Pushkin’s life and verse on stage: “In Pushkin: A Life Played Out the perplexity is whether the great poet could in any way be separate from the profligate man. Pushkin means no ill. To the contrary, he is devoted to the ideal of freedom for the serfs, but he is immersed in a life of recklessness and betrayals on a path of self-destruction. His early death was an incalculable loss to Russian literature. Could it have been otherwise? The playwright allows us—for a time—to imagine an alternative, just as the play hurtles to its inevitable end.”
Matthew Carney reports on China’s increasingly sophisticated monitoring of its citizens: “What may sound like a dystopian vision of the future is already happening in China. And it’s making and breaking lives. The Communist Party calls it ‘social credit’ and says it will be fully operational by 2020. Within years, an official Party outline claims, it will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.” (HT: J. Peter Escalante)
What is “late” capitalism? Stephen Miller explains.
The University of Pennsylvania to become the first Ivy League school to offer an online bachelor’s degree.
The president of Johns Hopkins University tells his students to take that “introductory philosophy, we will all benefit.”
This man attends every Trump-themed book release at Kramerbooks & Afterwords in D.C. to talk to the press and get quoted in the paper: “‘It’s so easy to show up at these things, and if you want to, you can make eye contact with any member of the press and they will eagerly talk to you forever,’ Carlisle said Tuesday evening, after attending Kramerbooks’ release party for Bob Woodward’s Fear.”
Sarah Lyall reviews Robert Galbraith’s (J. K. Rowling’s) latest mystery novel: “Because Rowling is so straightforwardly liberal, it’s a pleasant surprise to find that Galbraith is an equal-opportunity satirist. He is just as happy to send up the self-righteous anti-capitalists of the left as the clueless twits of the right.” But it’s also a “big and baggy” book that leaves “few of its protagonists’ activities, emotions and motivations” to the reader’s imagination. Everything is “exhaustively described.”
What “Rip Van Winkle” can teach us about the American founding: “ Irving’s story helps his readers experience the founding in the most unlikely of ways. Rip Van Winkle sleeps through it. In fact, the founding is absent. Nevertheless, the founding’s absence is what makes Irving’s story so effective at showing how self-government imbues a people with pride for their country and desire to preserve it.”
A Reader Recommends: Amanda Hamm recommends Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator. “Once again, the author bends time by going back and forth between 1920’s St. Petersburg and the same city, 1999.”
Essay of the Day:
Michael Upchurch argues in The American Interest that the late Tom Wolfe, who passed away in May, will be remembered primarily for The Bonfire of the Vanities:
“In 1987, Wolfe turned from writing nonfiction that read like fiction to writing fiction that read like a documentary of its time. It’s amusing, three decades after its publication, to look at Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s somewhat nervous dustjacket assurance to readers that while The Bonfire of the Vanities was a novel, it was ‘based on the same sort of detailed on-scene reporting as Wolfe’s great non-fiction bestsellers.’
“It’s also worth recalling that, in the 1980s, minimalist fiction was having its heyday. Raymond Carver was, for some people, a god. Anne Beattie was delivering tales in which lack of affect was often a character’s guiding emotion. Small canvases were the rule. Short clipped phrasing was de rigueur. In that context, The Bonfire of the Vanities came like a welcome explosion of literary fireworks. Wolfe loved language. He had riotous fun with it. He liked showing off his gargantuan vocabulary and formidably well-stocked mind. He delighted in coining phrases, the most famous from Bonfire being ‘social X-rays’ (for fashionably diet-starved New York socialites).
“Wolfe’s provocative 1989 Harper’s essay, ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,’ made an after-the-fact case for what he was up to in Bonfire. He granted that capturing the teeming multi-ethnic chaos of New York City on the page was a daunting challenge. Still, he thought it was worth a try. And he believed the best way to do it was to bring back ‘the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep.’ Bonfire pulls it off—not that the book is soberly realistic. Instead, it’s packed with stylization and artifice galore, full of farcical distorting mirrors that illuminate reality even as they warp it.”
Photo: Oklahoma supercell
Poem: Paul Mariani, “De Profundis”
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