MICE LIVE IN OUR WALLS but do not trouble our kitchen. We are pleased but cannot understand why they do not come into our kitchen where we have traps set, as they come into the kitchens of our neighbors. Although we are pleased, we are also upset, because the mice behave as though there were something wrong with our kitchen. What makes this even more puzzling is that our house is much less tidy than the houses of our neighbors.
No one could have predicted on March 10, 2011, that the imminent Tōhoku earthquake, at magnitude 9.0, would be the greatest to hit Japan, or foreseen the giant tsunami that struck the Japanese coast minutes later. But that does not mean the subsequent meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was unavoidable. The plant was built to withstand a big earthquake and survive a moderately sized tsunami, but a panoply of engineering errors—too-short sea walls, backup diesel generators installed in locations likely to flood, pools overcrowded with spent fuel rods, and a main control room insufficiently
In her account of her years in Teach for America, the lesson Michelle Rhee wants to impart is that success in the classroom takes time to achieve and depends mainly on discipline and toughness. In her first year she failed miserably: she was a nervous wreck who couldn’t control her classroom. But on the first day of her second year, she writes, she took a new approach: “I wore my game face. No smiles, no joy; I was all thin lips and flinty glares.” She describes making her students line up and walk into the classroom four times, until they
Vladimir Nabokov was eighteen when the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 made his wealthy family’s continued residence in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed at the start of World War I) impossible. They fled first to the Crimea and then, in 1919, to London. The following year they settled in Berlin, where in 1922 Nabokov’s father was assassinated, more by accident than design, by extreme right-wing Russian monarchists: they were attempting to kill another Russian émigré politician, Paul Milyukov. V.D. Nabokov bravely seized and disarmed one of the gunmen, and pinned him down, but was then shot three times by
Charles Jackson barely ever wrote a piece of fiction. The vast majority of his output—five novels or collections in the decade beginning 1944, and one final novel fourteen years later (“99 percent of this novel is lubricious trash,” read the Kirkus review)—was thinly disguised fact. His first, and by far his best-known, work was The Lost Weekend; it was essentially his homosexual alcoholic’s diary artfully made fiction. It made headlines for its depiction of alcoholism; the homosexual component got far less attention, likely because of the distorted Freudian fever gripping the nation, in which alcoholism and homosexuality (or “latent homosexuality”)
In the fun-house mirror of the present, the contours of the twentieth century have assumed a strange symmetry. It begins and ends with imperialism. The century opens with the West plundering the Rest, until one Asian nation, Japan, joins the action and becomes an empire itself. In the century’s last decade, the pattern repeats: the forces of liberal capitalism are again as dominant as ever, only this time China is the apt pupil of Western rapacity. The way historians speak of the present in terms of “imperialism,” ”anti-imperialism” and “the rise of Asia” makes the burst of decolonization after World
David Sedaris doesn’t write like a writer. He writes like someone who writes for a living. That’s a different thing, and not necessarily a bad one: Mr. Sedaris can be the life of your two-person party if you turn to his essays for quick, easy diversion and nothing more. But only a man with column space to fill would devote the first eight pages of a book to the experience of having dental work done in France.
Before David Letterman banned him, the filmmaker Harmony Korine made three memorable appearances on CBS’s Late Show. On his first visit—in 1995, when he was 22—Korine came to promote Larry Clark’s Kids, for which he’d written the screenplay. When Letterman asked how one turns a script into a movie, a fidgety Korine, his voice cracking, replied, “Oh, I’m not sure.” The audience laughed, then broke into applause. He delighted them again in 1997, returning in a suit and V-neck sweater to plug his directorial debut, Gummo. (Letterman: “You’ve assembled a series of very striking, vivid, disturbing impressions.” Korine: “Yeah, well,
In his new memoir, Attempting Normal, comedian Marc Maron describes several of his more arduous experiences, from eating extra spicy chicken to rescuing feral kittens to bedding down-and-out prostitutes (only twice; he’s “not a hooker guy”). Maron’s comedic persona, which he has honed for the past thirty years, is both hostile and hypersensitive, and listening to him on stage or on his critically acclaimed podcast WTF can feel like eavesdropping on a therapy session. Airing painful personal history might not help him work through his issues (“if your life is disintegrating, saying so publicly doesn’t necessarily reverse the rot”) but
Aesthetics is, at its best and at its origins, a form of hunting. Not only a hunt for the beautiful and the sublime, but also for the ensnarement and identification of subtle experiences, ambivalent impressions, and novel sensations. If beauty and truth represent the big game—the promise of freedom, happiness, and peace on earth—the minor aesthetic categories are smaller, but still significant, quarry. Even in the eighteenth century, in the writing of Edmund Burke and Richard Payne Knight, Friedrich Schiller and Schlegel, the philosophy of taste often revolved around the marginal categories of the pretty, the ugly, and the picturesque.
Of all the things one can portray in a movie, marriage is surely not the most titillating. It can’t possibly hold a candle to sex or violence—or some lurid combination of the two—and is an equally tough sell against horror, slapstick, sci-fi, romance, or the western. “Embrace happy marriage in real life,” director Frank Capra once remarked, “but keep away from it onscreen.” And yet there have been a great number of films, from the silent era until today, that have defied Capra’s warning and compellingly depicted one of the world’s most enduring institutions. (Capra himself offered a fiendish satire
There is no question that David Bowie changed the way many people looked, in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s. He set styles. Fashion designers—Alexander McQueen, Yamamoto Kansai, Dries van Noten, Jean Paul Gaultier, et al.—were inspired by him. Bowie’s extraordinary stage costumes, from Kabuki-like bodysuits to Weimar-era drag, are legendary. Young people all over the world tried to dress like him, look like him, move like him—alas, with rather variable results.
The Yacoubian Building, a 2002 novel by Alaa Al Aswany, weighs heavily on my time in Cairo, informs everything I see here, an unsentimental picture of an exigent, corrupted people. I pass the actual apartment house downtown, less grand than I imagined, occupied in the novel by several strata of Cairo life: a wealthy wheeler-dealer, a rising politician, a closeted gay newspaper editor, the poor who occupy a shantytown of windowless “iron rooms” on the roof, each of the rooms two by two meters square. The tragic beat of events turns monotonous, but the book is politically provocative, a devastating
In the summer of 2011, when David Graeber heard rumors of a mobilization against Wall Street, he was hopeful but wary. Graeber is an anthropologist by trade, and a radical by inclination, which means that he spends a lot of time at political demonstrations, scrutinizing other demonstrators. When he wandered down to Bowling Green, in the financial district, on August 2nd, he noticed a few people who appeared to be the leaders, equipped with signs and megaphones.
If you were to run into eighteen-year-old Baudy Mazaev on a multicultural Boston street, you’d probably take him for a Portuguese or an Italian; in a pinch you might guess his family origins to lie somewhere farther east. He has straight black hair and an aquiline nose and a build that attests to a long and successful stint as a high school wrestler. Nor does his speech provide any particular clues to his ethnicity: he has the distinctive accent of someone who has grown up on the banks of the Charles River.
André Aciman’s third novel, “Harvard Square,” takes place in Cambridge over the long, scorching summer of 1977. A nameless graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, wades through pages of 17th century literature preparing for crucial exams. One day he visits the tiny cluttered Cafe Algiers off Harvard Square and hits it off with a loud and opinionated cabdriver from Tunisia called Kalaj, nicknamed Kalashnikov. A friendship is made and our narrator ends up spending less time in the library and more time enjoying the nightlife and lessons in charming the fairer sex from his new buddy and tutor.
Edna O’Brien’s fourth novel, August Is a Wicked Month (1965), displayed one of the best author photographs of the 20th century. It’s reprinted on the cover of Country Girl, Ms. O’Brien’s new memoir. It depicts the young author, cigarette clasped between her middle fingers, glancing to her left at some unseen provocation. The photograph is suggestive of both innocence and experience. It seems to promise: This girl is trouble.
Pity the poor soul who one day decides to write a biography of Janet Malcolm. She has little patience for “the arrogant desire to impose a narrative on the stray bits and pieces of a life that wash up on the shores of biographical research.” But oh, what tantalizing bits are on offer!
Willa Cather really didn’t want me to read her letters. And she was hoping you would mind your own business as well. I know this because I just committed a serious violation of her privacy, reading the more than 500 letters amassed in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, and published despite the author’s repeated, explicit wishes to the contrary.
Joel Dicker, a 27-year-old Swiss novelist, is the talk of the town in his native city of Geneva. Dicker’s second book, La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert (ed. Fallois/l’Age d’Homme, Sept. 2012) has won three major literary prizes, including the novelist’s award from the Académie française, and was long-listed last year for France’s Prix Goncourt. At the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall, Harry Quebert was a sensation: one observer compared the buzz surrounding the book to that of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. That Dicker is young, handsome, and managed to dethrone Fifty Shades of Grey on the bestseller list of
