They say there are two kinds of writers. First, the A-line writers: the sort with magnificent prose, literary and rich, whose style is more engaging than their ideas. These people are a pleasure to read just for the sake of reading. Then, the B-line writers: Their ideas outweigh their sturdy but unremarkable writing. They are not stylists but thinkers, polemicists, detail hounds. People read their work for the thoroughness of thought. There is, of course, the minuscule array of writers who encompass both groups, but they are rare and very wealthy.
Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me is a slim, well-intentioned, and gratingly naive collection of essays on Women’s Issues. It could serve as a sort of primer for freshman-year dorm-room discussions of why rape is bad, why all people deserve the right to marry, how they can maintain a baseline measure of equality while they’re married, and why feminism is still a noble movement. But that’s only if you like your agitprop soft-boiled and sexless.
Anand Giridharadas’s The True American operates on the seemingly provocative question of who is more American: the Bangladeshi air-force officer who immigrates to Dallas, hires on as a gas-station cashier, and dreams of working with computers; or the Bud-swilling, tatted, truck-driving, meth-blasted Texas peckerwood who shot him as “revenge” for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Which man more encapsulates the true core of American ideals? And, really, what are America’s post-9/11 ideals? Is our place in the pecking order of social status in this country somehow mystically predetermined, or do we really choose who we become? These are the high-concept questions
Unbalanced tokens, check your syntax. Non-closure is at the end of this excerpt: collection, which fills more than 40 boxes, was almost too intimidating to even broach.1187576
I don’t like it when books I love are turned into movies. I’m a teenager at heart, which means I’m ferociously protective of the images and moods I conjure up while reading a book. I don’t like that imaged sullied by some development executive at Dreamworks trying to revive Katherine Heigel’s career. But for reasons I haven’t quite figured out, my affection for Donna Tartt’s work demands a cinematic treatment. It could simply be that Tarrt writes boys and men so well. And I like watching mischievous boys and craggy men acting on screen.
I spent the last ten days devouring everything by novelist and screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto, the sole author behind HBO’s magnificent True Detective. I got hooked on Pizzolatto’s writing within moments of finishing the first episode of this bleak, philosophical, and wry new mystery series about two cops investigating a serial killer in rural Louisiana.
The greatest fear I harbor about having kids is that I will, as Philip Larkin puts it in “This Be the Verse,” fuck them up. I will fuck them up in some imperceptible way at first and there will be big consequences for it later. I fear that something will be “off” with my Hypothetical Child and I will be unaware or incapable of understanding it immediately, and that when I do finally become aware, I will somehow make matters worse by choosing the wrong treatment or not recognizing the gravity of whatever my child is going through. Perhaps, I
My favorite character on Boardwalk Empire, Eddie, Nucky Thompson’s obsequious Prussian bagman, killed himself because FBI agents used personal information to coerce him into collaborating against his beloved Nucky. After a Pilsner-fueled night of fraternizing with other German ex-pats (and Al Capone’s brother), sweet old Eddie was picked up by US agents. They held Eddie at an offsite location for 12 hours, offered no lawyer, and harshly interrogated (tortured) him, but still—Eddie did not crack!
Since the age of thirteen or so, my female cohorts and I have defined womanhood through a handy set of quantifiable—or tangible, at least—measures: bra size, dark eyeliner, use of tampons, relative intactness of one’s hymen, smoking, being “eaten out.” From there, the relevant metrics have only accumulated: a double-digit number of sexual partners, being […]
The Occupy protests of 2011 successfully transformed the issue of income inequality from an under-acknowledged condition into a national problem. This is a victory that has eluded labor unions, progressive activists, and liberal Democrats for over forty years. It is an admirable and, in some ways, very inspiring achievement, given the slapdash, decentralized, and rambling nature of the Occupy encampments.
