Longtime Daily Show correspondent Stephen Colbert noticed a distinct shift under Stewart’s leadership and embraced it. “When Craig was there, it wasn’t so political,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2005. “Jon has asked us to be political, and to share his interest in doing political comedy that actually has some thought behind it.” Shortly after Stewart’s premiere as anchor of The Daily Show, on January 11, 1999, it was clear that the show had grown up a bit. The focus on pop culture receded as news and politics rose to the surface.
Not everyone was convinced. Herzog worried that politics felt “like homework.” He left the network shortly after Stewart made his debut, for what would prove to be a short-lived stint at Fox. “I was wrong,” Herzog admits. “He was right. And he remains right. Politics is culture.”
Much of what made the original Southern Reach books powerful and disturbing can be found in this new volume. Once again, VanderMeer produces a near-seamless shading between the weirdness and danger of Area X, and the natural environment that preceded it.
Pressly’s book is a probing critique of a modern public sphere that overwhelms the private realm, but it goes further than that. He argues for privacy, or what he more accurately terms “oblivion,” as not just freedom from surveillance but a positive, albeit essentially unknowable value—a place where true human depth and personality reside.
On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome with his Italian partner Isabella, Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sitting at the table. He fainted, landing on his neck and becoming tetraplegic as a result. He spent 2023 in Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack. “I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir.
Aciman’s elegant narrative is an echo of the in-between, the blurred passage into adulthood. He began to uncover an identity in the romanticism of European cities. He says that “Rome never asked to be loved,” and yet he learned to love it—for its flaws and for its holding of his family in their pain and displacement.