the end of summer

Also: Who are we when we don't do the thing we love anymore? [View in browser](    [❤️]( September 11, 2022 Dear Cog reader, We’re back! Your Cognoscenti editors had a good couple of weeks away, but we’re happy to return to your inboxes this Sunday morning. Are we ready for fall? We’re getting there. Who better to help with ambivalence over summer’s end than Anita Diamant, who’s [written a delightful essay this week]( about the impending change of seasons. The field crickets kick it up a decibel at this time of year, and for Diamant, it triggers the onset of her “autumnal melancholy.” But this year, she’s discovered a new way to think about the winter boots and wool socks to come — one that has her hearing the cricket’s song as more serenade than dirge. (This is a good one to listen to; it includes Anita’s wonderful read, plenty of frisky crickets, Marvin Gaye and Edith Piaf to boot.) Some of you have probably recently returned from [dropping a kid off at college](. Bill Eville knows the feeling. A self-proclaimed crier, Bill didn’t shed a tear — not while packing up the car; not while helping his son, Hardy, set up his dorm room; not even as they arrived home, and the family dog welcomed them at the door, waiting expectantly for another person. But the tears did come, eventually. Read Bill’s essay about his experience with this miraculous thing plenty of parents and kids work up to for 18 years: letting go. For all my tennis fans who've been staying up way too late the last couple weeks, I think Theresa Okokon’s essay — about Serena Williams’s farewell — is unlike anything else you’ve read on the topic. It’s not so much about tennis. Or achievement in sport. Or Serena’s extraordinary contribution to changing the face and culture and hue of tennis in America and abroad. (Frances Tiafoe’s electric run at this year's U.S. Open might not have happened if not for the Williams sisters.) It is about [the grief that accompanies evolution]( especially when we leave something that we love behind. Happy Sunday, all. It’s good to be back. Cloe Cloe Axelson Editor, Cognoscenti [Follow]( Support the news   Must Reads [Don't despair the end of summer]( September is upon us and the fall field crickets are calling time, writes Anita Diamant. As usual, they’ve triggered the onset of my annual autumnal melancholy: Winter is coming. Woe is me. [Read more.]( [Don't despair the end of summer]( September is upon us and the fall field crickets are calling time, writes Anita Diamant. As usual, they’ve triggered the onset of my annual autumnal melancholy: Winter is coming. Woe is me. [Read more.]( [I didn't cry when I took my son to college. Then I got home]( I pull into our driveway and see the house listing, as it prepares to welcome back three, not four, writes Bill Eville. [Read more.]( [I didn't cry when I took my son to college. Then I got home]( I pull into our driveway and see the house listing, as it prepares to welcome back three, not four, writes Bill Eville. [Read more.]( [Who are we when we don't do the thing we love anymore? Serena is brave enough to find out]( Serena Williams wants to be more the greatest tennis player of all time, writes Theresa Okokon. She wants to define who she is, and she wants that definition to be up for reinvention, on her terms. [Read more.]( [Who are we when we don't do the thing we love anymore? Serena is brave enough to find out]( Serena Williams wants to be more the greatest tennis player of all time, writes Theresa Okokon. She wants to define who she is, and she wants that definition to be up for reinvention, on her terms. [Read more.]( [Joe Biden is winning. The 'Tony Soprano' effect makes that hard to see]( Our free press has made a mob boss the nation’s leading man, and in so doing has obscured the remarkable job being done by the actual president, writes Steve Almond. [Read more.]( [Joe Biden is winning. The 'Tony Soprano' effect makes that hard to see]( Our free press has made a mob boss the nation’s leading man, and in so doing has obscured the remarkable job being done by the actual president, writes Steve Almond. [Read more.]( [College changed my life. I want the same for my students — with less debt]( There is hardly a part of me today that wasn’t shaped in a significant way by the things I learned between the ages of 18 and 22, writes Jonathan Fitzgerald. [Read more.]( [College changed my life. I want the same for my students — with less debt]( There is hardly a part of me today that wasn’t shaped in a significant way by the things I learned between the ages of 18 and 22, writes Jonathan Fitzgerald. [Read more.]( What We're Reading "Like the North Star in the night sky, she was a fixed point, something by which to orient yourself." "[Queen Elizabeth’s Unthinkable Death]( The Atlantic. "The freedom to dial back your investment at work and not worry about the security of your job is a privilege in itself, and one that many people from marginalized identities don’t feel they can enjoy ..." "[‘Quiet quitting?’ Everything about this so-called trend is nonsense]( The Guardian. "At the very time when technology promises to free us from the constraints of geography and open up more choices of places for people to live, real estate has become an even bigger constraint ..." "[How the ‘Rise of the Rest’ Became the ‘Rise of the Rents’]( Bloomberg. "I, too, have quietly questioned if what I wanted is still what I want." — Theresa Okokon, "[Who are we when we don't do the thing we love anymore? Serena is brave enough to find out]( ICYMI [As ‘9/11 Kids,' We Only Have The Stories Other People Tell Us About Our Dad]( Sophia and Lindsay Cook were too young when their father died to have many memories of him. Now, 20 years after 9/11, they’re still trying to understand who he was, and which parts of him live on in them. [Read more.]( [As ‘9/11 Kids,' We Only Have The Stories Other People Tell Us About Our Dad]( Sophia and Lindsay Cook were too young when their father died to have many memories of him. Now, 20 years after 9/11, they’re still trying to understand who he was, and which parts of him live on in them. [Read more.]( If you’d like to write for Cognoscenti, send your submission, pasted into your email and not as an attachment, to opinion@wbur.org. Please tell us in one line what the piece is about, and please tell us in one line who you are. 😎 Forward to a friend. 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