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August 19, 2025 
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| Martin Parr/Magnum Photos |
Dear readers,
Like many book lovers who cultivated their reading habit early, I was not an athletic child. I got headaches playing soccer; I was hit by a pitch in the only Little League game I recall. But despite my lack of talent, I discovered somewhere along the line that I in fact crave hard exercise — the bodily exertion of it, the muscle memory that bypasses thought in favor of instinct and reaction — and as an adult I have carved out time for power walks, kayaking and playing ice hockey, badly, with a group of like-minded devotees.
(Hockey in particular appeals to me for some of the same reasons a worthy book does: the attempt to corral chaos and to shape it, however fleetingly, into something beautiful.)
All of which is to say, my relationship to exercise is very different from that of my colleague Dwight Garner. But that hardly prevented me from delighting this week in his charming essay on the subject, which turns to examples from literature in an attempt both to justify his torpor and to goad himself to action. I encourage you to read it, wherever you fall on the exercise spectrum.
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