The word reckoning has several definitions, and in many ways, David Zweig’s important book, An Abundance of Caution, which describes the decisions that led to the mass, sustained closure of American schools during the COVID pandemic, touches on several of them.
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When I first heard about Lollapalooza, I was 15 years old, with the morning show on Atlanta’s 99X alternative rock station announcing the news through my clock radio. After a years-long hiatus, the legendary alternative music tour with a funny name was coming back. Jane’s Addiction headlining! Audioslave! Incubus! Queens of the Stone Age! This was Lollapalooza 2003 (presented by Xbox), and this was a big deal.
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In late 2008 during the depths of the global financial crisis, someone going by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto registered a website domain and posted a nine-page white paper describing the technical workings of something called Bitcoin, a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” to an obscure moderated mailing list frequented by privacy-obsessed computer nerds. In January 2009, this shadowy Nakamoto figure released an alpha version of the open-source software for Bitcoin to the masses and then spent the next two years engaging in online discussions to answer questions and troubleshoot glitches with the new blockchain-based decentralized technology. In 2011, he (or she or they) abruptly went dark and disappeared into the ether, leaving the world with a self-perpetuating digital money-printing machine.
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Reading David Mamet’s new book of essays, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, I was reminded of how loosely jointed and shape-shifting an essay can be. In this collection, a single essay can pivot from palindromes to springboks to why theatrical events always begin a few minutes after the hour. (Without fail, Mamet says, it takes six or seven minutes for the audience to become quiet with anticipation.) This same eight-page piece of writing then launches into an elaborate comparison of our current anxieties about race, sex, and the environment to the feelings that gave rise to the Salem witch trials.
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When William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008, the United States lost its most articulate champion of conservative ideas. Over the course of a 60-year career in the public eye, Buckley did just about everything: published books and articles, lectured, wrote a newspaper column, edited a national magazine, advised politicians, and even ran for office. He was fortunate to live long enough to see the hopes he nourished as a young man come to pass when, after long and patient work, conservatives captured the Republican Party, elected a conservative president, and, most of all, promoted the policies that brought about the collapse of communism.
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Making a proper diagnosis is a crucial step for physicians in developing a rational treatment plan to either cure disease or relieve suffering. Sometimes, using modern imaging technology and laboratory testing, diagnosis is a straightforward process. But other times, despite extensive testing, no coherent picture emerges from patients’ complaints. In her book, The Age of Diagnosis, Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan, a neurologist, explores the complexities and potential pitfalls of the diagnostic process. She tries to make the case that there is much over-diagnosis in contemporary health care. She contends that many widely used designations like long COVID and chronic Lyme disease are labels given to vague and unrelated symptoms that are psychosomatic in origin yet have been used to satisfy patient anxiety and physician need for certainty.
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"When conservatives discuss novels," Christopher Scalia complains in his entertaining and useful 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), "we tend to mention the same handful of works. We cherish a reliable and sturdy stock that hasn’t been replenished in a generation or two"—a stock that includes The Lord of the Rings, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and, heaven help us, Atlas Shrugged. It shouldn’t be that way. Conservatives should be widely read literary people.
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Do you remember the year 2000? Twenty-five years on, I can barely recall all the fuss over “Y2K,” but I think it was around that time when, in an airport bookstore, I spotted a novel by a writer I hadn’t yet tried, Michael Connelly, though I’d seen reviews praising him. The book at hand, if memory serves, was Angels Flight, published in hardcover in 1999 and in paperback the following year. I bought it to read on the flight back to Chicago—and loved it. I promptly acquired his earlier novels (Angels Flight was his eighth), starting with the first one, The Black Echo, published in 1992, and I’ve read (and reread) all of the books that have appeared since then. I’m sure a lot of other readers would say the same thing.
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She is not the protagonist one would root for—adulterer, opportunist, sexual masochist, foulmouth, backslider, self-loather, abuser of mind-numbing substances. Yet by the last line of her memoir, journalist Laurie Woolever commands respect thanks to her profundity and sheer, clear-eyed self-awareness.
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In 2012, the Tumblr blog "Nice Guys of OKCupid" spotlighted a now-familiar archetype: the self-proclaimed "nice guy" whose progressive, sensitive façade masks entitlement, resentment, and self-absorption. Matt Gasda’s new novel, The Sleepers, animates a pretentious, Ivy League version of this archetype. Set in Brooklyn, it follows Dan—a hyper-online, upwardly mobile academic—steeped in some of the central tensions of the millennial era.
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