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Saturday, September 16, 2023

In today’s newsletter, The Weekend Essay, and then: • The futility of the Never Trump billionaires • How Emily Wilson made Homer modern • A week of chaos in Kevin McCarthy’s Washington

Lost in the Mountains In the nineteen-sixties, my sleepaway camp was delightfully under-supervised. Then a camper went missing. By David Owen Photograph by Gilles Peress / Magnum In 1967, during the summer of “Sgt. Pepper,” I spent a month at a camp near Florissant, Colorado. When I arrived, from Kansas City, I sent my parents a brief postcard, addressed to “Occupant,” to let them know I hadn’t died en route. I was twelve. I lived in a tent with four other boys and a counsellor. One day, the smallest boy, called Moose, took off all his clothes, climbed to the top of the bunk bed in the center of the tent, and threw a hunting arrow at someone, for a reason I don’t recall. The arrow missed but made a hole in the canvas, a problem when it rained. We hung a gas mask from the tent’s frame, and one of us would put it on “whenever anyone cuts a phart,” I told my sister in a letter. Thanks to the extraordinarily detailed sex-education unit of my science class that year, I was able to explain to a group of campers what sixty-nine really is—not “six inches in, nine months to go,” as most of them believed. They responded with cries of incredulity and disgust, until a slightly older camper said that, although he hadn’t done the thing himself, he could confirm that my definition was correct. Nowadays, the rare sixth grader who didn’t already know everything there is to know about sex positions would be able to go online and study video examples. And there are other differences between that era and this. Keep reading

From the News Desk

Daily Comment The Futility of the Never Trump Billionaires Every party, at every time, has some tension between its élites and its base. But it’s hard to think of a more spectacular divide than the one currently defining the G.O.P. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells  The Political Scene Podcast A Week of Chaos in Kevin McCarthy’s Washington This week in Congress: a Biden impeachment inquiry, a frozen House of Representatives, and a looming government shutdown.

Editor’s Picks

Annals of Literature How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern Her vitally urgent translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey strip away the “tarnish of centuries.” By Judith Thurman Photo Booth Friendship and Gender Rebellion in Nineties San Francisco For the queer community pictured in Chloe Sherman’s new photo book, “Renegades,” self-presentation is a kind of sacred tongue. By Crispin Long

Books We Recommend This Week Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction. Father and Son, by Jonathan Raban (Knopf). Raban’s posthumously published final work follows an English father and son whose lives take diverging paths. Raban juxtaposes an account of his rehabilitation after a stroke that occurred in 2011, when he was sixty-eight, with his father’s experiences as an artillery officer in the Second World War. The stories never connect, reflecting the divide between the liberal, literary son, who immigrated to Seattle in 1990, and the conservative father, who became a vicar in the Church of England. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. 24/7 Politics, by Kathryn Cramer Brownell (Princeton). This near-encyclopedic exploration of the rise of cable news begins with the lead-up to the 1984 Presidential election, when cable executives and lobbyists set out to dismantle the power of network broadcasters and redirect it to themselves. Brownell, a historian, details how the opponents of network broadcasting successfully cast the industry as “elitist” and peddled cable as a democratizing force that would “empower people, politicians, and perspectives.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Witness, by Jamel Brinkley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Many of the stories in this powerful collection orbit figures who dwell on the past, unable to accept their “forward movement through the entanglements of time.” There is a woman who is obsessed with the wife of her brother’s killer; a son haunted by his mother as he makes plans to install his father in a nursing home; a man whose budding romance ends after he relates a horrific memory. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Details, by Ia Genberg, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson (HarperVia). This elliptical novel, narrated by an unnamed woman who is confined to her bed by a high fever, consists of four character studies. During her illness, the woman picks up a book inscribed to her by a former lover. Flipping through it brings back vivid recollections of that woman, whose frosty personality “was part of her—and not as deficiency but as tool, a useful little patch of ice.” These reminiscences lead to others: first of a wayward roommate; then of a “hurricane” ex-boyfriend; and finally of the narrator’s traumatized mother. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The best books of 2023 so far What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know.

Culture Dept.

Fiction “On the Agenda” Bessie said, “Do you remember Lotte saying that things not put properly away were like ‘visual noise’? Don’t we have a need—don’t we yearn for order?” By Lore Segal  This Week in Fiction Lore Segal on Friendship, Talking, and Aging The author discusses her story from the latest issue of the magazine. By Cressida Leyshon  Sketchbook It Was Only an Art-Envy Dream A cartoonist’s nocturnal fantasy about stumbling across the greatest comic ever. By Roz Chast  The Front Row What to Stream: Sam Peckinpah’s Obscure Mini-Masterpiece Made for TV in 1963, “The Losers” is a thrillingly idiosyncratic display of cinematic artistry. By Richard Brody

Fun & Games Dept.

Daily Shouts Alumni Success Stories of Art-School Graduates The sculptor Tyler Banks (’12) is getting ready for his first solo show, made possible by four years of unpaid labor at a gallery in SoHo. By Jeremy Nguyen and Caroline Cash Shouts & Murmurs Old Men and Sea Using bait suggested by an algorithm, the old man hooks the huge fish. Other old men get text alerts and share the video with thousands, who fill the comments section with tips. Discuss. By Ian Frazier

Name Drop: Can you guess the identity of a notable person—contemporary or historical—in six clues? Play our trivia game »

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