March 10, 2025 print issue

The New Yorker's March 10 print issue includes three engrossing articles: Nathan Heller's "As Harvard Goes: The struggle for the soul of the university"; Michael Luo's "Tragedy at Rock Springs: Unearthing a gruesome episode of racial terror"; and Nick Paumgarten's "Dreams and Nightmares: A fan's notes on Super Bowl week." I'm on the Jennifer Wilson piece from the March 17 print issue now.

The Unknown

It's behind a paywall for anyone who has read their "free articles," but I believe that Jeffrey Goldberg's "The Unknown" is the engrossing article I read early in the twenty-first century.

election long-form

On the impending election, among other articles, tweets, and asides, I've read The New Yorker's "Can Harris Stop Blue-Collar Workers from Defecting to Donald Trump?" and Vanity Fair's James Pogue piece: "Steve Bannon Has Called his 'Army' to Do Battle—No Matter Who Wins in November."

Gopnik's Hitler

I read "The Forgotten History of Hitler's Establishment Enablers" in the library on Saturday afternoon. It's a summation of familiar territory--they thought they could control him," etc. Comparing you-know-who to you-know-which-evil-dictator is, of course, extremely unoriginal at this point, and it is also nothing new to state that such comparisons to other past American presidents and presidential candidates are also grounded in cliche.

fry guy makes mad bank

In The New Yorker's "Will the U.A.W. Strike Turn the Rust Belt Green?" I learned that a Rust Belt employee manufacturing French fries can earn more than an assembly line worker building cars.

Jon Lee Anderson returns to Haiti

Jon Lee Anderson's most recent dispatch from Haiti is worth reading. At L.U.S.K., his presence there was noted at least once before. Haiti needs help.

What Happened When My Wife Died

I hope to return to Charles Bock's "What Happened When My Wife Died."

always be knocking

Tad Friend's "Sam Taggart's Hard Sell" has me thinking about sales and my own efforts writing about it.

"My Apology" by Sam Lipsyte

"The events themselves—the words, the acts, the intent—are a blur, a frantic smear. A certain phrase, once quite common and, by my lights, benign, was uttered, I admit, by me. Its lesser-known and brutal associations, to which I was not privy at the time, choked the office like a poison gas.

"Currents of history pushed this gas, herded it, prevented it from dissipating or exiting through vents. My history seeped into that of the offended party, which collided with the history we’d all been taught in school, as well as the revision of that history we knowing people knew, as well as the revision of that revised history, which had recently gusted in with the force of a reckoning.

"Also, it should be noted with appropriate candor that after I uttered the aforementioned phrase and suffered an onslaught of verbal abuse from my co-workers—no doubt unmooring me from my usual sense of decorum—I did, in fact, in plain view of all, urinate on my offended colleague’s desk."

~~ from "My Apology" by Sam Lipsyte

Paul Theroux on Samuel Beckett

"Biographies of [Samuel] Beckett suggest not. You would not know from his work that Beckett was an excellent athlete—cricketer, golfer, swimmer, with a strong forehand in tennis. He loved watching rugby. In his twenties, he was intensively psychoanalyzed. For years, he lived on a stipend from his mother. He took holidays in Tunisia and Morocco. He romanced a number of lovely women—in fact, he had an affair on the go with a young English rose when, at the age of fifty-five, he married his French fiancée. (The love triangle in his later drama Play does not do this situation justice.) He loved to gamble, he played billiards, and, though his work is full of Descartes and Dante, he was a dedicated reader of detective novels—Agatha Christie and many others. Yes, there is a detective in Molloy, and Camier, in Mercier and Camier, is a private investigator, but he solves no crimes.

"Beckett’s essence is in his work, and it is bleak. His life was even grimmer at times—deprivation, the war, his courage in the French resistance, being stabbed by a pimp on a Paris street. But, in many respects, he was more Irish bloke than existentialist, his life much happier and more various and satisfying than you’d guess from his writing, which, by the way (and to his sorrow), his mother denounced as trash."

~~ from The New Yorker's "Facing Ka'ena Point: On Turning Eighty" by Paul Theroux

Happy Mother's Day!

"The British government’s current recommendation for people aged seventy and up is to practice strict social distancing. But the elderly, and others in high-risk groups, will shortly be asked to begin twelve weeks of social shielding, or isolation. That’s a long stretch for anyone, but especially in the life of someone for whom time has become precious. It’s also tough for the people separated from ill family members. In the most hopeful scenario, we won’t see my mother until June."

~~ from "My Mother Is Under Quarantine, But We're Still 
                Staying Close," The New Yorker, March 22, 2020

Herman at Home

Treat yourself to Jill Lepore's "Herman Melville at Home."

An Artist's Archeology of the Mind

From Joshua Rothman's "An Artists Archeology of the Mind" published in The New Yorker:

When Sacks was young, his family moved to Durban, a port city on the Indian Ocean. He walked to school wearing a safari suit and sandals. In the street, he passed Zulu men carrying shields and walking sticks; bare-chested African women with loads on their heads; Europeans in Western dress; Indian women in saris; black men in prison garb, laboring at the roadside with pickaxes. Sacks was on the “white” side of the color line; his ancestors, Lithuanian Jews, had come to South Africa toward the end of the nineteenth century. Still, the government included Nazi sympathizers, and, at his segregated school, bullies called him “Jew boy,” while his own lapses were met with strokes of a cane. The human world was inhuman. Meanwhile, a vast landscape surrounded him: long, deserted beaches echoing with rolling surf; grassy hills creased by ancient mountain shadows. At Durban’s port, he watched ships arrive from India, France, Japan—emissaries from an unfathomable world.

Sacks’s parents sought to resist apartheid: his father, an obstetrician, taught at a black medical school. Still, there was no escaping a sense of complicity. “I was waking up always too late in a ravishingly beautiful garden mostly run by thugs, and guess what, I was one of them,” Sacks has said. It was a relief for him, as a teen-ager, to become a competitive swimmer. His four daily hours in the pool were a ritual of solitude, discipline, exertion. Sacks went for training runs or daylong walks on the edges of towns. He was running along one of Durban’s beaches when a line unfurled in his head: “If they capture me, I have not learned to speak.” Decades later, he incorporated it into a prose poem. The line was a plea: don’t make me account for a life I don’t wish to have.

When Sacks was sixteen, he enrolled in an exchange program that would take him to America. He dreamed of California—by then he’d become a surfer—but the program placed him with a family on the west side of Detroit. It was 1967. Smoke from the race riots hung over the city; armored cars idled in the streets. Sacks read James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael—writers who had been censored at home—and, when he returned, he transferred from medical school to the political-science program at the University of Natal, a center of anti-apartheid activism. He became friends with Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, and studied with Richard Turner, an intellectual leader of the South African left. At nineteen, Sacks gave speeches and organized anti-apartheid demonstrations.

the state of ponzi

The news from Florida likely led to this 2009 George Packer essay, "The Ponzi State," appearing on The New Yorker page I glanced at earlier today:
According to an investigative series in the Miami Herald, oversight by the state’s Office of Financial Regulation and its commissioner, Don Saxon, was so negligent that more than ten thousand convicted criminals got jobs in the mortgage business, including four thousand as licensed brokers, some of whom engaged in fraudulent deals. Until the rules were recently changed, felons in Florida lost the right to vote but could still sell mortgages. (Under pressure from Sink, Saxon resigned this past August.) Kathy Castor, Tampa’s representative in Congress, told me, “Florida was particularly lax when it comes to mortgage regulation.” She connected the mortgage crisis and the lack of oversight with state politics and the political power of developers. “We were hit by two Bushes, George and Jeb”—Florida’s governor from 1998 to 2006—“and there was very loose growth management. Because Jeb was aligned with the development industry, it was a speculator’s paradise.”

Also, this week The New York Times covered the plight immigrants who bought taxi medallions in New York City in the years before Uber and other ride-hailing apps moved in, and found that their investments have lost such value so quickly that's it's nearly impossible to break even or survive at all.

I should say that in both cases, Florida housing and New York ride services, although neither is entirely unlike a ponzi scheme, there's a difference between buying at or near a bubble's top and a ponzi scheme as traditionally understood. I imagine that in America in 2017, we are accustomed to various unfortunates facing financial ruin due to the rapid rise and fall of prices.

Peter Hessler reporting from Colorado

He had served in Slovakia. “Every time you get to look at how somebody else lives, it gives you perspective that’s useful,” Riehl told me. In 2000, he was sent to a village in eastern Slovakia, where he advocated for bicyclists’ rights. Riehl told me that living in a post-Communist society strengthened his appreciation for freedom, truth, and the virtues of small government. Now he was applying that idealism to his current campaign. “I do unequivocally state that the Sentinel is full of fake news,” he said.

Kenneth Goldsmith in The New Yorker

I'd read so many online responses to Yi Fen Chou (the "pooped" poet), Vanessa Place, and Kenneth Goldsmith that I did something I rarely do these days.  Which was to sit in the library and read the entire Alec Wilkinson piece on KG, a poet I'd never heard of until the last few weeks, despite spending the majority of my life in University City in West Philly. It's almost a surprise I wasn't born in Clark Park, right where John Ebersole has sworn off white poets writing about race and dreamed up Public Pool. Based on Ebersole's online poetry personality, I'd assume he is a migrant to University City, not someone like me who grew up there, but I don't know. Anyway, the un-New Yorker-ish "resentfully" (an "ly" from those guys?) is noted, a jab that doesn't add anything to the profile, but in a life of grading, parenting, commuting, surviving, it was reading to enjoy. It was a break, a chance to read an extended profile of a writer, and I've enjoyed many of these over the years, often when I was previously unfamiliar with the writer's creative work, and mostly from Harper's Magazine or The New Yorker. Wilkinson's profile captured KG's quirks. I saw multiple points of view about his poetry's value, or not, thoughts about his copying, and I appreciated he's read Ulysses several times and much admires Benjamin, Joyce, etc. (these guys aren't my guys, but it's disturbing that they could be dismissed as dead white guys). Goldsmith comes across as a nerd-dandy-intellectual of sorts, somewhat aware that he is playing the poet-fool, out there hustling in funny clothes. So he's a human being—a goof?, a jerk?—but not a murderer. He's a wealthy man, perhaps, but no doubt, this is only relative to the pervasive poverty in the world of poetry (news alert: in fact, he is rich by any definition although the pervasive poverty of poetry remains). His projects sound creative, if not poetic, and he'd tell you, I think, he's a plagiarizer by more than one definition. It would make sense to me if his appropriation did not stand the test of time although with art, and the commerce surrounding it, one never knows. Past poets who mastered PR and marketing in their own lifetime have managed to stay in print long after it. I'm thinking mainly of Allen Ginsberg, whose strategy (sorry, I meant spontaneous impulse to do this or that) included meeting late in life with writers associated with WWII fascism, Celine and Pound, protesting nukes and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and standing in the background of Bob Dylan music videos (for more detail, read American Scream). Even when he rambles on race, I doubt The Donald will reference KG as "one of those New York Jew poets who cracks out of tune," but KG, VP, and PP's detractors have gotten me reading more poems. It reminded me to hunt down some poetry and prose from a writer I associate with Philly, Linh Dinh, as well as some new ones, Franny Choi, Nomi Stone, Jenny Zhang. And by coincidence I heard Candace Wiley and Skip Eisiminger read poetry at an event I organized down here. My version of Philly poetry has nothing to do with KG. It starts with Lamont Steptoe and Don Riggs, and it extends to so many talented others who've mainly lived in South Philly, Center City, particularly back when it was affordable, or even in the suburbs. These poets have studied and taught variously at Penn, Drexel, Temple, CCP, and other schools; some are from the region and others moved to Philly because an artist could afford its cost of living. After Alec on Kenny, I was on a roll, reading about and by all manner of older affluent why-pee-poes. I read most of the Jane Smiley interview in the new print copy of The Paris Review, highly recommended, and then a chunk of the Bernie Sanders profile from Mother Jones. From the New York Review of Books, I read a paragraph or two of George Soros on Ukraine, but that was all I could stand although I often recommend his father Tivadar's book on surviving the Holocaust in Hungary. I thought I'd read in the print version that Goldsmith had relatives on both sides who died in the Shoah, but when I returned more recently to the online version of the article, even after some skimming, I could not find this detail although that's not to say that these facts had been disappeared.

Jack Kerouac in The New Yorker

from The New Yorker's archives quoting Jack Kerouac's diaries:

Tuesday, February 28, 1950. My new plans for March: soon as I get my money, I’ll join the morning club at the Y and work out almost every weekday. Also, black coffee (no cream and sugar); chinning from the door (which has no real grip, so I can only do ten or eleven or twelve); and less sleep. I’ve been getting fat and lazy. Time for action, time for a new life, my real life. I’ll be twenty-eight in two weeks. Two meals a day instead of three. Much travelling. No stagnation. No more sorrows! No more metaphysical awe! Action … speed … grace … Go! Writing from true thoughts instead of stale rehashes. I’m going to express more and record less in “On the Road.”

toss up?

John Cassidy at The New Yorker, a magazine endorsing Barack Obama, seems to indicate that the race is as close as some recent polls indicate. His map still tilts toward an Obama victory and yet his writing acknowledges that some of the states leaning blue could very well wind up in the hands of Romney.

On the radio on the ride to Ohio, aside from NPR, whose experts both predict an Obama victory as at least 70 percent likely, almost all of the talk radio is unabashedly right wing to ostensibly neutral, that comes across as right wing when a Democrat (or this Democrat) is in charge.

Larry Kudlow, a bow-tie throwback money guy who will communicate in a friendly way with cohosts across the political aisle, seemed to be the only conservative acknowledging that the Obama victory is still the likely occurrence.

And then there is the conspiracy theory or legitimate questions surrounding Tagg Romney's purchase of voting machines that will be used in Ohio.

So it feels like everything is up in the air, which could be why the Utah paper endorses Obama and one in Florida that endorsed Obama in 2008 now swings to Romney.

PS--On topic, this sappy tribute to freedom, tattoos, and American nationalism caught my eye although it's a bit disturbing as to what it seems to imply about the intended audience (college students? all of us?).