Adults are not supposed to take things from children—even though it’s childish things that litter the path to adulthood. I had a remarkable English teacher in high school who once began class by lining up a collection of Disney stories, for summary execution, before dispatching each in front of us for their no longer so secret flaws.

I’ve had both a more critical eye and an aversion to the phrase “I hate to burst your bubble” ever since. This passage, from Elif Batuman’s novel, The Idiot (2017), would have fit right in that day:

The meanest girls, the ones who started secret clubs to ostracize the poorly dressed, delighted to see Cinderella triumph over her stepsisters. They rejoiced when the prince kissed her. Evidently, they not only saw themselves as noble and good, but also wanted to love and be loved. Maybe not by anyone and everyone, the way I wanted to be loved. But, for the right person, they were prepared to form a relation based on mutual kindness. This meant that the Disney portrayal of bullies wasn’t accurate, because the Disney bullies realized they were evil, prided themselves on it, and loved nobody.

I thought the novel itself had something in common with Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018)—specifically, a quality of young person unable to articulate basic feelings externally. It makes me wonder whether we’ll end up writing-off a whole generation, like a batch of cookies left idle in the oven too long.

Parul Seghal’s lovely review of Lorrie Moore’s latest novel in the New Yorker reminded me that I’ve been neglecting her Collected Stories (2020). I was not prepared for how good or funny the first story, “Agnes of Iowa” (1995), would be.

Speaking of book reviews, here’s a fun sentence from Colin Burrow’s review of Lorraine Daston’s Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022) in the London Review of Books:

But a general rule about rules is that one rule breeds another rule developed to catch an exception to the first rule, and so (potentially) ad infinitum, until there are so many darn rules that nobody can be bothered to grasp or obey most of them.

There’s no better send-off for Robert Gottleib than his daughter’s documentary, Turn Every Page (2022), but do read David Remnick’s piece in the New Yorker.