There is nothing we feel more often than air—an assertion so obvious as to sound idiotic. Yet nothing's more easily forgotten than that which is with us every day. We are wrapped in atmosphere at every moment.

All matter contains energy, crouched and waiting to burst. Fire is crackling potential erupting to visibility, life's secrets spilling forth into physical expression. It spouts out of nowhere using only what was hidden, like imagination surging through the borders of reality and appearing in the form of dance, song, or play.

Stand barefoot on a bluff in the late days of spring and the toasted stones will warm you as would another's hands. Crunch a perfect apple in your mouth and you will find the grit can mirror silt.

My Augusts are filled with the most dizzying mysteries. Faced with deducing what happened to the year, I play detective in my very own sun-drenched noir.

Here I’ve gathered songs that sound like lost highways—the endless, midnight ones that pass nothing but stardust. Our propulsion comes from music as much as an engine, as heartbeats propel us through perception and feeling, over empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.

Professionals like to insist that every year has a Song of the Summer. It's a media thing. They even come to a consensus sometimes, though that's been harder and harder to do the farther we get from 2010.

Today, I lie buoyant on my summer sheets, television screen paused on the video game I just can't stop playing. Its pause gives me a little break from dying—at the hands of giant insects; in puddles bubbling with acid; on the spikes placed in pits laid by deranged urban planners.

Dark Academia, if you haven't already heard, is a subculture emerging on TikTok and Instagram that adopts the aesthetics of the ivy-trussed campus: think browns and burgundies, greys and ivories, blazers and books like Mrs. Dalloway and The Idiot (Dostoevsky's, though the case could be made for Batuman's as well).

Waxahatchee writes poetry so precise it carves silhouettes out of thin air, and she sings through smoke that's more clove than Marlboro. It feels like sandpaper for the soul.

My house is haunted. There are rooms I cannot enter, and every night I speak with ghosts. We bicker in the shower and argue at the cutting board. Their forms vary, appearing sometimes as others and sometimes myself, come to resurrect some buried humiliation from my past.

One of the most frequent questions I get is about how I’ve been able to pick up temporary work throughout my travels without falling afoul of the law.

I like to keep Earwyrms open as a outlet where other writers and critics can submit their playlists and essays as well. This week's was written and curated by Ben Kasl, a writer and improviser living in Chicago.

The following is excerpted from On Tyranny, written before the new rules of the pandemic.

I'll be clear: Black lives matter. Abolish the police. All cops are bastards. Amplify black voices. This week's is a playlist of black artists who deserve to be recognized, based on this thread by Moses Sumney.

Everyone I know is reading Normal People by Sally Rooney. These rare times when a book becomes this popular might be our brightest moments, even if the work in question is sometimes frustrating.

Michael Jordan is the concept of celebrity writ large, a name we're demanded to reckon with whether we know shit about him or not. He was first to mutate from person to brand, foretelling the rise of our culture of influencers.

This week, I finally saw My Dinner with Andre. It'd been sitting on my watchlist for years, collecting dust as I could never find it, until the combination of the Criterion Channel and my appalling privilege in a global pandemic gave me time at last to sit and watch.

I can't stop looking in the mirror. No longer can I stand my phone, so I've returned to the original screen. I watch my arms grow thinner, my eyes sink deeper, my bones reveal their contours like roots pushing up on the sidewalk.

Haven't felt this alien since middle school—I ask permission to go outside, walk the halls half-asleep and wonder what it could feel like to be held. Months into quarantine, I see now I'm guilty of taking touch for granted. The line between forgetting and never knowing is thin as worn chiffon.

Short issue this week, I have 198 unread emails and still have to pick an outfit for cocktails tonight with a little owl named Blathers. Here's an update on my favorite songs of 2020 that haven't made Earwyrms yet.