Times Literary Supplement (January 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Have a good trip’ – On the uses of psychedelic drugs; Hisham Matar’s novel of London exile; A West Bank tragedy; Puzzled by crosswords; French Band Aid, and more…
By Carrie Cogan
I rode west with a childhood friend who was driving to a job in California. We passed through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and still there was no sign of the Commander. My friend placed a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans on the console between us, jumble of rich dark gems, glittering like they were wet. I crunched them in my teeth without thinking. Sometimes I drove and let her sleep. When clouds clotted the sun her hair still glowed, some mix of orange and yellow and pink. Toast, or the honey for it, or the cinnamon.
After we spent a day and a night in a certain desert town, I told my friend to go on without me. I’d stay. The town was bordered by empty hills and endless sky: room to disappear. I found an unopened pack of Juicy Fruit gum on the sidewalk, which I took for a sign.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 5): The latest issue features ‘Read This And Learn’ – For decades, Juan Rulfo’s novel, “Pedro Páramo,” has cast an uncanny spell on writers. A new translation may bring it broader appeal.
For decades, Juan Rulfo’s novel, “Pedro Páramo,” has cast an uncanny spell on writers. A new translation may bring it broader appeal.
By Valeria Luiselli
Readers of Latin American literature may have heard one of the many versions of this story:
It is 1961 and Gabriel García Márquez has just arrived in Mexico City, penniless but full of literary ambition, trying desperately to work on a new novel. One day, he is sitting in the legendary Café La Habana, where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were said to have plotted the Cuban Revolution. Julio Cortázar walks in, carrying a copy of Juan Rulfo’s novel “Pedro Páramo.” With a swift gesture, as if he’s dealing cards, Cortázar throws the book on García Márquez’s table. “Tenga, pa que aprenda,” he says. “Read this and learn.”
These two titans of 20th-century literature and music formed a profound, yearslong relationship across generations and backgrounds.
Early in 1935, a blizzard blew through New York City. The storm was so fierce, it virtually emptied Central Park. But Willa Cather spent her morning there, sledding with the violin prodigy Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters.
Video timeline: 0:00 On preferred subjects for writing 3:20 On Karen Blixen /Isak Dinesen 4:24 On families 6:54 On the mother figure 9:00 On the novel ‘Babysitter’ 17:27 On the novel ‘Night. Sleep. Death. And the Stars’ 22:48 How traveling resembles writing 28:47 On Donald Trump
“What is so exciting about the novel is that it mimics life and that you end up doing something you never thought you would do,” says Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s greatest living novelists, when looking back on a life of writing.
It might be a violent event or something politically relevant, or it could be a racist experience that sets off a novel. In her storytelling, Oates finds it interesting to focus on girls at the beginning of puberty: “There’s a kind of wonderful neutrality of childhood that gets conditioned out when girls get to be 12 – 14 years old. And then, from that point on, when they’re so shaped by what we call the male gaze and the expectations of others that they grow into being someone who is this female image.”
But today, the family is very different and there are all kinds of families: “There are families of same-sex couples who got married and they may adopt a child or they may have a child of their own, but then there may be families that are like communes where people are living, sharing a house, but they are a family and they may have dogs and cats who know who they are. […] The so-called nuclear family – which is just a father, mother, and children – still exists, of course, but it’s not the only example of any longer, which is wonderful. It all begins with the emancipation of women”, Joyce Carol Oates concludes.
Oates feels attracted to writing because writing is storytelling and “what’s interesting about storytelling is that you have to have revelations. That you start off with a situation, and a little bit of a mystery evolves, and then you have to follow the tendrils and the roots of that mystery, like an investigator. And then there has to be a revelation.” This means that Oates focuses a lot in her writing on the pacing and the suspense and the movement, like “how long is a paragraph, how short is the dialogue, and how much dialogue is there in proportion to the exposition, and the craftsman side of writing is actually where many people write.“
Times Literary Supplement (January 3, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Lady Vanishes’ – Muireann Maguire on a revival of classic crime fiction; What next for Julian Assange; David Hockney’s drawings; Dreaming up 007; The science of belonging and more…
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 31, 2023): The latest issue features Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready For His Close-Up – Sam Wasson’s supremely entertaining new book, “The Path to Paradise”, tracks the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a remarkable career.
Elon Musk thinks a free market of ideas will self-correct. Liberals want to regulate it. Both are missing a deeper predicament.
When the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk sat down for his profanity-laced interview at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit in late November, his petulant dropping of F-bombs received a lot of attention. Less noticed but far more revealing was his evident disdain for a humble word beginning with the letter T. “You could not trust me,” Musk said, affecting an air of tough-guy indifference in his shearling-collared flight jacket and shiny black boots. “It is irrelevant. The rocket track record speaks for itself.”
by Dana Mattioli (April 23, 2024)
From veteran Amazon reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Everything War is the first untold, devastating exposé of Amazon’s endless strategic greed, from destroying Main Street to remaking corporate power, in pursuit of total domination, by any means necessary.
In 2017, Lina Khan published a paper that accused Amazon of being a monopoly, having grown so large, and embedded in so many industries, it was akin to a modern-day Standard Oil. Unlike Rockefeller’s empire, however, Bezos’s company had grown voraciously without much scrutiny.
By Casey Michel (August 2024)
A stunning investigation and indictment of the elements in United States’ foreign lobbying industry and the threat they pose to democracy.
For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they’ve not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they’ve secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, journalist Casey Michel contends some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself.
By David E. Sanger (April 2024)
Three decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a volatile rivalry against the other two great nuclear powers–Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia–in a world far more complex and dangerous than that of a half century ago
.New Cold Wars–the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon, David E. Sanger–is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations against two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly-democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace–so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. By the time America emerged from the age of terrorism, it was clear that this had been a fantasy.
By James Gleick
In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell makes a scientific case for the existence of human agency.
Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell
Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now.
Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers?
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 22, 2023): The latest issue features MAGIC: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, by Roland Lazenby; My Jewish Charlie Brown Christmas – The Peanuts special is the most overtly Christian TV holiday classic. So why does it speak to me so deeply?; Seven Fishes (Not Seven Dishes) for Christmas Eve – A modern Italian American take on the Feast of the Seven Fishes offers a streamlined menu any family can pull off….
Roland Lazenby’s big biography of Magic Johnson gives us a wealth of detail, a huge cast of characters and, in a way, the tapestry of our time.
By Thomas Beller
MAGIC: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, by Roland Lazenby
I once asked a portrait photographer why no one ever smiled in her pictures, and she replied, “A smile is a mask.”
I thought of this aphorism as I read Roland Lazenby’s 800-page biography of Magic Johnson. Sports Illustrated declared his smile to be one of the two greatest smiles of the 20th century. (The other was Louis Armstrong’s.) As Missy Fox, the daughter of his high school coach, says in the book, “That is the one thing he’s always had, that smile.”
The Peanuts special is the most overtly Christian TV holiday classic. So why does it speak to me so deeply?
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was a one-of-a-kind wonder when it premiered in 1965 and remains so almost 60 years later. Unlike the other jingle-belled baubles that TV throws down the chimney each year, it is melancholy and meditative. The animation is minimalist and subdued, full of grays and wafting snowflakes. I could wrap myself in the Vince Guaraldi jazz score like a quilt.
And then there’s the speech.
Kim Stanley Robinson is credited with helping create the genre of climate fiction, and his book Green Earth is yet another example of that. Set in Washington, DC, Robinson draws from his own personal experience living and working in the capital city. “What I like about DC is that there is kind of an electricity in the air, a human electricity,” Robinson told CityLab. “You walk the streets, you see people from all over the world. To go to the world capital and settle there is a statement. It’s an attempt to wrest control of one’s fate.” But where the fictional part of the story begins is in its characters — when he portrays federal bureaucrats as a positive force for good.
“If we can understand that cities are part of nature — even if they don’t really look like nature — that means we’ve got to change how we plan with them, how we work with them, and what our future looks like on spaceship Earth,” Adrian McGregor says. That’s the premise of Biourbanism: Cities as Nature, which looks at how effective urban planning and design can be achieved by viewing cities through a natural lens. McGregor sees cities as instrumental to lead the fight against the climate crisis. “There’s a policy gap between a federal government making decarbonization commitments and actual city policy,” he says. “They’re not really thinking clearly about where the emissions are coming from and therefore how to target them.”
Journalist Henry Grabar has a pretty simple solution for better city living: parking reform. The act of parking, for so many, is an aggravating experience. “You’re more likely to be killed over a parking space than you are to be killed by a shark,” Grabar told CityLab. In his book Paved Paradise, he argues that the key to happier residents is transforming parking policies to make them smarter and more convenient, and by undoing some of the privileges given to drivers in order to help boost multimodal transportation. “It’s very hard to overrule the instinctive feeling that parking ought to be available when I want it, where I want it, for the price I want to pay, which is zero,” Grabar said. “A lot of smart parking policy deviates from those assumptions, like charging for coveted street parking in busy locations, or trying to encourage people to park in a garage a few blocks away and then walk a bit.”
What happened after the Tulsa race massacre? It’s a question often lost when thinking about the violence that saw one of the wealthiest historic Black American neighborhoods burned down, and its residents killed or chased out. Built From the Fire seeks to tell the story of Greenwood from start to end, past the initial tragedy that wiped out Black Wall Street and the destructive urban renewal plans and physically divisive highways that followed. For Victor Luckerson, who moved to Tulsa and embedded himself in Greenwood’s community and archives in order to tell the story right, the policies and actions of local government officials did as much damage, if not more, to the neighborhood’s heritage than the initial conflagration. “I would say the massacre was more devastating in the short term, and urban renewal more devastating in the long term,” he says.
It’s not just heartbreak and bad grades that teens are facing — now, it’s gentrification too. Author Jade Adia found inspiration in the Los Angeles youth that came out to protest against police brutality after the murder of George Floyd, and wrote There Goes the Neighborhood with those young people in mind. Her debut young adult novel tells the story of 15-year-old Rhea, who devises a plan to save her best friend’s family from eviction, as gentrifiers threaten to upend her neighborhood in South Los Angeles. “I wanted to tackle the topic [of gentrification] in the most accessible way possible,” Adia told CityLab, “by putting young people and their experiences on the front lines of the conversation.”
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