Other dealers characterize Horowitz as a pulp-novel antagonist: the dastardly villain. It’s not just that he is brazen, or that his success inspires envy and flashes of antisemitism. It’s that rare books have always been a handshake business: the dealer Robert Wilson recalled approvingly that W. H. Auden invited him to cart away his books and letters and “send me whatever you think proper.” Few who’ve dealt with Horowitz would be as blithe. Ed Maggs, a prominent English dealer, told me, “Glenn is such a very clever guy, but I never knew that he particularly understood the truth. I would not trust him one inch.”
To many of his colleagues’ delight, Horowitz was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney in 2022. A decade earlier, he had sold five legal pads scrawled with lyrics by the Eagles’ drummer and singer, Don Henley, including thirteen pages of work on “Hotel California.” He’d purchased the pads in 2007 for $50,000 and sold them five years later for $65,000, so his profit was trifling. But, when the two collectors who bought the pads later tried to auction off some of the lyrics, Henley became convinced that they’d been filched from him, and ultimately contacted the D.A. Horowitz and the collectors were charged with possessing stolen property, and Horowitz was accused of helping to fabricate the provenance of the pads.
People have been forgetting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. You spend thousands of dollars on the most important night of your life, and as the days tick down you get more and more excited—only two months until I see Taylor Swift! Only fifty-nine days! Only fifty-eight!—until the magical day itself. You get dressed up in imitation of one of her outfits. You wear a friendship bracelet, because there’s a Taylor Swift song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid” where she mentions friendship bracelets. You write the number thirteen on your hand, because Taylor Swift sometimes writes the number thirteen on her hand. You’re so full of excitement it feels like your heart might burst. And then, suddenly, it’s night, and you’re streaming out of the venue with hundreds of thousands of other fans, and you have no memory of what just happened. You know, intellectually, that you were there for more than four hours as the world’s biggest pop star performed her entire back catalog for you, and you sang along to every song. But you don’t remember it. You can’t conjure the images, or the feelings. You don’t feel anything at all.
Dried cells—it’s what’s for dinner. At least that’s what a new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are hoping to convince us. Their claims sound too good to be true: They say they can make food out of thin air.
But that’s exactly how certain soil-dwelling bacteria work. In nature, these “autotrophic” microbes survive on a meager diet of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor drawn directly from the atmosphere. In the lab, they do the same, eating up waste carbon and reproducing so enthusiastically that their populations swell to fill massive fermentation tanks. Siphoned off and dehydrated, that bacterial biomass becomes a protein-rich powder that’s chock-full of nutrients and essentially infinitely renewable.
And yet, Strout is a magician. From what might seem cussedly bathetic, deliberately underplayed, she produces rabbit after rabbit; moments of such sadness or illumination that the reader may feel momentarily winded before being compelled to continue.
Young people who came of age before the twenty-first century, Franz Nicolay argues in a new book called “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music,” could be forgiven for assuming that working one’s way up from gigs to a steady job in music was a plausible career path. You might not make it as a chart-topping star, but there were still opportunities for “band people”—the “hired guns” or “side-of-the-stagers” who offered structure and support. Music was everywhere, and there had to be people to play it. Nicolay’s book details the lives of working musicians, especially those far from the spotlight: background vocalists hired for uncredited recording sessions, rhythm guitarists playing on freelance contracts. Not that the spotlight in question shines all that brightly to begin with; most of the dozens of artists Nicolay spoke to work in commercially tenuous realms, such as indie rock or punk, in which a band like Sonic Youth represents the imagination’s zenith.
But anyone who has streamed a song on their phone for free can sense that something has changed.
What redeems these pages are the parts where Pacino reveals his single-minded commitment to his craft. When he confesses that he was happiest during the four years he spent making Looking for Richard, or exhorts younger actors to believe in the story “as if it happened to them”, you sense that Pacino is still a twentysomething wannabe theatre actor at heart, furiously practising his lines aloud in vacant lots.