But there’s also the compelling case that reading in pubs is a British institution. The bond between literature and pubs is time-honoured. Countless books and pubs across the UK celebrate their common history, from Compton Mackenzie’s novel Whisky Galore gently parodying Hebridean islanders’ fondness for a good dram, all the way down to Broadstairs highlighting Charles Dickens’s affection for its Kentish coastline in two separate museums, a week-long Dickens festival, and, inevitably, a pub. London, Dublin and Edinburgh have plenty of literary-themed pub crawls, and you just need to cast your eye over a list of your local pubs to appreciate how many book or writer-inspired names they’ve enthusiastically adopted. If you aren’t within 10 miles of a “Shakespeare’s Something”, you’re in France.
My hunch is that although the novel can do almost anything when it’s done right, it’s really most at home when it’s at home. Born in its true shape in the bourgeois 18th century, that era of burgeoning literacy and print and urbanization and social mobility, and written and read from the very beginning by so many women, it side-stepped the traditions of male education. For centuries men had been educated mostly through the classics, trained in conventions of rhetorical address, fixed categories of subject matter and style. In the novel, women took the pen into their hands and wrote about the daily life they knew, in the vernacular language of everyday. And men did too, of course.
What books do we reach for when we know that we soon will die? And do we read to prepare ourselves for death, as the ancient Egyptians did with the “Book of the Dead,” or to distract ourselves from it — to break from the crisis of the present? Dying of leukemia in 2004, Susan Sontag carried “Don Quixote” with her to radiation treatments, and blitzed through “Persepolis” in her hospital bed at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Sigmund Freud, dying of mouth cancer, read Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin,” refusing all painkillers save aspirin to maintain his lucidity. In Saul Bellow’s final novel, “Ravelstein,” the secular protagonist, modeled on the philosopher Allan Bloom, finds himself unexpectedly drawn to the sacred as he is dying of AIDS: “If he had to choose between Athens and Jerusalem, among us the two main sources of higher life, he chose Athens, while full of respect for Jerusalem. But in his last days, it was the Jews he wanted to talk about, not the Greeks.”
“Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp,” by the Polish painter, intellectual and writer Jozef Czapski, represents a unique contribution to this tradition of last books. Delivered to a group of P.O.W.s in a Russian labor camp where he was imprisoned in the winter of 1940-41, Czapski’s wide-ranging lectures on Proust provide a rare glimpse into what it means to turn to art and literature at a time when mortality is on your mind. Born in Prague in 1896 to an aristocratic family, Czapski, who was fluent in Polish, Russian, German and French, fought for Poland against the Bolsheviks, eventually moving to Paris to pursue a bohemian career as a painter. Through the connections of the Polish pianist Maria Godebska-Sert, he was ushered into Parisian artistic and literary circles, where he met several friends of Proust, who had recently died. Discouraged by the difficulty of the French master’s prose and the extravagance of his style, Czapski abandoned an attempt to read “Remembrance of Things Past.” After a romantic disappointment, however, he returned, eccentrically picking up the novel in the middle, with the sixth volume, “The Fugitive.” This early encounter blossomed into a literary obsession.
Quillette’s suggestion that our intellectual media stifles “open-minded” discussion is dismissed by its detractors as being made in bad faith. If anything, they say, there is too much “open discussion” these days; we have a president who will say anything at any time, neo-Nazis marching through university towns, and have you been on Reddit? Here, too, it’s fair to be skeptical: many calling for open-mindedness simply want to be able to say contemptible things with no consequences or criticism, and there are certain ideas that we refuse to countenance for good reason.
But which beliefs exactly should be judged as “out of bounds”—and who gets to be the referee? How wide is the circle of ideas that are not even worthy of discussion? Such questions are themselves open to debate, and the judgments we make about them in particular cases will tend to be provisional. Still, this is preferable to the alternative. For there is a growing cost to pretending we’ve arrived at a settled consensus about their answers, or to denying that they are even real questions.
But Lopez’s friend said the crazy diet was science-based: The absence of carbs and abundance of fat pushes your body into a biological state called ketosis, during which you burn fat instead of glucose. Lopez—who was five foot nine, 200 pounds, and “a bit portly”—was intrigued. His online digging led to the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Rogan, a college dropout and self-described “silly bitch,” unpacks complex topics with no pretense. He was interviewing the top keto researcher, Dom D’Agostino, Ph.D., a professor of physiology at the University of South Florida.
“It was interesting to hear a scientist talk about what he eats and why,” says Lopez. D’Agostino is not a salesman, and he did not create the diet. Which raises the question: Who did? That’s when things get weird, involving a two-time felon, medical misconduct, and multiple deaths. But Lopez didn’t know about keto’s history. He just wanted to find out if the hype could be real. “I threw out all my carb-heavy foods, like ramen and Hot Pockets,” he says. “Then I grabbed as much bacon, grass-fed butter, and steak as I could find.”
It’s in hundreds of shops like his around the city, many no bigger than subway cars, where you’ll find New Yorkers shoulder to shoulder, eating slices in near silence. “Teens, Wall Street guys, guys camped out with a shopping cart, a pizza place is the most diverse space in the city,” said Colin Atrophy Hagendorf, author of “Slice Harvester: A Memoir in Pizza” and host of the Radio Harvester podcast. “Inside a pizzeria that dream of diverse New York City is a reality. I think that’s such a beautiful thing.”
Silicon Valley’s Phoenix-like resurrection is a story of ingenuity and initiative. It is also a story of callousness, predation, and deceit. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise — what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
“Big Bang” is a stunningly accomplished novel, both deeply American and deeply weird. So is it, as Bowman claimed, “true history?” Lethem, for his part, urges caution: “Indeed, though Bowman’s book is full of facts, none of them is to be considered strictly reliable.” And of course it doesn’t matter; this is, after all, a work of fiction, and a vastly entertaining one at that.
One chord attached you to me, enclosed us in a symphony;
Two feet you found your way around, holding papa’s hand, you learned to stand;