In the creepy Netflix series You, which I’m slightly embarrassed to say I’ve watched one season of, manager and book nerd Joe Goldberg presides over a sprawling New York City bookstore, the kind that any book lover would be excited to come upon and linger in for hours. Besides books, it’s filled with plush chairs and reading nooks and lamps that emit soft light. A charming doorbell jingles when customers enter. Joe’s something of a romantic, and right away he falls for Guinevere Beck, an insecure graduate student who comes into the store and asks his help finding a book. Cringey flirting ensues—followed by obsession, stalking, and serial murder. Meanwhile, the store, Mooney’s—the exterior of which was filmed outside an actual bookstore on the Upper East Side, Logos Bookstore—seems to be doing just fine financially. Little do customers know, Joe has in the store’s basement a climate-controlled rare book storage and repair room-turned-dungeon where he tortures and murders his kidnapped victims in between friendly cash register interactions aboveground.
Murders aside, I find myself wishing I could visit a bookstore like Mooney’s. (Better yet, to walk—not drive—to one.) Bookstores, whether hosting author talks, book release events, or other gatherings, provide important social functions to their communities. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg in 1989 coined a term for places like bookstores, cafés, coffee shops, and hair salons, among others: “third places,” sites where people spend time while not at work or at home. As historian Evan Friss notes in his 2024 book The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, third places “function as critical sites for intellectual, social, political, and cultural exchange. They nurture existing communities and foster new ones.” Because they “cost nothing to enter,” “they are de facto public spaces, gathering spots.”
In November 1923, Ford Madox Ford, “like everyone else in Paris,” was sick with flu. Yet he was optimistic. He dashed off letters from a typewriter set on “a table across my bed.” In 1908, Ford founded The English Review, and edited its first fifteen issues. Now, as he wrote his daughter, he was “at my old game of starting reviews” again.
The Transatlantic Review had an almost preternatural birth. Paris “gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the tree-trunks.” Ford had a “vague sense rather than an idea” of what to do about this “immense seething cauldron” of artists, who “bubbled and overflowed,” but lacked a practical vision. His brother Oliver suggested a magazine. (The original name of the magazine was to be the Paris Review. The name was switched because the first serial advertisement was from Compagnie Transatlantique.)
Medieval science, broadly speaking, had followed Aristotle in seeking explanations in terms of the inherent causal properties of natural things. God was certainly involved, at least to the extent that he had originally invested things with their natural properties and was said to ‘concur’ with their usual operations. Yet the natural world had its own agency. Beginning in the 17th century, the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes and his fellow intellectual revolutionaries dispensed with the idea of internal powers and virtues. They divested natural objects of inherent causal powers and attributed all motion and change in the universe directly to natural laws.
But, for all their transformative influence, key agents in the scientific revolution such as Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton are not our modern and secular forebears. They did not share our contemporary understandings of the natural or our idea of ‘laws of nature’ that we imagine underpins that naturalism.
This dissonance between the idealized notion of dying speech, based on people’s expectations and cultural ideals, and the reality of final moments so often complicated our understanding of death. And when delirium enters the equation, the gap between expectation and reality widens even further.
What should we make of people who can speak and yet make no sense?
One big author and one major publisher announced within weeks of each other that they were through with the practice of blurbs, and the resulting conversation threw publishing into a tizzy. In the process, it provided a new lens on who has access to clout and resources in an increasingly precarious industry.
“You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip” is a whirlwind inquiry into one of society’s oldest practices. McKinney writes about gossip with an intellectual rigor that borders on reverence, explaining how a raunchy Doja Cat lyric exemplifies the theory of mind and how the notorious burn book from “Mean Girls” actually helped teenagers avoid a predatorial teacher.