Tag: book reviews
Trump’s America, Seen Through the Eyes of Russell Banks
What’s wrong with . . . everywhere? We traditionally ascribe the pathologies of American life to any place that isn’t where we live: blue states lament red states, rural areas despair over inner cities, downstate frets about upstate, our somewhere pities your anywhere else. Lately, though, that cultural pessimism seems to have come closer to home: fear of neighbors with a different flag in their apartment windows, anger at other parents in the school pickup line with the wrong stickers
Portrait of the Artist as an Office Drone
In the opening pages of “Private Equity,” a memoir about working in high finance in the early twenty-tens, the author, Carrie Sun, is asked in a job interview why she wants to be a personal assistant to the founder of an investment firm. Sun, who at the time is twenty-nine years old, has been recruited by a headhunter through LinkedIn, where her profile displays a dual degree in math and finance from M.I.T., completed in just three years; steady career
How Much Does Pro Wrestling Matter?
In the nineteenth century, as wrestling matches became a staple of the American carnival circuit, legitimate competition was not always the easiest sell. Bouts could stretch to galling lengths, with little discernible action, before winding their way to unsatisfying, humdrum endings. Promoters hit upon a solution: if they fixed the bouts, with participants agreeing to the outcome beforehand, they could better insure a compelling product. Coördinated “professional wrestling,” as it came to be known, made possible more commercially attractive shows
The Novel That Found Its Melodrama in the Psychoanalyst’s Office
Before I’d read any psychoanalytic texts, or attempted therapy myself, I was drawn to the practice for its facility with plot. This intrigue began in high school, when my mom went into training to become a clinical psychologist. Occasionally, she would arrange for a classmate to try the inkblot test on me. As a result of these sessions and of being exposed to the new terminology floating around our household, I began to sense that a problem, stared at over
Mario Vargas Llosa Returns to the Dictator Novel
There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other, an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, was known inside the country as the Octopus, because it had tentacles everywhere. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, and it controlled the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. U.S. State Department officials had siblings in the upper
Sid Meier and the Meaning of “Civilization”
Sid Meier is famous for creating the video game Civilization. He’s also known for having his name on the box. Meier released Civilization thirty years ago this month, after developing it with Bruce Shelley, a veteran board-game designer. The pair were inspired by the illustrated history books you might find on a middle-school library shelf, and by titles like Seven Cities of Gold (1984), a video game of Spanish conquest created by the designer Danielle Berry. In Civilization, you start
The New Deal Program That Rewrote America
For a long time now, the New Deal has been our best—sometimes it seems like our only—model for an American government that sets aside obeisance to unfettered capitalism and comes to the aid of its people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made no apologies for this approach, but he did try to explain it. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity,” he said in 1936, accepting his party’s renomination, “than the consistent omissions of a
Coins, the Overlooked Keys to History
Loose change was scarce last year. Retail and restaurant industries collected less cash from customers, so had fewer coins to deposit with their banks, while limited hours and new safety protocols at mints around the country slowed coin production. Some coin-based transactions evolved right away: cashless tipping became more common, even more toll booths were converted to pay-by-plate systems, and plenty of places began rounding up or down to simplify payment. But it wasn’t enough. Only a few months into