Every week at “Saturday Night Live” is just like every other week. The weeks are the same because they’re always fuelled by hard work, filled with triumphs and failures and backstage arguments, and built around a guest host—Jennifer Lopez, Lizzo, Elon Musk—who often has no idea what he or she is doing. Over the past fifty years, the job of Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, has been to make the stars look good, and to corral the egos and talents on his staff in order to get the program on the air, live. Since the début of “S.N.L.,” in 1975, he has fine-tuned the process, paying attention to shifting cultural winds. What began as an avant-garde variety show has become mainstream. (Amy Poehler has characterized the institution that made her famous as “the show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.”) But the formula is essentially unchanged. Michaels compares the show to a Snickers bar: people expect a certain amount of peanuts, a certain amount of caramel, and a certain amount of chocolate. “There’s a comfort level,” he says. The show has good years and bad, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership over it. Just about all viewers of “S.N.L.” believe that its funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. Michaels likes to say that people in the entertainment business have two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix “S.N.L.” (When J. D. Salinger died, in 2010, letters surfaced in which even he griped about what was wrong with the show.)
Cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret behind Michaels’s extraordinary tenure. “It’s him and Hitchcock,” John Mulaney told me. “No one else has had this kind of longevity.” Half of them think that Michaels has repeatedly been able to remake the show for a new audience because he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil. The other half wonder whether Michaels, gnomic and almost comically elusive, is a blank screen onto which they’ve all projected their hopes and fears and dark jokes—whether he, like the cramped stages in “S.N.L.” ’s Studio 8H, is just a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds.
It was below freezing the other Friday morning, in Long Island City, when the author Jhumpa Lahiri walked into a nondescript brick building beneath the Queens Boulevard overpass. She was wearing a long white wool coat and maroon suède boots. “That’s her!” someone said, springing up from a bench. As Lahiri took off her coat, she was given a nametag that read “BookOps” over the logo of the New York Public Library.
The N.Y.P.L. had just acquired Lahiri’s papers, among which are school book reports, an Italian rail ticket with scribbled ideas for a novel, and a piece of fan mail from the director M. Night Shyamalan, in which he shared that he’d cried after reading “Interpreter of Maladies.”
What is your favorite smell? This question may seem banal, but think carefully, because your answer will say something about who you are. Our most meaningful smells evoke intimate feelings, similar to how we are affected by music or art. It is almost impossible to talk about your favorite smell without getting personal. The smell of our partner or our children evokes feelings that are difficult to describe in words. A friend who recently became a father described the smell of his child as making him giddy with love. For dog lovers, the smell of the family dog is often high on the list of favorite smells.
These feelings are shaped by our memories and experiences. Researchers have shown that people often think other people’s pets smell bad, but not their own pets. New parents have the same attitude toward dirty diapers—it doesn’t smell as bad if it comes from your own child. These smells have a special meaning for us, and the emotions they evoke are due to olfactory memory—smelling enables us to remember events and emotions, and associate them with each other. This is what makes smells so deeply personal.
Gornick, 89, is a celebrated American writer not much known on these shores, although her work is diligently being resurrected by the wonderful Daunt Books. Having previously put out Fierce Attachments, the much-praised 1987 memoir about her complicated relationship with her mother, now it is republishing The Odd Woman and the City, a 150-page essay (originally published in the US in 2015) that casts Gornick as a modern-day flâneur traversing the streets of her beloved Manhattan, aiming both to keep loneliness at bay and to feed her insatiable writer’s curiosity.
The Shetland Way offers a fascinating insight into a unique place that holds past and future in uneasy tension, written with clarity and rooted in deep affection – not only for the islands but for the broader land and elements on which we all depend.
Angel recounts the history of two experiments in communal living in New Harmony that took place between 1814 and 1827. The first was led by George Rapp, a German pietist who established the town of Harmony as a religious commune; the second by Robert Owen, a secular proto-socialist from Wales who hoped to build a rationally managed society from the ground up after purchasing Rapp’s land in 1825. In what Lillian Robinson called “history’s least ‘studious’ study” of the communities, Young plays Rapp’s spiritual devotion against Owen’s faith in material progress—a contrast she likens to the “Cartesian split between body and soul.” Where Rapp “believed his people to be future angels,” Owen “believed all men to be machines.”
In juxtaposing their contrasting projects, Young mines Rapp’s and Owen’s failed experiments for salvageable, concrete traces of the loss and hope that fuel her fiction and poetry. Though the book is ostensibly a work of nonfiction, the “fairy tale” frame Young uses to narrate her histories draws it much closer to Sargent’s poetic “social dreaming” than to a dispassionate study of real-world utopian communities.
Oh, O.K. None of us read the book? Well, at least we’re all on the same page! Ha-ha, book-club humor.