Reviews and News:
A history of the NYPD: “I got mugged a bunch of times growing up in Brooklyn and thought I had it rough. But I didn’t have it nearly as bad as the German immigrant who, on a wintry night in the 1840s, took a walk through Battery Park. He was killed by robbers who then rifled his pockets and grew enraged when they found only 12 cents. So they hurled his body into the harbor. But it didn’t sink — it landed on the ice, where it remained in the morning, glowering at those who came to take in the view. Tough town. And one reason was the lack of a police force. Instead, a loosely organized group of ‘constables’ was responsible for public safety. They often got paid by the job and were routinely mocked, harassed and beaten by the many baddies who lurked in the alleys and packed the taverns and brothels of the roiling young city.”
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The meritocracy of Harry Potter: “You’re either born with magic or you aren’t, and if you aren’t there’s really not any obvious place for you in Hogwarts or any other wizarding establishment… So even from the perspective of the enlightened, progressive wizarding faction, then, Muggles are basically just a vast surplus population that occasionally produces the new blood that wizarding needs to avoid becoming just a society of snobbish old-money inbred Draco Malfoys. And if that were to change, if any old Muggle could suddenly be trained in magic, the whole thrill of Harry Potter’s acceptance at Hogwarts would lose its narrative frisson, its admission-to-the-inner-circle thrill. Which makes the thrill of becoming a magical initiate in the Potterverse remarkably similar to the thrill of being chosen by the modern meritocracy, plucked from the ordinary ranks of life and ushered into gothic halls and exclusive classrooms, where you will be sorted — though not by a magic hat, admittedly — according to your talents and your just deserts.”
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Paddington Bear creator Michael Bond dies.
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Revisiting the short, tragic life of Branwell Brontë: “Despite being a passionate poet, writer and artist, he failed to hold down conventional jobs, and repeatedly succumbed to vice. Finally, his world fell apart after the end of an affair with a married woman, Lydia Gisborne, which accelerated his dependence on opiates and alcohol. He died at the young age of 31 from the long-term effects of substance abuse.”
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What can be done about America’s permanently unemployed? “Why, since 1970, has each new downturn added to the ranks of the permanently unemployed? Social science has not fully answered this question, but the best guess involves a combination of a generous social safety net, deindustrialization, and social change.”
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Christopher O. Tollefsen reviews Andy Crouch’s The Tech-Wise Family: “Our internet dependence really is a crisis for families first, before it is a crisis for our schools, churches, and even our republic, for it is in the family that the effects of distraction and alienation most immediately rupture our chance at human flourishing. Family members who do not and cannot communicate with one another cease to be part of an intentional community with one another. The family then ceases to be the little school that makes possible virtue, community, and the cooperative pursuit of a common good in other social and political spaces.”
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Essay of the Day:
What’s it like be a ghost writer? Andrew Crofts explains in the Times Literary Supplement:
“The hiring of a ghostwriter is a mutually seductive process. Those who are ghosted know that their reputations are going to be channelled through our eyes, and they are eager to make the right impression while at the same time maintaining the upper hand. They tend to like to meet in their palatial homes or in hotels that they think will reflect well on them. The darkly polished Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge, equidistant from Harrods and Harvey Nichols, is particularly popular with Russians, Middle Easterners and Africans as a venue for brief meetings. For more lingering lunches, they usually favour the Rib Room in Sloane Street’s Jumeira Carlton Tower, owned by the grandees of Dubai, or China Tang, in the bowels of the Dorchester. Anyone who belongs to one of the grand clubs of Pall Mall will use that to impress their ghost, or the showier clubs of Mayfair and Soho. But what happens once you have been seduced into signing the confidentiality contracts and the money has pinged in from strangely named foreign accounts?
“It is important to remember that you may receive no recognition at all for writing the book, should it come to fruition. If they choose to acknowledge you on the cover, or somewhere more discreet inside, that is very useful for the winning of future assignments, but it is not to be expected. You can expect that they will entertain you royally while they are telling you their secrets, but once the job is over, so is your relationship. If you have the sort of temperament that suits the ghosting process, you will welcome that brevity, because what you wanted was an interesting story, not a new best friend. By the time the book is finished, you will be itching to get started on the next one, which will almost certainly be about something completely different.
“You don’t argue with your clients, or challenge their statements, however repulsive you may find them personally, unless they are contradicting themselves or saying something that either the publishers or the eventual readers are going to find hard to swallow. You want to encourage them to open up and tell you more, not clam up and become defensive. You are producing the book that they would write if they could, so any views expressed in it are theirs and not yours. You are writing in their voices, taking on their characters, pleading their case for them more eloquently than they are able to do for themselves, like a barrister would do for them were they to find themselves in court. Once a project is up and running, I hang around my subject like Charles Ryder hung around Sebastian Flyte, or Nick Carraway hung around Jay Gatsby, getting as much material on tape as possible while also imbibing his or her voice so that I will be able to reproduce it on the page, inventing dialogue and descriptions where necessary while staying in character.”
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Photo: Colima Volcano
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Poem: Catherine Tufariello, “Clear Water”
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