I really really loved the Netflix adaptation of 100 Years of Solitude. The New York Review did not, but I totally disagree with the assertion that the book is not a telenovela.
Harper’s I’ve been subscribing to for only one year of its not-talked-about-enough 174 (!) year history, but I wholeheartedly recommend subscribing over, say, the Atlantic. Here are four pieces that genuinely took ahold of me:
About the collective creation of truth.
About the placebo effect of creating your own story, vis a vis science and god and art.
About how the politics of identity ruined contemporary art.
About the president and the staying power of bureaucracy.
This video of Billy Strings talking and playing guitar I watched raptly. If it’s too long just fast forward to 1:00:30 and watch his right hand.
This video explaining the political spectrum I had to watch twice because it was so savagely and smartly funny.
This short story by Samanta Schweblin blew my mind. (The Paris Review is also totally worth it for $59 a year.)
I loved the movie A Different Man, but I watched it on the plane and the woman next to me seemed very concerned whenever she looked over.
This album by Anna Ferrer is the most ancient-sounding totally new thing I’ve ever heard.
Babylon Berlin I binged recently and it vies for best-ever status. Slow burn but really has it all—20th century geopolitics, the advent of pop psychology, smoking cigs inside, gay burlesque culture, communism v republicanism v fascism, poor people eating rodents, meth and heroin, brainwashing—but the cool thing is how such a messy and horrible transition in world history plays out in such a richly interpersonal way.
You still haven’t read Anna Karenina?!
Like every other middle-class mom in America, I’ve been incessantly bringing up the hit podcast The Telepathy Tapes in conversation.
Jazz still rules.
This episode of the Ezra Klein Show was a great example of respectful and educated disagreement and I learned a lot from it.
Along those lines, in conclusion, definitely hit play on this complicated and beautiful and timely documentary about the always problematic but heart-of-gold man of American Letters, Norman Mailer.
Here’s a picture of the dog. Have a great day.
