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For me, playing squash is not about achievement. That’s what makes it so much fun.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The genocide double standard
• The escalating cost of Trump’s lies
• Caffeine’s dirty little secret

No Hope of Glory

At a squash tournament in Grand Central Terminal last weekend, I watched the players in a women’s match move with elegant command of their bodies and their rackets. I was mesmerized by their liquid maneuvers as they whipped the tiny ball around a glass box constructed beneath the bronze chandeliers of the station. Whenever one of the players made an especially daring and deft move, I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “That’s me.”

This joke was so amusing to us because although I have played squash with this friend, it is all I can do to keep the ball in the air. I am not a strong player, but that is part of why the sport delights me so much. I first learned to play a bit in college, when a friend offered to teach me in the campus gym. I never got much better. Now, untethered from any expectation of “doing a good job,” I’m free to have a wonderful time chasing after the ball in my dedicated Asics with non-marking soles.

That people like to do things because they are good at them makes sense; I also find satisfaction in pursuing what I know I can do well. But there’s a distinctly relaxing, no-pressure type of fun in doing something just for the hell of it. So much of modern life centers on productivity. Even in the realm of hobbies, people often become fixated on achievement. Playing a sport with no hope of glory can break up that stressful, somewhat robotic mindset.

Pursuing fun without goals can be its own pleasure. But setting goals that are blissfully disconnected from self-improvement can be empowering too: As Gloria Liu wrote in The Atlantic in 2022, working toward what she calls a “Big Pointless Goal” can serve as “an act of protest against the self-optimization hamster wheel.” (One goal Liu includes as an example: popping 100 wheelies a day on a bike for 30 days.)

Liu adds that going on a quest of any nature makes you a magnet for helpers and co-conspirators, and I have found that to be true in my journey as a middling squash player. My enthusiastic embrace of the game has brought me closer to existing friends and introduced me to new ones. I have played at venues across New York City, including in some spaces I may not have otherwise had access to. I respect that not everyone wants to play squash with someone as bad as I am; for some people, the point is to be challenged. My own friends have varying skill levels, but they’re always gracious about my vision of mostly talking while we also hit the ball around. Though I don’t always make contact with the ball, I do always chase it, resulting in an excellent workout.

We are in the twilight days of January, the annual peak of frenzied self-improvement. It’s the time of year when many who set ambitious resolutions are dealing with the comedown of realizing that it’s hard to change. That’s why, especially this month, there is a strong case to be made for pursuing something for no higher purpose than to have a bit of fun. These experiences can even contribute to your overall health and happiness. I may take a squash lesson sometime this year—I imagine that improving at the game might enrich my experience in some ways. But the joy of my mediocre-squash era is its own reward already.

Related:

• In praise of pointless goals
• Don’t approach life like a picky eater.

Today’s News

1. The International Court of Justice issued an interim ruling in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. The court ordered Israel to take measures to prevent acts that are banned by the 1948 Genocide Convention, but it did not order a cease-fire in Gaza.
2. The jury in E. Jean Carroll’s damages trial in New York ordered Donald Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million for defamation.
3. Last night, Alabama executed the inmate Kenneth Smith using the previously untested method of nitrogen gas for the first time in the United States.

Dispatches

• The Books Briefing: Alex Kotlowitz, the author of There Are No Children Here, recommends books that illuminate oft-neglected American issues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The U.S. Should Apologize to Gay People

By Jonathan Rauch

In the summer of 1984, after he finished his first U.S. Foreign Service assignment, in Yugoslavia, Jan Krc flew to Washington, D.C., for what he thought would be a couple of weeks’ training en route to his next post, in South Africa. He thought nothing of it when he was called in for a security debriefing early one morning at the U.S. Information Agency headquarters. There, in a nondescript conference room, he was met by two middle-aged men in suits. The session began with half an hour of preliminaries, but then swerved sharply.

Have you engaged in homosexual relations since age 18?

Oh, shit, he thought …

“In the end, I did sign what basically was a confession,” he told me.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Long live the Chicago Rat Hole.
• “What we discovered on ‘Deep YouTube’”
• Why Biden handed climate activists a huge victory
• Lebanon’s January hangover
• Israel’s bitter bind.

Culture Break

Read. Out There Screaming, a recent horror anthology, will leave you surprised by what actually scares you, Stephen Kearse writes.

Watch. The late Norman Jewison directed iconic movies such as Moonstruck and Fiddler on the Roof, but not many people know his name, Ira Wells writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

In 2028, squash will become an Olympic sport for the first time. I enjoyed reading this 2022 New York Times Magazine profile of an elite squash player who has become a standard-bearer of what the author calls American squash’s “coming-of-age.” The article breaks down some of the fascinating history behind why Egypt is so dominant at the sport, and why America is just now catching up.

In non-squash-related news: Last Friday, I wrote about the joy of reissues in an era of constant reboots. In the week since, yet another instance of running it back has emerged: Jon Stewart is returning to The Daily Show. As Devin Gordon wrote in The Atlantic this week, “The choice is both a punt and a surrender, as well as a poetically fitting choice for an election year that already feels like a depressing rerun. It’s the late-night equivalent of renominating Joe Biden and Donald Trump.”

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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