One afternoon a little over a year ago, I got a brief and mysterious e-mail from a man named Jackson Taylor. It was sent from a personal Gmail account. “I am heading up a new literary fellowship here in New York,” he wrote. “You have been secretly nominated for a spot in the inaugural group—and I was wondering if I might have a moment of your time to speak by phone? The fellowship begins in April but won’t be publicly announced until June.” Before I had a chance to respond, my cell phone rang: it was Jackson. He said he was travelling and sounded out of breath, but I heard something about a “congress of writers” that would teach skills and speak truth to power. If I showed up for twice-weekly sessions for two semesters, I would receive ten thousand dollars. The program’s benefactor, Jackson told me, was the family foundation of Leonard Riggio, the executive chairman of Barnes & Noble. They had “deep pockets,” he said.
To reduce Once More We Saw Stars to a “grief memoir” is to do it a categorical injustice. The book transcends the despair of mourning, ushering into its pages familial unity, bona fide romance, ontological disillusionment, existential triumph, dilating dexterously between experiences specific and universal. With propulsive sentences Greene sails what could have proven an unnavigable story forward, laying to, masterfully, to relish in the sublime. “Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it, a blinding fission of every emotion,” he writes. “The world is charged with significance, with meaning, and the world around you, normally so solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin, translucent. I feel like I’ve discovered an opening.” With generosity and journalistic command, Greene shares this opening he has discovered with all of us.
So when I hear the term “soap opera,” the first thing that comes to mind isn’t evil twins or sudden amnesia but rather the effort that it takes to create four new narratives each week, something like 260 hours of television a year, and to do it a way that keeps an audience invested for decades, for an actual lifetime. This is not something that can be done with narrative trickery. Story is needed. And for story you need plot.
At a Television Critics Association panel earlier this year, no less a luminary than Meryl Streep referred to HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” unironically, as “a piece.” As in: a piece of art, not a piece of . . . you know.
Who would have ever dreamed that television would one day be spoken of with such unadulterated reverence by Meryl freaking Streep?
This is a world that Emily Nussbaum willed — and, to some extent, wrote — into being. From her graduate school days vouching for the underrated excellence of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to sweater-vest-wearing culture snobs; to New York magazine, where she immortalized her appreciation for the full range of high-to-lowbrow pop culture by creating the Approval Matrix; to the New Yorker where, in 2016, her vibrant, incisive analyses of an ascendant medium won her a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
The important answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward. Unless they are as incompetent as the air force and air traffic control, the Malaysian police know more than they have dared to say. The riddle may not be deep. That is the frustration here. The answers may well lie close at hand, but they are more difficult to retrieve than any black box. If Blaine Gibson wants a real adventure, he might spend a year poking around Kuala Lumpur.
Much of consequence happened in 1969, which means that this year is chockablock with golden anniversaries: the moon landing, Stonewall, the Manson murders. But do not neglect the fact that 2019 also marks a half century of Jazzercise.
The leaders of Jazzercise, Inc., know what you’re thinking. “When you hear Jazzercise you think legwarmers and leotards, right? Or a workout for your Mom but not for you?” the company’s Web site says. “It’s true that we were the original dance party workout. But today the leotards—and the 80’s—are long gone and our classes are way too hot for legwarmers.” Countless workout fads have come along since the heyday of Jazzercise: Tae Bo, Pilates, Zumba, boxing, spinning, pole dancing. And yet Jazzercise persists: today, according to the company, there are more than seven thousand franchises, serving roughly two hundred and fifty thousand customers in twenty-five countries and grossing somewhere between ninety-five million and a hundred million dollars per year. It’s big in Japan.
When the American photographer Vivian Maier died at the age of 83 in 2009, impoverished and alone, no one knew who she was. The 150,000 pictures she had taken on her beloved Rolleiflex during her lifetime – street portraits, mostly – had never been published; many of her negatives had never even been printed. But all that changed in 2009, when a collector who had acquired a portion of her archive put the images online. Ever since, she has been both a popular enigma and a celebrated artist, her photographs widely exhibited and increasingly expensive to buy. In 2013, she was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, and now we find the bare bones of her life at the heart of a playful, tricksy and sometimes exasperating novel by the Danish writer Christina Hesselholdt.
Neal Stephenson’s new novel, as his veteran fans will soon discern, is a sequel to his earlier book, “Reamde,” though it’s not touted as such in the marketing material. The reason for this omission might be that, despite featuring the same cast, “Fall” is as different from “Reamde” in tone and purpose as possible. Leave it to this master trickster to have us board a cruise ship we expect to voyage to Club Med, but which instead delivers us to the Twilight Zone.
Spend some time thinking about human nature and you’ll inevitably end up grappling with contradictory evidence for what makes us tick. On the one hand, human history is replete with examples of cooperation, problem-solving, and altruism. On the other, humans have been responsible for genocides, slavery and family separation, and indifference or inaction in the face of suffering. Thinkers from Aristotle to Thomas Hobbes, Philippa Foot, and John Gray have attempted to grapple with our essential nature as a species, asking whether we are capable of improvement. In the mid-20th century, the human sciences entered the discussion. As historian Erika Lorraine Milam details in Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America, influential researchers believed they could trace humanity’s goodness — or awfulness — to our evolutionary past, our environment, or our genes.