Big swinging axes

Welcome to Cozy Week! Through Friday, we’re bringing you dispatches for rainy days, literally and spiritually. So sit back and get comfortable with a beverage or three, pull a blanket over your lap, and enjoy.

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An excerpt from Jonny Diamond’s essay on chopping wood. This piece originally ran on July 31, 2023. Today we’re un-paywalling it for everyone.

Splitting wood has become ready shorthand in film and television, saying more about a character than any line of dialogue possibly could.

If a woman is splitting wood we know she is tough, that she can handle herself and takes no shit; if an older man is splitting wood, we know he is still vital, perhaps a little stubborn; if an adolescent or even a child is splitting wood, we are told something about the material circumstances of the character(s), about their belief systems—this is a family that will stick together.

But the image of the wood-splitter has become such an obvious and overused symbol of American masculinity that it has drifted into parody, both intended and not. The instant legibility of the wood-splitter as strong and self-sufficient makes it an obvious pantomime for political advertising.

In 2016, the HBO TV show Veep featured a character named Jonah Ryan, a fictional congressional candidate from New Hampshire who records a campaign ad in which he splits wood. Ryan, dressed in freshly pressed jeans and a plaid shirt (over a turtleneck and beneath a puffy vest), awkwardly and improbably splits large rounds of pre-cut maple, as a comically earnest voiceover reels off stale puns: “President Selina Meyer thinks she can chop our prosperity… our dignity… our stature around the world. Well someone is chopping back… ”

Ready for October? We’re releasing our monthly playlist ahead of schedule. Get into it. 🎃