“These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
And from an excerpt of the book describing how the road to fascism is like being a frog in a gradually heated pot of water:
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ‘43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ‘33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
So if you’re waiting for the grand moment when the scales tip and we are no longer a functioning democracy, you needn’t bother. It’ll be much more subtle than that. It’ll be more of the president ignoring laws passed by congress. It’ll be more demonizing of the press.
In thinking about the books I’ve read that made a significant impact on how I see and understand the world, I’d have to go with:
Various Richard Scarry books (like Cars and Trucks and Things That Go) when I was little, although Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood & Sesame Street probably had a bigger and more lasting impact on who I am as a person.
Where the Red Fern Grows was my favorite book as a child — I read it so many times. And there were these biography series for kids at my local library and I read a bunch of them. The two that I distinctly remember were the books on Thomas Edison and Harriet Tubman. From the Edison book I learned that a clever lad from the Midwest could make and invent wonderful things using your mind and your hands. And Harriet Tubman: she was straight-up a superhero and her story taught me all I needed to know about the truth of American slavery.
I first read Orwell’s 1984 in 1984, when I was 10 or 11. Probably affected my view of the world more than any other book.
How about you? What are your personal foundational texts? Note that, as I understand it, these are not simply your favorite books, but the books that mean a lot to you and have been instrumental to your development as a human.
In striking aerial images, he captures the massive scale of 21st-century agriculture that has sculpted 40 percent of the Earth’s surface.
He explores the farming of staples like wheat and rice, the cultivation of vegetables and fruits, fishing and aquaculture, and meat production. He surveys traditional farming in diverse cultures, and he penetrates vast agribusinesses that fuel international trade. From Kansas wheat fields to a shrimp cocktail’s origins in India to cattle stations in Australia larger than some countries, Steinmetz tracks the foods we eat back to land and sea, field and factory. He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them.
At an event last month marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, actor Bryan Cranston read a passage from the book (it’s about 13 minutes long):
After some loving jabs at the devotion this book inspires and its notorious length (“There are only 50 chapters…”), Cranston reads from Power Broker’s opening pages. The performance is fun, and Cranston gets an ad-libbed laugh by archly reading “Shea Stadium,” a part of Moses’ legacy that was demolished and replaced in 2009. Cranston’s also reads some of the famous list sections that Caro rattles off in The Power Broker’s opening chapters. The drumbeat of names is Caro’s attempt to contextualize the scale of Moses’ impact, a technique cribbed from The Aeneid.
In the wake of the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, a book published in 2010 by Rutgers Law professor Jay Feinman has hit the bestseller charts: Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The book’s title is a reference to an insurance industry strategy of denying legitimate claims to boost profits. Bullet casings at the scene of the shooting referenced the same strategy: they were labelled “deny”, “defend”, and “depose”.
Delay, deny, defend violates the rules for handling claims that are recognized by every company, taught to adjusters, and embodied in law. Within the vast bureaucracy of insurance companies, actuaries assess risks, underwriters price policies and evaluate prospective policyholders, and agents market policies. The claims department’s only job is to pay what is owed, no more but no less. A classic text used to train adjusters, James Markham’s The Claims Environment, states the principle: “The essential function of a claim department is to fulfill the insurance company’s promise, as set forth in the insurance policy… The claim function should ensure the prompt, fair, and efficient delivery of this promise.”
Beginning in the 1990s, many major insurance companies reconsidered this understanding of the claims process. The insight was simple. An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims. If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits. Therefore, the claims department became a profit center rather than the place that kept the company’s promise.
A major step in this shift occurred when Allstate and other companies hired the megaconsulting firm McKinsey & Company to develop new strategies for handling claims. McKinsey saw claims as a “zero-sum game,” with the policyholder and the company competing for the same dollars. No longer would each claim be treated on its merits. Instead, computer systems would be put in place to set the amounts policyholders would be offered, claimants would be deterred from hiring lawyers to help with their claims, and settlements would be offered on a take-it-or-litigate basis. If Allstate moved from “Good Hands” to “Boxing Gloves,” as McKinsey described it, policyholders would either take a lowball offer from the good hands people or face the boxing gloves of extended litigation.
I don’t know about you, but the violence implied by the “Boxing Gloves” metaphor is particularly galling — but also germane to the national conversation we’re currently having about violence, culpability, and who is and isn’t sanctioned by the state to decide who suffers or dies.
This Beautiful Day: Daily Wisdom from Mister Rogers (Bookshop) is exactly what it says on the tin: a book of daily reflections from the writings, stories, and shows of Fred Rogers. I would be chuffed to find this under the tree on Xmas morning.
In my mind I was thinking, Yeah, OK, this old line. But I must have had a look on my face because he shook his head and laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ve got twin beds,” he said. With a grin he added, “And honestly, I don’t find you particularly attractive.” I was both insulted and relieved. And that’s how I became the potty-mouthed sidekick to a man eleven years older than me who was in the middle of a divorce.
I hadn’t realized Sonny was so much older than Cher, who was 16 when they met, which, uh, yeah. (via @georgehahn.bksy.social)
In 2015, the BBC & PBS adapted the first two books of Hilary Mantel’s excellent Wolf Hall trilogy into a six-episode miniseries called Wolf Hall, starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII. Now they’ve made a second miniseries that covers the events of the third book, The Mirror and the Light. Here’s a trailer and synopsis:
The TV sequel picks up in May 1536 after the beheading of Anne Boleyn and follows the last four years of Thomas Cromwell’s life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared and influential figure of his time. These are years when Henry’s regime is severely tested by religious rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion. Cromwell must deftly navigate the moral complexities that accompany the exercise of power in this bloody time; he’s caught between his desire to do what’s right and his instinct to survive. The question is: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s brutally mercurial gaze?
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light premieres in the UK on BBC One on Nov 10 but Americans have to wait until March 23, 2025 to watch it on PBS.
Over the past several months, I’ve settled into a routine that involves reading one book at a time on paper or on the Kindle and listening to one book on audiobook. This way, I can switch back and forth without feeling like I am abandoning one book for the other. Right now, I am most of the way through James by Percival Everett on audiobook and just (finally!) started Craig Mod’s fine-art edition of Things Become Other Things. (Both are about very different kinds of journeys.)
For the last three years, I’ve been been getting my audiobooks through Libro.fm. You can listen through their app or download DRM-free mp3 or m4b files to listen in the app of your choice. They are a social purpose corporation, 100% employee owned, and partner with local bookstores to offer audiobooks & share profits. They don’t have every title because of Audible’s strategy of locking up exclusives (like Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and the Odyssey), but they have most of what you’d want to read. They also make it easy to gift audiobooks to friends and family (and I suppose, enemies and strangers if you want?)
Just in the past few months, I’ve listened to:
All Fours by Miranda July. This is one of those books that’s better as an audiobook. July is an actress as well as an author and the audiobook is more like a performance than a reading.
James by Percival Everett. Already mentioned this one, but the narration by Dominic Hoffman is superb and emphasizes some of the vernacular differences that are key to the story that might be tougher to express in print. (Hoffman also narrated James McBride’s Deacon King Kong and Ted Chiang’s Exhalation.)
Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. This is the definitive account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and a great companion to HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries.
You can purchase individual audiobooks through the site or sign up for a membership where you get one free credit a month and each credit to good for one audiobook, regardless of price.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
Well! In the Yale Review, Chris Ware (one of my favorite cartoonists) writes about Richard Scarry (one of my favorite children’s book authors) and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (one of my favorite books).
This year is the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that-well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)
Unlike those budget vehicles, however, the new deluxe Penguin Random House anniversary edition of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is lavishly well-made, attentively reprinted with sharp black lines and warm, rich, watercolors. It includes an especially lively afterword by Scarry’s son Huck, in which he explains, using language even a kid can understand, how his dad wrote and drew the book, as well as hinting at what it was like to grow up as the son of arguably the world’s most popular and successful children’s book author.
(Lowly was perhaps the first children’s book animal character with a real nod to the ADA and the myth of “dis”-ability, and cheerfully makes his linear form work in all sorts of inspiring and disarmingly moving ways.)
And:
But the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman’s guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which America was barreling in the late 1960s.
From the Atlantic in 1948, Death of a Pig by E.B. White is about the story that inspired the author to write Charlotte’s Web a few years later.
The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossom time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.
Once in a while something slips — one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts. My pig simply failed to show up for a meal. The alarm spread rapidly. The classic outline of the tragedy was lost. I found myself cast suddenly in the role of pig’s friend and physician — a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop. I had a presentiment, the very first afternoon, that the play would never regain its balance and that my sympathies were now wholly with the pig. This was slapstick - the sort of dramatic treatment which instantly appealed to my old dachshund, Fred, who joined the vigil, held the bag, and, when all was over, presided at the interment. When we slid the body into the grave, we both were shaken to the core. The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.
The producer later said that it took him 17 takes to read the death scene of Charlotte. And finally, they would walk outside, and E.B. White would go, this is ridiculous, a grown man crying over the death of an imaginary insect. And then, he would go in and start crying again when he got to that moment.
Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means — and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to — the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.
I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.
The hero of one of my favorite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”
It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.
There are a lot of honest people in Russia-tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.
The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear.
There are a lot of them, too. We meet them all the time, in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia, in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.
In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?
The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.
Two years later, Navalny was dead, murdered by Russia’s leader, dictator Vladimir Putin. I do not think it is hyperbole to read Navalny’s words as a warning, a harbinger of what happens to a country and its people when they come under undemocratic leadership.
Out today from National Geographic is Infinite Cosmos, a gorgeous-looking book by Ethan Siegel (intro by Brian Greene). It’s about the history of the JWST, humanity’s biggest ever space telescope, a machine that allows us to peer deeper & clearer into the universe than ever before, and some of the amazing results obtained through its use.
Even with its unprecedented capabilities, JWST’s views of the universe are still finite and limited. The faintest, most distant objects in the cosmos — including the very first stars of all — remain invisible even in the longest-exposure JWST images acquired to date. The universe itself offers a natural enhancement, however, that can reveal features that would otherwise remain unobservable: gravitational lensing.
Whenever a large amount of mass gathers together in one location, it bends and distorts the fabric of the surrounding space-time, just as the theory of general relativity dictates. As light from background objects even farther away passes close to or through that region of the universe, it not only gets distorted but also gets magnified and potentially bent, either into multiple images or into a complete or partial ring. The foreground mass behaves as a gravitational lens. The amount of mass and how it’s distributed affect the light passing through it, amplifying the light coming from those background sources.
Separated is the newest documentary film from Errol Morris. Based on Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, the film probes the inhumane family separation and immigration policies of the Trump administration. From a review in The Guardian:
The Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and loaded en masse into wire-mesh cages. It was inhumane treatment, which was precisely the point. The White House’s intention was to use terror as a deterrent and effectively write every parent’s worst fear into law. “When you have that policy, people don’t come,” Donald Trump said blithely. “I know it sounds harsh, but we have to save our country.”
Errol Morris’s forensic, procedural documentary walks us through the bureaucratic backrooms to show how the policy was hatched and implemented. It explains how its principal authors — Trump adviser Stephen Miller and attorney general Jeff Sessions — junked the pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) in favour of a bold new tactic of forced separation and mass imprisonment. If Separated lacks the rueful exuberance that typifies much of Morris’s early work (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, even last year’s John le Carré film), that is entirely understandable. The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.
“Harm to children was part of the point,” says Jonathan White, a committed public servant who saw his department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, hijacked by a blatantly inhumane strategy that the Trump administration implemented for its deterrent potential. “They believed it would terrify families into not coming.” White isn’t exactly a whistleblower, although he comes across as no less courageous in describing a dictated-from-the-top family separation scheme for which he had a front-row seat.
And here’s an interview with Morris & Soboroff about the film:
For his second term, Trump and his team are planning a blockbuster sequel to these inhumane crimes entirely in the open: deporting up to 20 million people (undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and political opponents) with a minimum of due process, which will require a massive increase in the scale of the police state and concentration camps. That’s 6% of the US population. We don’t know if they will succeed but they will try. Those are the stakes.
I got a lot out of this interview with The Message author Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jon Stewart for The Daily Show.
Best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates sits down with Jon Stewart to talk about his latest book, “The Message,” and reconciling past and present vestiges of oppression. They discuss his visits to Senegal, South Carolina, and The West Bank, how past atrocities like slavery and the holocaust can create a zero-sum game of control, the need for safety and statehood despite morally problematic systems, his exposure to Palestinian stories that have been hidden in American media, understanding the physical traumas of the Black community, and the purpose in writing to shape the world around us.
On the way to the dental clinic they talk about going home for Christmas. It’s November and Marianne is having a wisdom tooth removed. Connell is driving her to the clinic because he’s her only friend with a car, and also the only person in whom she confides about distasteful medical conditions like impacted teeth. He sometimes drives her to the doctor’s office when she needs antibiotics for urinary tract infections, which is often. They are twenty-three.
Jack was home safe. He had survived his kidnapping. But the actual kidnapping is not what this story is about, if you can believe it. It’s about surviving what you survived, which is also known as the rest of your life.
It’s also about, spoiler alert, trauma.
Tolstoy tells us that all happy families are alike and that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. A few years ago, I wrote a different novel, my first novel, about divorce, which was inspired in part by the divorce stories of several people I know, and I came to the conclusion that, actually, all divorces are exactly alike. I tell you this because I’ve now come to understand the same thing about trauma: Happy, well-adjusted people are all different. The traumatized are exactly alike. I’m about to tell you a story that is nothing like a violent kidnapping — almost laughably so — but what I’ve learned over the years is that trauma is trauma. Something terrible happens, beyond what is in our own personal capacity to cope with, and the details don’t matter as much as the state we’re thrown into. Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that threatens us with financial ruin or from the dismantling of our world by our parents’ divorce. It’s wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system.
In 1950, master photographer Irving Penn set up a simple studio in Paris and started to photograph people of all kinds of professions, each wearing their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.
Working in the tradition of representing the petits métiers, Penn photographed fishmongers, firefighters, butchers, bakers, divers, baseball umpires, chefs, bike messengers, and sellers of goods of all kinds.
Penn continued photographing workers in New York and London, collecting the photos into a project called Small Trades.
Like everyone else who has recorded the look of tradesmen and workers, the author of this book was motivated by the fact that individuality and occupational pride seem on the wane. To a degree everyone has proved right, and since these photographs were made, London chimney sweeps have all but disappeared and in New York horseshoers — hard to find in 1950 — now scarcely exist.
I love My Brilliant Friend — it’s one of my all-time favorites and might be the best show you’re not watching. I agree completely with Clare Thorp’s description of it as “criminally underrated”.
As the trailer above shows, the previous two lead actors (who were excellent) have been replaced by older ones, a change I’m a little apprehensive about, but everything else about the show has been pitch perfect so I’m gonna trust the process. From an NPR piece on the new season:
“This child is you, when you were a child,” Maiorino recalled her friend Alessia saying about the novel’s titular protagonist and sometimes antagonist Lila. Like Lila and her friend Lenù, Maiorino is from Naples and stayed in the south, while her friend left to study in the north of the country, get married and have children.
Art has now truly imitated life for Maiorino, who plays Lila in the fourth season of the series.
New episodes of My Brilliant Friend started airing on HBO last night and will drop every Monday for the next 10 weeks. Go check it out!
This month, Powers will publish his fourteenth novel, “Playground,” a book that initially seems like a way for him to add “ocean guy” to his C.V. It essentially comprises three story lines. The first is about Todd Keane, an all-conquering tech giant. The onset of dementia has compelled him to revisit his happiest memories, which involve Rafi Young, a close friend of his teens and twenties from whom he is now estranged. A second story line concerns a close-knit, dwindling community on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia, that must decide how to respond to an offer from wealthy American investors who want to launch a libertarian seasteading enclave nearby. The third follows Evelyne Beaulieu, a famous oceanographer, as she reflects on her life’s work and all the destruction she has witnessed: the collapse of fisheries and the disappearance of various species; the acidification of the seas; the dredging, in a single afternoon, of entire “coral cities that had taken ten thousand years to grow.” There’s also a Silicon Valley-inspired twist, involving Todd’s investments in social networking and artificial intelligence, that brings these narrative threads together.
Powers was a participant in the personal-computing revolution of the seventies and the rise of the Internet in the nineties, and he is deeply attuned to the potential cataclysms that technological innovation could invite. “I had this sense that we were living through this ethical moment again,” he said, of the inspiration for the new book.
Sometimes the word “neurodiversity” is framed as if it’s merely a political stance or a political conviction. It’s not. It’s a living fact, like biodiversity in rain forests. We clearly have people with many different kinds of minds. There are people with dyslexia, there are people with ADHD, there are people with autism, there are people at all points of the spectrum. And all of these labels are the names of “disorders,” but if you look at them another way, they’re just different kinds of human operating systems.
We have to get beyond the fact that these conditions were discovered by people looking for forms of illness, basically, and recognize that they’re just there. They’re part of the human fabric. They always have been. People with these conditions have been making contributions to the evolution of science, art and technology for centuries — invisibly, mostly. You know, most of the labels were invented in the 20th century. We have to start looking at those labels, instead of the checklist of modern disorders, as human resources that we have not learned to tap fully because we’ve been so busy treating those people like carriers of disorder.
Amazon’s series The Rings of Power hasn’t gotten great reviews and Evan Puschak hypothesizes that, unlike movies, TV is not the right medium to tell Tolkien’s stories.
I’m skeptical that the Lord of the Rings, or any other story from Tolkien’s mythology, can really work as a TV series. It’s a square peg round hole situation. TV as a form just doesn’t play to the strengths of Tolkien’s vision.
Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodo routes — the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula — took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. While passing the peninsula’s shrinking villages, Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan as a student at age nineteen, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. As the days passed, he considered why he has walked so rigorously and religiously during his twenty-five years as an immigrant in Japan, contemplating the power of walking itself. For Mod, solo walks are a tool to change the very structure of his mind, to better himself, and to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.”
The way Craig has gone about writing and publishing this book is unique. In November 2023, he published an exquisitely designed fine art edition with color photography, limited to 2500 copies (of which ~900 remain), and priced at $100. The mass market version, published by Random House, is an expanded version of the fine art edition retailing for $31 ($15 on Kindle). Craig explains:
Wait? Didn’t you already publish this book in November 2023? Yes! Yes we did! (Where we = me, Craig.) That was the fine art edition. Limited in quantity. Printed and bound in Japan, in full color on Heidelberg presses with a silk screened and foil stamped cover. Retailing for $100. This Random House edition is a significant expansion of that fine art edition — more than double the length in text with a dozen additional photographs. There is so much more context about me and my relationship to Japan, and more Japanese historical context as well. The Random House edition is printed and bound as a standard trade hardcover (and retails for $31 USD), with images printed in black and white. I’m tempted — almost! — to call them different books that emerged from the same source material.
Artist and illustrator Andrew DeGraff makes maps that show where the characters travel during movies — imagine Billy’s trail maps from Family Circus but for films like Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Pulp Fiction, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
I’ll start. I finished the superb Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham and Miranda July’s excellent All Fours within the last few weeks. I’m about halfway through Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I could not finish Frankenstein — I was so excited and the book was so not my thing.
A friend recommended that I read North Woods by Daniel Mason next but I’ve also got my eye on There There by Tommy Orange and The Missing Thread by Daisy Dunn (which I posted about this morning). It’s just over a month until Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo drops…the excerpt piqued my already excited interest.
What’s everyone else reading these days? Or are looking forward to reading?
The way the Fields sisters see it, and I think they’re right: race is a fiction, it doesn’t exist biologically, it’s a social construction, it’s designed to categorize, and it often obscures far more than it explains. But racism is real, right? Racism, the action, is real, it’s material, it affects people’s lives, it has life or death stakes, it structures the way that we engage in, and are received by, the society in which we live.
The example they give in the beginning of the book is: imagine a Black police officer is killed by one of his white colleagues. He’s undercover and he’s shot and killed. The news would say that this police officer was killed because he was Black. But the Fields sisters would say, wait a sec. Did the white officer shoot because he was white? That the Blackness caused the death, that the whiteness caused the shooting? No, of course not. What happened was that a white officer relied on racist assumptions about people of African descent to come to a set of conclusions, then acted on those conclusions.
I came into the house my usual way, like a thief. I turned the lock slowly and shut the door with the handle all the way to the left to avoid the click of the lock. Took off my shoes. Rolled my feet from heel to toe, which is how ninjas walk so silently. I was often two or three hours late because I had trouble admitting that I was planning to talk to Jordi for five hours. But how could it be any shorter, given that it was my one chance a week to be myself? My heart was pounding as I tiptoed through the living room. I know the quietest way to wash up, too: picking up and putting down the cup and face wash with this technique where you pretend each thing is heavier than it is. Imagine the cup is made of brick, so that as you put it down you’re also lifting it up, resisting its weight — the opposite of this would be just dropping it, letting gravity put it down. When I walk past Harris’s bedroom I think glide, glide, glide.
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