Last year, the team behind The Simpsons produced a video for the French luxury fashion house Balenciaga that debuted in October at Paris Fashion Week. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) It featured the show’s characters walking a runway in Balenciaga designs, and was, depending on your worldview, what you might call a long commercial for the brand or a short episode of the show. David Silverman, a veteran Simpsons producer and animator who directed the short, describes it as “one of the hardest things I ever did.” Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s artistic director and, like a lot of 40-somethings, a fan of The Simpsons since childhood, gave note after note, trying to strike the right balance between caricature and sincere presentation of his clothing. “Simpsons characters,” Silverman says, are “quite different from human proportions, so in some respects we took great liberties. Cheating, we call it.” It took a year’s worth of work and in the end gave the people something they didn’t know they needed: an animated Homer Simpson—a lovable oaf who once gained 61 pounds to qualify for disability so he could work from home—posing in a red Balenciaga puffer jacket, a more recent iteration of which costs $2,850.
That the fashion industry now looks to The Simpsons for inspiration is odd for a group of characters who have, for the most part, never changed outfits. But Bart—with his skateboard and his malleable mind—is a proto--hypebeast if there ever was one. And in a recent episode parodying contemporary fashion, The Weeknd voiced the owner of a white-hot new streetwear company, Slipreme. Adidas has a Simpsons sneaker line, and Nike has made a shoe with a Marge Simpson color-way (featuring swaths of blue, like her hair, and light green, like her dress), which fetches an ungodly average price of $873 on the resale market. From the outset, the show’s creators always understood its business cachet. In the ’90s, The Simpsons shilled Butterfingers and plastic key chains—and mocked itself for its craven commercialism. As one Springfieldian says after encountering the latest example of the Simpson family selling out (an ad for a record, The Simpsons Go Calypso!), “Man, this thing’s really getting out of hand.” Three decades later, it’s a testament to the show’s longevity, not to mention American progress, that the Simpsons still appear on key chains, only now they’re made out of calfskin, by a luxury fashion house, and cost $260.
Who among us likes a wrap? Not “occasionally eats” or “will scarf in a pinch” but like-likes — who prefers a wrap? Or to use a Kondo-ism, for whom does a chilled sandwich wrap “spark joy?” Please point me to one person on this side of the metaverse who genuinely relishes sandwich fixings tightly rolled inside a cold, stiff emerald-tinged tortilla. My theory? The mythical wrap lover does not exist.
Not very long ago, eagles were rats in America’s public imagination. Despite the bald eagle’s position as a national symbol, the actual bird was widely despised until about the mid-20th century. Before that point, many people treated them like rodents and killed them without discretion—while also unselfconsciously admiring the bird’s likeness on government seals, coins, and memorabilia. In The Bald Eagle, Jack E. Davis offers a twofold biography: He traces the histories of both the emblem and the creature and describes how patriotic pleas for conservation finally allowed their public perception to merge. Most revealing is what he says about American exceptionalism.
But nostalgia is often not what we need. Comforting memories tend to filter the past. Jennifer Niesslein dives into this ambiguity in her new collection, Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia, a free-ranging mix of nine personal essays that entwine family history, social commentary, and pop cultural musings as the author plumbs her own rearview-mirror longings and white America’s revisionist histories.
In this exhilarating book, Terry Eagleton describes the sea change in literary criticism that occurred between the two world wars. The five intellectuals he concentrates on here are inevitably male – as well as Richards, there is TS Eliot, William Empson, FR Leavis and Raymond Williams – since Cambridge, the university with which they were all connected, was not particularly welcoming to female academics. Or, indeed, to anyone at all: most of the time these men appeared to dislike each other intensely and enjoyed saying so. Indeed, Eagleton’s great achievement here is to look beyond the scrim of five tricky personalities to identify the continuities in their work, which added up to a revolution in the way that people – not just professional academics, but the whole community of readers throughout the English-speaking world – thought and talked about books.
In her new book, “The Palace Papers,” Tina Brown takes on a centuries-old institution of strong personalities, byzantine rules, a definite pecking order and mercurial public support.
I don’t mean the monarchy. I mean the press.
Like a lot of us, A.J. Jacobs spent a chunk of the past two years doing puzzles, but at least he got a book out of it.
"The Puzzler," which he began before the pandemic, is the result. Like the self-described human guinea pig's other books — "The Know-It-All," about reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and the self-explanatory "The Year of Living Biblically" — it charts an experiment. But this experiment is easier to relate to and less rigid since — instead of following a predetermined course — the book loosely chronicles him taking a stab at more than a dozen kinds of brain-teasers.