Before Sarah Rachul was a Disney adult, she was a Disney baby. “I don’t really ever remember a time when the Disney movies or characters weren’t a part of my life,” says the 29-year-old account director, who is based in Ohio. When Rachul was a toddler, her parents and grandparents began taking her to Disney theme parks; today, she holidays there regularly, usually with a pair of mouse ears atop her head. Sometimes, she subtly dresses up like Disney characters, which is known as “Disney Bounding” (full-character costumes are banned inside the parks, so guests aren’t confused with employees). She even hosts her own podcast about Disney, The Pixie Dust Project.
Rachul is a proud “Disney adult” – a nebulous and often pejorative term for a grown-up who is a fervent fan of the Walt Disney Company. In the popular imagination, a Disney adult is a childless, self-infantilised and overly excitable millennial; someone who lacks both self- and social awareness. People have said as much to Rachul. In 2022, 2.2 million people watched a video of her breaking down in tears upon meeting a Goofy mascot at a Disney park – many commenters told her to “grow up”, but others told her she was “pure”.
As a repository of language, New York is nowhere near utopia. But it could be almost like a modern Babel—not the one from the biblical myth, cursed and divided by mutual unintelligibility, nor a “Babel in reverse” that steamrolls languages into a single tongue, but one where hundreds of languages thrive in a diverse network. Could there be a version of the city in which English, Chinese, Spanish, and other widely spoken languages are useful tools for mutually intelligible conversation, not killer languages whose speakers assume their speech is superior? In this imaginary—but not impossible—New York, it would be a place where vastly different languages would be recognized, interpreted, and enjoyed, not wished away or weeded out.
If you have been to the Melting Pot before, it was likely on a date. Maybe it was a first date, where dipping bread cubes and apple chunks into a pot of burbling cheese, cooked right at your table, offered a welcome distraction from the awkwardness of getting to know a new person. My own first experience at the restaurant was a first date with a man whose name I do not remember, but I vividly recall that I accidentally (lightly!) stabbed him with a fondue fork whilst reaching for a chunk of bread.
The most dramatic steakhouse performance is the act of sending back the steak. To be clear, I have never in my life sent a steak, or any meal, back. May I die first. But I do love watching people send their steaks back. In the steakhouse, only you, the patron, know the ideal wellness or rareness of the steak you have ordered. Too rare or too well, either way, servers whisk steaks back to the kitchen upon request with absolute understanding, a grave affirmational nod. It is an expected part of each evening. Oftentimes, steaks return looking exactly as they did when they were first delivered.
The Turtle House is an intergenerational story, yes, but instead of centering on inherited traumas, it focuses, rather, on the potential for strength and resilience in an uncontrollable world.
“I do think I know a hot dog from a real artist,” Joan Acocella observed modestly last year. Few would disagree. Watching her tell them apart, with an occasional blast of her savage wit, was a treat for readers for four decades. Sadly, the publication of her new collection, “The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays,” comes just weeks after her death Jan. 7 at age 78. Bringing together some of her smartest and most entertaining pieces on literature and language published between 2007 and 2021, the volume must now serve as a makeshift monument to Acocella’s career.
Remotely is a pandemic book. Confined to their San Francisco home during the COVID-19 lockdown, the critic and his wife, photographer Lucy Gray, obsess over TV, he writes, “because she and I have always reckoned we were living in a story, talking to each other and to the TV. And one point of television was to give us all a way of talking to ourselves about what the world might be.” So, the book becomes a dialogue, with Lucy’s character speaking in italics.
This form lends Remotely much of its poetry. But how so? For one thing, Thomson cunningly matches form and content.