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.”