Film and television history are all too prone to pop culture distraction. What I most enjoyed about James Meek’s LRB review of Peter Biskind’s recent book, Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television (2023), is how deliberately he avoids that trap.
Here’s a remarkable observation from the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin:
Thanks to an alignment of calendars, 2024 will set a record for the greatest number of people living in countries that are holding nationwide elections: more than four billion, or just over half of humanity.
Remember: Don’t boo, vote.
Happy New Year! We already have a sense of what 2024 may have in store for us, so let’s set the right tone with this observation from David Brooks, in his recent and excellent book, How to Know a Person (2023):
The thing we need most is relationships. The thing we seem to suck at most is relationships. The effects of this are ruinous and self-reinforcing. Social disconnection warps the mind. When people feel unseen, they tend to shut down socially. People who are lonely and unseen become suspicious. They start to take offense where none is intended. They become afraid of the very thing they need most, which is intimate contact with other humans.
[…]
The crisis in our personal lives eventually shows up in our politics. According to research by Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute, lonely people are seven times more likely than non-lonely people to say they are active in politics. For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy.
Call your mom. Pick up where you left off with an old friend. Make a new friend. The purpose of civilization isn’t to host some zero-sum argument until one side is exhausted and vanquished. In fact, playing only to win the argument does more harm than good. If you feel compelled to get involved in some hip new cause, consider building a relationship instead.
Many thanks to a friend for drawing my attention to Julie Schumacher’s hilarious novel, Dear Committee Members (2014), which unfolds exclusively through a series of academic letters of recommendation.
Pay no attention to those year-in-review pieces. You don’t need any reminder about what happened. You were there.
Getting the first sentence right is always trouble, and so we must stop to admire a perfect opener wherever we encounter one, like Stefan Collini’s recent essay in the London Review of Books: “A tax system is a political philosophy expressed in numbers.” Read on, it’s a great piece.
The Spectator gets it right in their final editorial of the year: distribution remains the challenge, but there’s never been a better time to be alive.
It was an unexpected joy to listen to these two nerds talk about rockets.
Larry Wilmore has republished the inaugural episode of his podcast, Black on the Air, to mark the passing of his first guest, Norman Lear. It’s a great interview. Thanks for leaving the world a better place, Norman.
John Lanchester’s multi-book tour of the misuses and abuses of data in the London Review of Books is magnificent.
The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey says “Inflation Is Your Fault” and she’s right—well, you and all those federal governments for printing a lot of money during the pandemic.
Oxford’s word of the year gives me the ick—even our oldest educational institutions apparently cannot resist the lure of clickbait.
Let us offer our condolences to the premier of Ontario, who will not get to enjoy running unopposed a third time in the next provincial election (sometime in 2026).
Rob Reiner’s documentary about his friend, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023), was a delight—as was Brooks’s inevitable chat on the WTF podcast.
I am catching up on the London Review of Books. Here’s a thoughtful passage from Geoff Mann’s recent essay regarding climate catastrophizing:
The resources people have to manage this uncertainty remain largely the same as in the past: a mixture of information and doubt, faith and fatalism. What is different is the vast expansion in the range of what is now thought possible, which is no longer bound to the patterns of the past. Communities all over the planet are falling forwards into a future for which history is probably not a useful guide. If there are limits on the range of possible futures, they will become clear only after we, or a substantial proportion of us, are gone.
As a result, the words we use to calibrate our reality seem less and less like accurate descriptions of the conditions they are supposed to name. If ‘crisis’ is so continuous a state as to be ‘normal’, what help is either term?
Lastly, and certainly apropos of nothing, may I randomly remind everyone of Christopher Hitchens’s excellent book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001).
Amid all of the crash punditry about the now resolved Open AI “leadership spill” last week, it was disappointing to see an all-too familiar reflexive veneration of a young technologist. It’s more than trying to restore investor confidence: we’re looking for someone to save us.
I thought Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast rose above the fray with one of the more grounded discussions.
Speaking of salvation, here’s a cheeky passage from philosopher John Gray’s new book, The New Leviathans (2023):
Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent system of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity.
David Cameron returns to politics, to take up the foreign secretary portfolio from a seat in the Lords, and the Economist’s Bagehot columnist isn’t having any of it:
A man who deserted his office is now painted as an example of duty. In British politics, the appearance of competence is more important than the evidence of it. Aesthetics trump achievement. Nothing demonstrates this more than the renaissance of Mr Cameron.
The contempt is amusing, of course, but I have to confess that the real view from across the Atlantic is that of envy: no Canadian columnist, in a comparable political situation, would assume such a tone.
I spent the past few weeks taking in Martin Amis’s as yet appreciated final novel, Inside Story (2020). It’s many things—it includes some of the clearest and most thoughtful practical advice about writing, for example—but it also doesn’t have to be anything more than a story about a man who misses his friend.
Here’s a beautiful passage that I keep thinking about:
Martin was eighteen, and he was walking just after dark through a distant and neglected suburb of North London when he saw a lit window on the second-lowest floor of a council medium-rise. All it showed were the dark-blue shoulders of an unoccupied armchair. And he thought (this is word for word), That would be enough. Even if I never write, complete, publish anything at all, ever, that would be enough. A padded seat and a standard lamp (and of course an open book). That would be enough. Then I'd be a part of it.
“I look at you as an exquisite poet of self-hatred,” says filmmaker Errol Morris to David Cornwell (that’s John le Carré to your bookshelf), the subject of his excellent new documentary, The Pigeon Tunnel (2023). “Yeah,” laughs the subject, “I would go with that.” If you’ve seen the film, but are new to the author, you’ll enjoy Larry Wilmore’s recent podcast chat with Morris.
The current edition of the Economist has two smart pieces on government. The first, looks as prospective reform in Italy (“Italian politicians cannot resist changing the rules.”). The second, takes a deep look at why the crafting of legislation in the UK has gotten wobbly: it’s not the process, it’s the people.
“In response to growing concern over Canada’s capacity to welcome more newcomers,” the Toronto Star reported last week, “the federal government says it will incorporate housing, health care and infrastructure planning with provinces and municipalities when setting the country’s annual immigration targets.”
We’re in annual performance review season so this is a great opportunity to return to the basics—like, for example, how it’s generally not ideal to volunteer that you haven’t been doing your job, by suggesting that you’re going to start doing your job.
This is either a communications blooper or a confession from a country that’s hitched both it’s economic well-being and feel-good national identity to something it hasn’t put even an idle thought toward. This is serious: failing to set those who want, or need, to come here up for success, while undermining the hard work of those who’ve come before, can only feed a populist backlash. I’m reduced to quoting, out of context, an enduring meme from the otherwise excellent animated series Archer (2009-2023): “Do you want ants? Because that’s how you get ants.”
Here’s a thoughtful definition of creativity from John Cleese’s wonderful book, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide (2020), which I re-read last week: “Wherever you can find a way of doing things that is better than what has been done before, you are being creative.”
Here’s an observation about centrism, from Bari Weiss’s excellent book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism (2019), which I read last week, and find myself still thinking about:
…in the absence of healthy centrism, many progressive politicians practice avoidance. They ignore real social tensions associated with mass immigration, unsure how to acknowledge those tensions without stoking xenophobia, alienating their perceived base, or being smeared as bigots. They downplay patriotism, afraid of stoking jingoism or of being accused of it. They ignore the need for a return to a common culture or even a set of civic values, lest they be accused of promoting cultural intolerance. […] In the absence of serious liberal answers to these significant questions, the bluntness of authoritarian populists becomes that much more seductive to the average voter, who comes to see liberals as evasive and out of touch.
There’s a third, lesser observed problem in all the tragedy of recent weeks: there are few, if any, adults in any room right now. To lift a phrase from P.J. O’Rourke, we need a cry from the far middle.
Inkoo Kang’s reflection in the New Yorker on the end of the FX series, Reservation Dogs (2021-2023), which I also finished last week and recommend, captures something I’ve been trying to describe about the network’s artistic approach for years:
The showrunner, Sterlin Harjo, who created the series with Taika Waititi, continued expanding this mosaic for the next two seasons, in a mode spearheaded by Louis C.K.’s “Louie” and brought to its apex by Donald Glover’s “Atlanta”: the formally and tonally mercurial, auteur-driven, detour-prone, impressionistic half-hour dramedy. (Call it “the FX mood piece.”) The result can be easier to admire than to get lost in.
If you’ve also finished the show, I recommend listening to Marc Bernardin’s recent thoughts on the Fatman Beyond podcast.
Speaking of podcasts, Halloween is tomorrow, and that means there’s still time to listen to the Dana Gould Hour’s annual special.
Your homework this week is to read Lionel Shriver’s latest Spectator column (“Keep your politics à la carte”) and then go for a long walk. While you’re on that walk throw on Scott Galloway’s latest No Mercy / No Malice post (“Listen”) as read by George Hahn. If you should happen to come by any strangers, be nice to them.
I’m not sure what we did to deserve Maria Bamford or her recent memoir, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere (2023). She reviews in passing, for example, a self-help book by using the framework of that self-help book against itself, and it’s not only unspeakably hilarious it also qualifies as high art.
I find it endearing that the least interesting thing about Sir Patrick Stewart’s recent memoir, Making It So (2023), are the Hollywood anecdotes. His origin story, of finding an interest and then being encouraged to develop that interest to the best of his ability, should be a path offered to every youth. As he observes: “I was fortunate to grow up in a time when there was a compact between the government and the people dictating that the arts were a necessity of life, not a frivolity.”
Speaking of adults doing the right thing, you must listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger explain why he refuses to describe himself as “self-made man” on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. It’s too bad he can’t run for president. I’m serious. We’re already through the looking-glass, friends.
Speaking of podcasts, if my notes from last week about Timothy Garton Ash’s memoir, Homelands, failed to entice your curiosity, perhaps his recent chat with Paul Wells will.
Book blurbs are notoriously cliché and vacuous. Here’s an exception from Mark Lilla:
We know there are Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and Poles—but are there Europeans? Yes, at least one: Timothy Garton Ash. Homelands is the brilliant, captivating story of how he became one.
I find that impossible to improve upon and all that need suffice as a review, too.
Is the United Kingdom in Europe? How much of Europe is even in Europe? As Ash notes in Homelands (2023), his recent memoir: “…European countries have a long history of existential uncertainty about their full belonging to Europe.” Europe may not be certain of itself but Ash definitely is—at least in a way that I cannot imagine an American or a Canadian attempting about their respective federations, as that would ultimately require an effort to tread and take in the whole of the place.
Here’s a stand-alone thought we ought to keep in mind: “The gamble of civilisation is that we can learn from the past without having to go through it all again ourselves.”
Finally, something else to worry about:
Earth is currently thought to be in the middle of a supercontinent cycle as its present-day continents drift. The last supercontinent, Pangaea, broke apart about 200 million years ago. The next, dubbed Pangaea Ultima, is expected to form at the equator in about 250 million years, as the Atlantic Ocean shrinks and a merged Afro-Eurasian continent crashes into the Americas.
Run for your lives! Well, tell your kids—to, uh, tell their kids, to…
Anyway, this is precisely the sort of thing you expect to read in Scientific American (which is where the above paragraph is from) but not front-page news, where you no doubt saw it last week. Sure, it sounds like a problem—but one for which nature’s given us a good 250 million year head-start.
I’m going to keep saying it: it won’t be actual problems that get us in the end but our failure to focus on those actual problems. Hell, the least we could do is limit our catastrophizing to the present.
Over in the Atlantic, Tom Nichols is absolutely right about a functional opposition being an overlooked healthy necessity in politics.
Not that you need an excuse to think about the Roman Empire but, if you do, and you want to outrun your FOMO, seek out Emma Southon’s exceptional book, A Fatal Thing Happened on The Way to the Forum (2020), without delay.
As I’ve said before, I admire when people change their mind and have the courage to share what led them to do so. Jeff Jarvis’s revised reflection on the death of the book in the Atlantic is not only a thoughtful essay but a dignified pivot. May we all achieve such balance with our respective multitudes.
I know it’s part of his brand but I just cannot help but be amused whenever I see John Waters command any mainstream attention. Here’s a great thought from his recent (digital) New Yorker interview (speaking of branding):
You embrace and make fun of what they use against you. That's what I did from the very beginning, calling [my movies] a "trash epic" or a "gutter film." One critic in Baltimore who hated me said, How do you beat us to the typewriter?
Over in the not-yet-linked October issue of Wired, Paul Ford has puts finger on the very subtle tension inside academia where creatives are now well-positioned to run away with the very AI tools thought to make them irrelevant at the expense of their designers:
When stuff gets out of hand, we don’t open disciplinary borders. We craft new disciplines: digital humanities, human geography, and yes, computer science (note that “science” glued to the end, to differentiate it from mere “engineering”). In time, these great new territories get their own boundaries, their own defenders. The interdisciplinarian is essentially an exile. Someone who respects no borders enjoys no citizenship.
Unless, of course, there are no longer any borders.
Walter Issacson’s recently released biography of Elon Musk will no doubt sell well, but I wonder how many potential readers will be deterred by, say, subject fatigue. I have decided, for example, to limit my interest to Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review, a hilarious experiment in both articulate exasperation and restraint. Cheap shots these are not:
Biographers don’t generally have a will to power. Robert Caro is not Robert Moses and would seem to have very little in common with Lyndon the "B" is for "bastard" Johnson. Walter Isaacson is a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer. […] Isaacson puts innovation first: This man might be a monster, but look at what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for instance, put innovation second: The man who built this is a monster!
The New Yorker also reminds us that Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad arrives next week. If you’re curious why that’s noteworthy, seek out the first sentence of her (already published) translation of the Odyssey.
Novels rarely offer an eloquent summary of their own premise, so it’s important to appreciate it when they do, like this passage from Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (2022):
But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safe-guarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.
I’m still thinking about this throwaway line from Marc Maron, during his WTF podcast interview with Hannah Einbinder: “The idea, that the right accuses us, of having some sort of organized agenda, is hilarious—because we cannot (sort of) come together on almost anything—and most progressive activism is neutered because of class. There: I said it.”
More people should say it. Though, every time I offer a friend or colleague a version of this, I am immediately treated to a remedial argument—as though argument, specifically winning the argument, were the key to moving the proverbial political ball forward and not part of the problem.
Best wishes to the prime minister who, as Paul Wells noted late last week, in addition to being stranded in India waiting on replacement parts for his plane, is also trapped in a metaphor.
Every year I read the Massey Lecture, the book version of the national public lecture series founded in 1961. I think it’s important to celebrate scholarship that’s not limited to ivory towers or hidden behind ivy paywalls.
This year’s topic (and title) is The Age of Insecurity—and, while I generally agree that we’re anxious at a civilizational level (my wording), I am ultimately not persuaded that what ails us is the singular fault of a particular economic system. Here’s my rule: if “law of the jungle” can be effectively substituted for capitalism, it’s a reflexive argument that you’ve likely grown tired of hearing. Incidentally, the same rule holds for “in a kindergarten classroom” and socialism.
Anyway, don’t let that discourage you from enjoying it—or any of the other lectures that have come before. It’s important to defend institutions, even—especially—when you don’t always agree.
Speaking of making a correct diagnosis, the Spectator’s Kate Andrews, in an excellent effort to retrace the route the Tories took to paint themselves into their present corner, actually gets to the root of why everyone is anxious and everything feels broken:
…Rishi Sunak now must explain why, 13 years on, schools are unsafe, nothing gets built, and the country’s major institutions all seem to teeter on the brink of collapse. Because that’s what happens when short-term political decisions pile up: lots of money is spent, nothing much happens.
In other words: it’s the software not the hardware. If it were the hardware, we couldn’t have build these things in the first place. We’ve either forgotten how to operate them, lost the will, or need to reconsider our leadership criteria.
Questlove’s recent appearance on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is pure joy.
So far, I’ve only seen a few tributes to Peter C. Newman, who died last week, but I hope the trend continues. If anyone deserves a long-form journalistic fête, it’s him.
September arrives with typically selective self-importance. Yes, we need to catch up. No, not all of us have been away. But for a few who mistake loudness for leadership, the awkwardness stems mostly from the fact that it’s the unacknowledged new year.
For downtown Toronto, it also brings the Canadian National Exhibition’s Air Show: a pageant of rare skill, no doubt, but also insensitivity and ingratitude. Maybe let’s not buzz refugees with fighter jets, in their already precarious accommodations, or take for granted that we’re fortunate such sounds are not part of our life over here. “I love you,” says the patriarch from the series Succession to his halfwitted would-be heirs in the final season, “but you’re not serious people.”
While we’re on the subject of seriousness, let’s appreciate the lead editorial in the Spectator for both self-awareness and ownership:
In her memoirs, to be published on 14 September, Theresa May cites the net zero commitment as one of the achievements she would most like to be remembered for. This sums up the problem of the modern Tory party. Anyone can set a target without first working out how to get there, or how much it will cost. But to do that is the epitome of the vain, unserious politics that May takes aim at in her book. May's outlook is sadly bereft of any sense of what conservatism is–or should be.
This problem is not exclusive to conservatism, though; it may as well be the spirit of the age.
Here’s the best sentence that I read all week (which is just as excellent in context as it is here all by itself): “The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.” It comes from David Sedaris, in an essay entitled, “A Speech to the Graduates,” from his most recent collection, Happy-Go-Lucky (2022).
Perhaps the most compelling thing about Ronan Farrow’s recent New Yorker profile is that he’s got his subject dead to rights: “[Elon] Musk isn't peddling pabulum. His initiatives have real substance. But he also wants to be on the show–or, better yet, to be the show himself.”
That’s the trouble with problems: it’s often less the problem itself—that is, the classic struggle between capability and complexity—that needs solving as such, and more the navigation of someone who needs to make the solution about them—or, failing that, at least prevent it from being about someone else. This, my fellow humans, is why we cannot have nice things.
I have just finished Deborah Levy’s remarkable “living autobiography” trilogy, on the advice of a friend (I certainly do not want for exceptional recommendations). Here’s an excerpt from the end of the final volume, Real Estate (2021), that captures the spirit of the entire endeavour:
I supposed that my literary purpose was to think freely, or rather for the books to speak freely on my behalf. If this sounds easy and obvious, it is not easy, not on the page or in life. Some people feel crazy when they try to deal with two contradictory thoughts at the same time, as if they fear they have done something wrong and need to purge the intruding thought before it muddies the water.
The dust jacket to the first volume positions it as a response to Orwell’s famous “Why I Write” essay but I think that undersells it. Writing about writing is notoriously tedious but thinking and speaking freely in any form is not easy and certainly brave. It reminded me of Zadie Smith’s forward to her own pandemic essay collection, Intimations (2020): “Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”