Live, laugh, read - wait, why did I come into this room?

Yesterday, I was part of a social media conversation about adult ADHD and how to cope with it. I read through the comments to see if anyone had any good ideas, and I added my own: the Pomodoro Method. I think I’ve written about it before. It’s very simple. You set a timer for 25 minutes during which you focus on one task and one task only. When the 25 minutes is up,  you can take a break, check your email, stretch, or do whatever. 

The Pomodoro Method is named after those cute little old-fashioned kitchen timers that are shaped like tomatoes. I don’t have a pomodoro timer, but I have an app on my phone. The reason why you might want to use an app rather than your phone clock’s timer is that the app will track your 25-minute intervals (called “pomodoros”) so you can set goals and track your progress. 

It’s a remarkably effective tool, and I haven’t used it in some time, because something distracted me and I forgot about it. And every word that follows that second comma is the reason for almost everything I do or fail to do. 

*****

I’m reading Kristin Kobes DuMez’s Live, Laugh, Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. It’s not as quick and easy a read as her first book, Jesus and John Wayne, but it’s very well researched. I didn’t think that I needed to know anything more about the worst of white American Christianity, but Kobes DuMez makes connections and traces trends and influencers and events back to their origin in a way that makes me question so much of what I thought I knew. Complementarianism and inerrancy are pretty much made-up concepts, and just as certain white Christian men used those made-up concepts to exert coercive control over women and everyone else in their charge, white Christian women used those same made-up concepts to curry favor with men, gain power via proximity, and keep other women in their place. “The world they made” is not an exaggeration. So much of American life from the 1950s to the present day is built on a foundation of white supremacy, misogyny, free market absolutism. It makes sense that the people who benefit from that foundation would reimagine Christianity to strengthen it. 

*****

I finished the book last night, and I was glad to have it behind me. The thesis is sound and the facts to support it are solid, but it’s not especially well written - not in the sense of writing quality, because Kobes DuMez is a very good writer, but in the sense of storytelling. There are places here and there where she tries to help the reader understand a subject and her story, but most of it reads as a recitation of facts - this happened, and then this happened, and here is how these two events are connected. It reminds me of a high school textbook. I give it a B. 

What does this have to do with adult ADHD? Well nothing - that’s the point. Seriously, though, back in the day, I’d have finished a book of this length in a day or so, but this one took me over a week. Clearly I need to get back on the pomodoro.   

There is Nothing for You Here

Before Trump’s first impeachment trial (ah, the good old days), I had never heard of Fiona Hill. I watched her testimony and was so impressed with her, and even more impressed when I learned more about her. She was born in 1965, same as me, the daughter of a former coal miner in postindustrial northern England. Her family, though better off than some others during those very bleak years, was legitimately poor, and the class divide made it all but impossible for young Fiona to make it beyond secondary school, let alone to university. 

But through a combination of luck, brilliance, hard work, and the help of a few people of good will, Fiona Hill did make it to St. Andrew’s University and then to the United States for graduate study at Harvard, where she eventually earned a PhD. She studied Russian and became a foreign affairs expert, serving as a translator at NBC News, a National Security Council staffer, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and now the Chancellor of Durham University in her native northern England. 

I admired her already for her fearless testimony during the impeachment trial, and for her many other accomplishments. But I admire her even more now that I’m halfway through There is Nothing Here for You. A combination of memoir and political history, the book examines Britain and the United States’ failure to take care of the working class and poor in the post-post war years. As a Russia expert, Hillihas first-hand in-depth knowledge of the collapse of Russia after the fall of Communism, and she warns that the US and UK are headed down the same path if we don’t stop the greedy rapacious oligarch bastards from grabbing and hoarding everything and leaving the rest of us destitute. 

OK, that’s not EXACTLY what she says, but it’s close. I remember reading about the rapid privatization of industry and public utilities and land ownership following the fall of the Soviet Union and how a handful of aspiring oligarchs bought working class people’s state-issued shares for far less than their value because most people were desperate for cash to cover food and shelter and other necessities. Pensions were no longer paid, and healthcare was no longer guaranteed, and millions of Russians who had been poor but at least secure were all of a sudden destitute, often homeless, left to beg on the streets. Meanwhile, Putin and a handful of his friends smashed and grabbed until they owned pretty much everything of value. 

I think about this a lot. I hear older people, some of whom still support Trump, confidently assert that they’re not worried about their Medicare or their Social Security because the government “can’t” take those entitlements away - but can’t they? They’re threatening to privatize National Park land, and have already started bulldozing Big Bend to build more of the stupid border wall. The Department of Education pretty much no longer exists; and in some places, school is only in session for four days a week. Regulations and consumer protections are disappearing - from the CFPB to the CDC experts who used to monitor cryptosporiasis outbreaks. The social contract between us and the government - we pay taxes, they provide services - is no longer in effect, at least as far as the services part goes. What is to stop them from cutting all services altogether? What is to stop the billionaires and their servants in the White House and Congress from taking away every protection and service that we expect from the government, and then just grabbing all of the country’s wealth and resources and dividing it all up among themselves? If Russia is any example, then nothing - there’s absolutely nothing stopping them. 

*****

So what is to be done, Dr. Fiona Hill? 

Yes, that was intentional. If they’re going to be out here calling people Communists, then I might as well quote Lenin. NOTE: I AM IN FACT NOT A COMMUNIST. I feel that it’s necessary to state that in writing. 

I’m still in the middle of the book.I should finish reading it before I start writing about it, but I suppose the answer to the question is to restore the social safety net and strengthen our institutions and demand that the government fulfill its obligations to its citizens and to safeguard our elections so that we can elect the people we want and then demand that they do what they promise to do. I’ll be interested to see how Fiona Hill suggests that we do all that. She saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Putin regime firsthand. She lived through the Thatcher-led downfall of the British working class. And she observed the workings of the first Trump administration from the inside, as a non-political national security professional. There’s no one better qualified to tell us how we can get out of this mess. I very much want to see us get out of this mess. 

Untimely reviews

Chris Rea’s “Fool (If You Think it’s Over)” is one of those songs that I can’t skip through. If it starts playing on the radio just as I’m parking, then I’m going to sit in the car until it’s over. 

This song was popular in 1978. I was 12, and I remember hearing it all the time and not particularly liking it. I liked up-tempo pop and disco at the time. “Fool” is not quite a ballad but it’s not really a pop song either. And something about it felt off. At 12, I was quite aware of creepy men, and I thought that the song’s voice was that of a creepy older man chasing after a young girl. But I was wrong. The lyrics that I thought were creepy turned out to be actually really sweet when you know the backstory. And thanks to the internet, I know the backstory. 

I hadn’t heard “Fool (If You Think it’s Over”) in literally decades, but it played on the radio one day, and I listened to it all the way through for the sake of nostalgia. And then something about the song grabbed me, so I listened to it again, and then again. Then I looked up Chris Rea, who was a pretty successful singer and musician in his native England. When he wrote “Fool (If You Think it’s Over),” he hoped to convince Al Green to record it, but the record company liked his demo recording and insisted that he record the song himself. It ended up being his only hit in the US.    

The real story, though, is the song’s inspiration. Chris Rea wrote “Fool” about his younger sister, Paula, who was heartbroken after her breakup with her first boyfriend. “The pains of 17/unreal they’re only dreams” is just the sort of infuriating thing a know-it-all big brother would say to a younger sister. But it’s clear somehow that he doesn’t mean “unreal” in the sense of imaginary or unimportant. The singer knows that the girl’s pain is real in the moment, but he also knows that it won’t last and that it won’t have any real impact on her life.  He wants her to know that she’ll move on and that things will get better. 

Context changes everything. “I’ll buy your first good wine..ooh we’ll have a real good time” was the line that made me think that the song was about a predator trying to groom a young girl. Instead, it’s a brother promising his younger sister that there’s so much more ahead of her - both good times and bad - than a teenage romance. And now, every time I hear that song, I imagine a brother consoling his younger sister over a bottle of wine. And I imagine the young girl cheering up and realizing that her brother is right and that the boy wasn’t worthy of her in the first place. And I imagine that the brother and sister actually do have a real good time. I hope that Chris and Paula Rea had a real good time. 

*****

During the early pandemic months in 2020, I started to watch “The Americans,” and I didn’t make it past episode 1. After a brutal rape 20 minutes in, I turned it off, absolutely furious. I’m tired of sexual violence as a plot point. Oddly enough, those of us who have actually endured it (and trust me that there are more of us than you think) don’t find brutal rape scenes very entertaining. 

Anyway, I started watching the show again recently. I skipped that scene, knowing that it was coming, but of course there was other sexual violence to come. And the almost lost me again, and not only for that reason. I just had a hard time believing in some of the period details and in the premise itself. But it started to grow on me. A few episodes in, I began to see how well it captures the period; not so much in visual details (but many of the visuals, especially the fashion, are spot-on)  but in the settled comfortable certainty of the upper middle class characters and their unshakeable belief in the mid-century idea of America. Then I watched three consecutive episodes when I was sick (again!) and the constant sex and violence and family drama felt repetitive. 

But the acting is absolutely brilliant. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys and Noah Emmerich and the brilliant Alison Wright and Annet Mahendru. And while I still think that the sexual content is largely gratuitous and exploitative, the story and the pacing and the world that it creates are absorbing and compelling. Bottom line: This is a show best consumed a little at a time, with long breaks in between. 

Side note about Matthew Rhys - I’d heard somewhere that he was Welsh, but I’d never seen him play anything but Americans - mostly cold-blooded killers or dour misanthropes (I loved his performance as Lloyd in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). I guessed that maybe he was born in Wales but raised in the US. Then I saw an interview with him, and that man is as Welsh as Dylan Thomas and also an absolute delight. I imagine a director saying something like “I need an actor to play a remorseless, pitiless murderer and/or an absolute miserable son of a bitch” and the casting director responding “I know! Let’s get that charming Welsh chap who sounds like he spends his days singing with his friends in a cozy seaside pub!” Uncanny. Matthew Rhys is really good at his job. 

*****

Our neighborhood civic association sponsors a summer movie series. “Song Sung Blue,” a movie that I assiduously avoided when it was first released, was the summer’s first selection, and I went for two reasons: My friends asked me to go, and no one else was home so what else did I have to do? 

Why did I try to avoid this movie, you might ask? Because I grew up hearing Neil Diamond all day every day and even though I still like him (how can you not), I didn’t need to see a movie about crazy Neil Diamond fans. I lived with one. That was my whole childhood. At one point in the movie, the Neil Diamond tribute singer portrayed by Hugh Jackman argues with his manager, trying to make a case for “Soolaimon” as the band’s opening number. “Nobody knows Soolaimon!” the man yells. “I fucking know ‘Soolaimon,’” I thought to myself.  I haven’t heard “Soolaimon” in decades but I bet I remember every note. 

The movie is based on a true story, and was different and much better than I expected. Kate Hudson deserved that Oscar nomination. I might even listen to some Neil Diamond today. 

*****

I just finished reading Leaving Aberdeen, a memoir by Estell Sims Halliburton. Mrs. Halliburton is a Black woman who was born on a sharecropping plantation in Mississippi in the 1940s. Her memoir tells the story of her early childhood picking cotton and living in a plantation shack through her family’s first real home in the town of Aberdeen to her first year in college at Tuskegee to her first summer in New York City as a 19-year-old on her own for the first time. That summer then turned into years, as the young Estell takes a break from school, works as a model and bookkeeper and store clerk, and marries a young soldier who ships out to Vietnam shortly after their wedding day. 

Halliburton’s writing style is uneven, but in a good way. She veers back and forth between formal and colloquial language, and the tone is inconsistent. Sometimes, she just recounts events as she recalls them. Sometimes, she places those events in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and other major historical events of the mid-20th century. The emotional tone varies, too - from her righteous anger as a Black woman who came of age in the Jim Crow South and learned that often, the North wasn’t any less racist; to love for her husband, children, parents, siblings, and friends. The book reads as if it was written in spurts, a few pages here and there as time permitted. The resulting variations in tone and voice make it very readable and human and moving. 

The young Halliburton family seemed to have had a rich and interesting life as working people and parents in 1970s New York, and I was surprised by their decision to return to the South. Mrs. Halliburton wrote a second memoir about the family’s life in Atlanta after the move, so I’ll read it and find out if it was the right decision. I do hope so. I’m invested now. 

*****

I started this as just a little journal of short reviews - a song, a movie, a TV show, a book - and then I realized that it reads like I spend all my time reminiscing about the 20th century. And I do. 

No, I really don’t. I don’t miss most things about the 20th century. But I do miss believing that I lived in the greatest and most benevolent country in the world. I miss the world in which everyone knew more Neil Diamond songs than “Sweet Caroline.” I miss pop music on AM radio. 

Bibliography 2025 - BLTN Edition

I never did finish my 2025 book list. I’ve become very lax about tracking and documenting my reading, and now I’m looking at a list of what I read last year and I’m finding two things: There are several books that I read and vividly remember but never added them to my list; and there are books that are on my list but I barely remember a word of them. 

Does it even matter? Some people just read books and move on and never even think about adding titles to a list or writing down their thoughts about the books they read. Those people aren’t me, though. It bothers me that I haven’t published a 2025 book list and so I’m going to do it now, just as we’re approaching the middle of 2026. Better late than never. So here’s the list: 

The Hard Crowd (Rachel Kushner)

We Want Everything (Nanni Balestrini). I’d never have picked this up if I hadn’t read Rachel Kushner. It’s about social upheaval and revolution in 1970s Italy, and it’s great. Whoever came up with the phrase “Become ungovernable” must have read Nanni Balestrini. 

The Let Them Theory (Mel Robbins). What was she thinking, you might ask? Click the link and find out. Five eye rolls. Highly unrecommended.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde). This was my first time reading Dorian Gray, and I went in knowing nothing other than what everyone knows, which is that Dorian Gray remains ever young while his portrait in the attic ages hideously. And rightly so, because as it turns out (SPOILER ALERT), Dorian Gray is an absolutely hideous person. I’d expected that he would be vain and selfish and trifling and dishonest, but he’s a straight-up murderous monster, lacking in all human decency. He’d be right at home in 2026. 

The Beauty of Everyday Things (Soetsu Yanagi). I’ve actually not yet finished this book. It’s on my coffee table, and I read it a page or two at a time. It’s a series of essays about ordinary household objects made by Japanese craftsmen and artisans. The essays and accompanying photographs are quite beautiful - inspiring, too - and I like his Yanagi’s idea that patterns and technique and their limitations are prerequisites for beauty, not hindrances. No one, not even a genius, is endlessly creative. Structure is helpful. But I hate his blithe dismissal of the craftspeople themselves. He insists that craftspeople are artisans NOT artists, and that anonymity is essential to their work. He disdains the idea that a craftsperson should try to put her personal stamp on anything she makes. He seems to believe in a permanent underclass who should quietly work their lives away creating beauty and comfort and ease for their betters. Another one who'd be right at home in 2026.

Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver)

David Copperfield. Charles Dickens.

Family and Other Calamities (Leslie Gray Streeter) and Trespasses (Louise Kennedy)

The Crow Trap (Ann Cleeves)

Mansfield Park (Jane Austen)

Iris in Winter (Elizabeth Caddell)

The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, and Don’t Tell Alfred (Nancy Mitford)

The Truths We Hold and 107 Days (Kamala Harris). I read the first book early in the year, amid the early Trump 2.0 chaos of DOGE and USAID and plane crashes, when people on the internet were seriously, with a straight face, asking why Kamala wasn’t “doing something about all of this.” Never mind that Kamala actually asked for the chance to lead, by running a near-flawless campaign for President. Never mind that she warned us - repeatedly and clearly and convincingly - that everything that happened last year and that is happening now would in fact happen. And never mind that 76 or so million Americans looked at the smart and compassionate and principled and accomplished Black lady and the 34-count pu$&y-grabbing corrupt racist insurrectionist felon and said “yeah, we’ll take the White dude.” Kamala was RIGHT THERE, ready to lead, and this country said “no thanks, we like the conman.” Yes, it’s been almost two years, and no, I am not over it. 

Lovely One, Ketanji Brown Jackson. I often wonder what it’s like for Justice Jackson to finally fulfill her highest ambition, only to be surrounded by the six worst Supreme Court justices in history. And Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, too - but at least they had a chance to serve when the Supreme Court wasn’t a wholly owned subsidiary of a corrupt Executive Branch. Anyway, it’s a very good book. I just finished Uncommon Favor, Dawn Staley’s memoir, and there’s a common thread connecting them. Both of these women knew what they wanted to do from a very early age. Both of them knew that they were extraordinarily gifted. Both of them were singularly dedicated to pursuing their goals. And of course, both of them had to be twice as good as white men to get half as far. 

Black Widow (Leslie Gray Streeter) and The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (Louise Kennedy)

The Sum of Us (Heather McGhee). I’m not sure why I didn’t write about this before, because it is very good. I have always been impressed with Heather McGhee when I’ve seen her on discussion panels, and I am consciously trying to read more books by Black authors, especially women. McGhee’s central thesis is in her subtitle: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. She touches on some of the same themes that Heather Cox Richardson wrote about in Democracy Awakening, which explains what Richardson calls the “liberal consensus,” the social welfare system that pulled us out of the Depression and made America free and prosperous in the post-war years; and its gradual dismantling beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing through the first Trump administration. McGhee covers this as well, but with a much closer examination of the role of race in the dismantling of the social welfare system and the ways in which Reagan and others in the public and private spheres exploited racial fears to hoodwink the so-called “white working class” into believing that equality for Black Americans would equal poverty and deprivation for them. Sadly, their tactics worked and continue to work, to everyone’s detriment. We really could have a just society and a fair distribution of wealth, but only if we understand that racism is the major obstacle. 

Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed. As I mentioned here, I re-read Ten Days after watching Reds for the first time right after Diane Keaton died. Fair warning - this post touches on pretty much everything, so don’t expect a book review. 

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, Jason Stanley. God, I spent a lot of 2025 neck-deep in fascism, didn’t I? No wonder my brain is in the state it’s in. Anyway, this book touches on some of the same things that Heather McGhee and Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have covered in their recent books, with a bit of a narrower focus. Stanley examines a specific tactic of fascists - the rewriting of history, the flooding of the zone with bullshit, making it harder to tell truth from lies; and of course, the framing of oppressors as victims. It’s DARVO on a macro scale. Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder are both in Canada now. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to characterize their departure as fleeing the US. I worry about HCR sometimes.  

I read a few other things here and there, too. I listened to an audiobook version of Jonathan Alter’s His Very Best, a biography of Jimmy Carter. I don’t consider that I really read it, not because I don’t think listening to an audiobook is reading (keep me out of that debate) but because I didn’t really pay attention to the recording. I ended up buying a copy of the book, an actual copy, because it was right on the front table of a new locally owned bookstore that I really like. The parts that actually penetrated the brain fog when I was listening were quite good so maybe I’ll actually read it this year. If I do, you'll see it on my 2026 book list. God willing, I will publish that sometime before the end of 2027.

Fictional Mitfords

I’m way behind on writing about books. This is something that I wrote in 2025 and never published. I’m publishing it now so that I can include it in my 2025 book review post. God willing, I’ll finish that before the end of 2026. 

*****

My life as an American woman in God-help-me 2025 is nothing like the lives of fictional British middle- and upper-class women in the early and mid 20th century. Nor do I want it to be - I wouldn’t want to be either the victim or the beneficiary of the English class system. When it comes to repressive social hierarchies, burn them all down is my motto. 

Still, I love reading about these characters, and so British womanhood in bygone eras seems to be a dominant theme for my reading - well, that, and the state of the world in God-help-me 2025. It’s quite the contrast. I read three of Nancy Mitford’s four novels in 2025. The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, and Don’t Tell Alfred are the stories of the Radlett family and their lives at Alconleigh, the family’s ancestral estate, and beyond. All three are told in the first person by Fanny Logan, the Radletts’ first cousin and daughter of Lady Alconleigh’s sister, known as “the Bolter” because of her history of marrying and abandoning a series of men. 

I read them out of sequence - I started with Love in a Cold Climate and after I finished, I remembered reading that Mitford had written several Radlett novels, and I got my hands on them as quickly as possible. The Pursuit of Love was the first in the series so I read it as a prequel. Don’t Tell Alfred, which I’m in the middle of now, takes place about 20 years after the events of Love in a Cold Climate, when Fanny’s husband, a quiet Oxford don whom we don’t hear from much in the earlier novels, is appointed British Ambassador to France. All of a sudden, unassuming Fanny and cerebral Alfred are thrust into the rarefied worlds of high Paris society and international diplomacy during the Cold War. 

I’d kick like a mule if I was yanked out of my cozy life as the wife of a high-ranking academic at Oxford and thrown headlong into a world of daily parties and reporters and photographers and visiting heads of state; but after overcoming some initial trepidation, Fanny adjusts quickly and becomes interested and invested in her new role. She manages one comic crisis after another, without much help from her beautiful but flighty assistant, and keeps the Ambassador on a need-to-know basis - hence the title. But Alfred is not a fool. He knows what’s up - he just chooses what he sees and what he doesn’t see. 

*****

In the earlier books, especially The Pursuit of Love, the Radlett daughters live in a world of privilege, but not ease. Marriage is their only prospect of independence. The rules of primogeniture dictated that none of the daughters could inherit their father’s considerable wealth, and Lord Alconleigh (based on Nancy Mitford’s real-life father, Lord Redesdale) believes in the rules of primogeniture and does not believe in formal education for women. Lord Alconleigh is also a tyrant - mostly a benevolent tyrant, but a tyrant nonetheless - whose whims and preferences completely dominate the family’s life. The “Hons Cupboard” - a closet that the girls use as a retreat and clubhouse - is their only escape from Alconleigh’s strict rules and erratic discipline. Yes, the Radlett girls live in a stately home on a huge estate where they are tended by servants and never want for anything, but their lives are not their own. Fanny, the first person narrator of all of the Radlett novels, is a little wistful about her own quiet life with her Aunt Emily, compared to the riotous family togetherness of Alconleigh; but she’s also glad to return to her serene and pleasant home after long visits with the boisterous Radletts and the mercurial Uncle Matthew. 

In Love in a Cold Climate, the girls grow up and gain some independence (mostly by marrying rich men). Don’t Tell Alfred is Fanny’s story. After a lifetime as a second banana to her Radlett cousins, Fanny really comes into her own in Paris despite her initial reluctance to leave her life in Oxford. She is surrounded by beauty and elegance and luxury every moment of the day, so much so that she quite sympathizes with her predecessor who refuses to vacate the Embassy, knowing as she does that she also won’t want to leave when her time comes. But even better than the richness of her physical environment is the freedom and autonomy that she enjoys as an older woman (of course, “older” is relative - Fanny is probably about 45 in this book).  Amid the chaos of a hack journalist’s efforts to undermine the Ambassador and his wife, and her socialite secretary’s failure to do much actual work, and her predecessor’s popularity and unwanted presence in the Embassy compound, Fanny perseveres. She outwits her adversaries and becomes a person of importance in Paris. 

*****

I’ve read enough about the Mitford sisters to know that The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are straight-up roman a clef novels in which art imitates life very closely. Lord and Lady Alconleigh are very much like David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford aka Lord and Lady Redesdale; and Linda Radlett must be Diana Mitford. Spoiler alert: Linda Radlett dies tragically at the end of The Pursuit of Love. Nancy Mitford loved her sister Diana, but was horrified by her political beliefs and rightly so because Diana was a Nazi. Maybe Nancy thought that death in childbirth was a better fate for Linda than Diana’s actual fate (imprisonment as a traitor to England during WWII followed by permanent exile from England). Runaway Jassy was obviously Jessica, my favorite Mitford. Even the Hons Cupboard was taken from real life at the Mitford home. 

Don’t Tell Alfred, on the other hand, seems more invented - in a good way. One thing I don’t know about the Mitfords is if they had a cousin like Fanny, or if she’s pure invention. I’ll have to find out, I guess, but I’m inclined to believe that it’s the latter because Fanny is, I think, a combination of Deborah, the youngest Mitford, and Nancy herself. Like Nancy, Fanny finds herself very much at home and at ease in Paris, but like Deborah, she also finds herself successfully managing a large and complex household and navigating the ins and outs of life on a very big stage. It’s a huge change for Fanny - from a quiet life in Oxford as a privileged but dull academic wife to wife of the English Ambassador to France in the postwar years. 

*****

The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are both almost entirely rooted in Mitford family history, with the former written as a tragedy and the latter written as a conventional society novel. Don’t Tell Alfred’s Fanny is informed by Nancy’s real life in Paris, but its events are entirely imagined, and its tone is society drama meets screwball comedy - somewhere between Barbara Pym and P.G. Wodehouse. With these three books, Nancy Mitford proved that as a writer, she could do pretty much anything. 

White Teeth

I just finished reading White Teeth, and my gosh. Zadie Smith has done it again, and by that, I just mean she’s done it because this was her first book. I always meant to read it, and I finally did. 

White Teeth was published in 2000, which was essentially still the 90s. Zadie Smith and the book got tons of attention at the time - she was quite young (still in her 20s) and a critically acclaimed first novel by a young author is always a big deal. Not long after it was published, I remember reading a blurb that described the book as a novel about a multicultural group of young people coming of age in London. That is not an untruthful description, but it’s a very incomplete one. White Teeth is about almost everything - family, sex, love, friendship, war, politics, history…it’s about the end of the British Empire and the history of 20th century England from World War II to Margaret Thatcher. 

*****

Every generation has some conflict with the generations before and after. Well, except Generation X because we are not out here looking for drama. Let the Millennials fight it out with the Boomers and Gen Z, and leave us out of it. Don’t start none, won’t be none - that’s our motto. 

Multilayered generational conflict is interwoven throughout White Teeth. Longtime friends Samad and Archie, who fought in World War II, both marry women a generation behind them. And so Millat and Magid (Samad) and Irie (Archie) are really young enough to be their fathers’ grandchildren, and are far removed from the England of the war years. Meanwhile, Archie’s wife Clara and Samad’s wife Alsana are the middle of three generations and torn between their native lands (Jamaica and Bangladesh, respectively) and their homeland, England. Samad doesn’t really consider himself English and in fact, he remembers Bangladesh when it was still India. It’s a lot. 

But it’s not all. Add in the scars of World War II and the beginnings of global radical Islam and the supreme arrogance of scientists who don’t distinguish between what can be done and what should be done, and you have a veritable ticking time bomb. 

Every character in this book has a distinct and complex personality - furious Samad, fierce and long-suffering Alsana, awkward Irie and her white father Archie and Black Jamaican mother Clara, Samad and Alsana’s twin sons Millat and Magid, the ridiculous but monstrous Chalfen family. And they all have a reason for being. The book needs every one of them. 

*****

I read novels for the characters more than the story, but White Teeth does not neglect one at the expense of the other. Something happens on almost every page, and reading it feels like reading Dickens, when there’s sheer joy in turning the page to find out what happens next. Fittingly, the book ends on New Year’s Eve 1999. Technically, 2001 was the first year of the 21st century, but the transition from 1999 to 2000 was really the end of the 20th century, and the 20th century is practically a character in White Teeth. It might be the main character. 

*****

I have at least three more Zadie Smith novels to catch up on, and then I’ll have read everything she’s published; in book form, at least. I’m hoping to read all of them this year. Stay tuned. 

Dead or Alive

If I’ve learned one thing in the last few years, it’s that picking up a new Zadie Smith essay collection is going to send me down a rabbit hole of knowledge-seeking about artists and writers and musicians whom I have never heard of. That book is also going to cost me some money because when I read Zadie Smith’s essays, I’ll almost always learn about a book that I didn’t know existed but that I must buy and read immediately. 

This time, the essay collection is Dead or Alive, and the book that I must buy is Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black. I thought that I had read all of Hilary Mantel’s novels, and I had resigned myself to the knowledge that there wouldn’t be any more new ones coming because Hilary Mantel died in 2022, may she rest in peace. 

Zadie Smith loves Hilary Mantel just as much as I do because of course she does, because she has flawless taste. She knew Mantel personally and recalls a conversation about the then work-in-progress Wolf Hall, describing Mantel’s animated explanation of her forthcoming book as a performance worthy of any stage. Zadie Smith didn’t read Wolf Hall until Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light had been published, and was just as awestruck as everyone else who read Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Who would ever have thought that Henry VIII’s henchman and consigliere and victim would be the best literary character since Jo March or David Copperfield or Dorothea Brooke? 

Not only Hilary Mantel, but Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Shakespeare, and Dickens all make appearances at some point in these essays. So do Stormzy, Madonna, and Eminem. A Zadie Smith essay collection is a bit of a party. You're lucky to be invited, and you never know who’s going to show up. 

*****

Zadie Smith sometimes writes about her childhood and youth in London. Her father was a white Englishman and her mother a Jamaican immigrant. She writes about what it was like to be a mixed-race child in 1980s and 1990s Britain. She writes with sadness and anger about the erosion of Britain’s social welfare system, which allowed her working-class parents to build a good life and to provide for their children. 

I love all of her personal writing, but she’s best and funniest when she writes about her mess of a teenage self - self-centered, self-important, self-dramatizing, messy and petulant and stubborn but also sensitive, brilliant, and hilarious. She writes about being a teenager like she really remembers what it was like and like she fondly remembers and accepts her teenage self, flaws and all. I was also a mess of a young person, and only began to think kindly about my teenage self when I had teenagers of my own and finally understood that they’re pretty much all self-centered, self-important, self-dramatizing, messy and petulant and stubborn but also sensitive, brilliant, and hilarious in their own way. 

In addition to the writers and artists and musicians I learned more about while reading Dead or Alive, I also learned something new about Zadie Smith, which is that she once fell from an upper floor window, breaking several bones and spending months recovering while also figuring out how to respond to the rumors that her fall was an intentional attention grab or a suicide attempt. The truth is that she was trying to look interesting while smoking a cigarette out the window of her teenage bedroom, and she lost her balance and toppled out of the open window. I never smoked as a teenager, and I never fell out of a window, but I did many many stupid things while trying to look interesting or cool, and sometimes those stupid things had even stupider consequences. Here’s something that Zadie Smith and I have in common with every other person born before 1985 or so - little or no video evidence of our stupidity exists. Thank God we didn’t have access to social media in the 80s, because we did stupid things all day long, and we thought we were hilarious, and we would have documented everything. 

*****

“Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough.” That is Zadie Smith quoting yet another writer, G.K. Chesterton, about whom I have mixed feelings. But here he’s dead right, and so is Zadie Smith, pointing out the unfortunate human tendency to fall for frauds and charlatans and to fail to see the truth even when it’s right in front of them. Zadie Smith can write about art, literature, history, or music from any decade or even any century, but she’s never not relevant to the present moment. Lucky for me, I haven’t read all of her novels yet. I’ll get on that next. 

Retribution

I read Jonathan Karl’s Retribution right after Christmas. This is a book whose cover is adorned with the infamous “Fight” photo taken right after the 2024 “assassination attempt” in Butler, PA and left to my own devices I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. But it was a Christmas present, so I read it. 

It was fine, I guess - very critical of Trump though not nearly critical enough. Karl is also critical of Biden and Harris and although some of his criticism is reasonable, the book as a whole reads very much as though Mr. Karl is trying to come across as “balanced” and “fair,” things that used to be very important to serious journalists and I suppose still are. But there are not always “both sides.” As they say on the internet, if one person tells a journalist that it’s pouring outside and another tells the same journalist that it’s bright and sunny, then the journalist’s job is not to present both sides of the story - it’s to look out the fucking window and see who’s telling the truth. 

*****

It is interesting that Sean Curran, who was Special Agent in Charge of Trump’s security detail on July 13 2024 is now the head of the United States Secret Service. Kimberly Cheatle, who was the Director of the Secret Service on that day, was fired; but the SA who was actually responsible for the safety of then former President Trump was promoted. Jonathan Karl interviewed Director Curran about how the Secret Service would respond if Trump was convicted and sent to prison in 2024, and Curran assured Karl that the Secret Service would continue to protect the former President no matter where he was, and that Curran himself was prepared to remain imprisoned with Trump. “There’s nothing I would not have done for him,” Curran said. Nothing he would not have done. Interesting. 

*****

I am a chronically well-informed person who lived and breathed every minute of the 2024 election campaign. I remember most of the details, most of the day to day ins and outs of that campaign. I remember the excitement and optimism of October, when I thought Kamala Harris would win. I also read 107 Days, Harris’s book about the campaign, pretty much the minute it came out. So I was already pretty well-versed in the events of 2024, and I didn’t learn much reading this book that I didn’t already know. It’s well-researched and well-written, but it didn’t reveal anything, about Trump or the campaign, that I wasn’t already aware of. Until the end, though, I thought that it might be a fine book to read for anyone who wants a primer on the last presidential election. But Jonathan Karl’s closing arguments tanked the whole thing for me. 

*****

About journalist friends who feared that a second Trump term would be the end of democracy in the United States, Karl writes “I have long believed - and still hope - that those fears are overblown.” This is just stupid, so shockingly stupid, that it outweighs any of the book’s positives. 

This is a book that came out late in the year 2025, a year in which a Congresswoman was arrested for trying to fulfill her oversight responsibility at an ICE holding facility in her district. It was a year in which a sitting US Senator was grabbed and thrown to the floor for daring to ask the Secretary of Homeland Security a question. The first official act of this presidency was a pardon for hundreds of insurrectionists, including people who attacked police officers with flagpoles and bear spray. 2025 was the year in which National Guard troops were nationalized and deployed on city streets. On October 1, 2025, the nation’s top military officers were summoned to a browbeating by the Secretary of Defense with a guest appearance by the President who told the Generals and Admirals that they needed to be prepared to fight the enemy within; i.e., us. We shipped people to a torture prison in a foreign country. We built an actual concentration camp. And that’s just what I can remember right off the top of my head. If none of that was enough to convince a journalist that his colleagues’ fears for the country were not “overblown” then what is he even doing?   

*****

I don’t blame the media for everything. But I blame them for not doing their jobs, and it seems to me that a journalist publishing a whole ass book about the 2024 campaign and the early days of his second term and still downplaying the seriousness of what’s happening in this country is really not doing his damn job. I’m going to go read a real book now. 

Vera and the Crow Trap

I can’t be bothered with American police dramas, but I’ll watch British crime all day long. Well, not all day long. But I really like British detective shows. 

“Vera” is one of my very favorite British TV shows of any genre. It stars Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope, a brilliant, quirky, irascible detective. Vera and her crew of Detective Constables and Detective Sergeants are a veritable murder-solving machine in Northumberland, which is apparently a hotbed of homicide. 

I love “Vera” for lots of reasons - the bleak but beautiful Northumberland landscape, the far north accent that sounds like a blend of Manchester and Scotland, the clothes and interiors, …but mostly the characters, and especially Vera herself. I love the way the characters look. Even the most beautiful actors (David Leon, Clare Calbraith, Wunmi Mosaku, Kenny Doughty, Brenda Blethyn herself) look like normal, real people in this show. Vera’s rumpled clothing and her careless appearance are sometimes the subject of comments or jokes, but not mean or critical jokes. The other characters, and by extension the viewers, know that Vera is perfectly comfortable as she is, and that her unorthodox fashion sense and her refusal to conform with a boss-babe appearance standard do not make her less powerful or less effective in any way. 

Vera is complex. She lives alone, and has very few relationships other than with her subordinates, with whom she is very demanding, and sometimes mean. In almost every show, she has a moment of kindness or humor that softens her enough that we viewers still love her, but we’re also still glad that she’s not our boss. We learn a little bit at a time about Vera’s lonely and difficult childhood and her early career, and we see her at home in the isolated cottage that she once shared with her alcoholic father, but these personal moments are few and far between. Most of the show’s action takes place in the police station or at crime scenes, and most of Vera's interactions are with fellow police officers, or criminals and victims and witnesses. 

*****

“Vera” is based on the crime novels of Ann Cleeves. She wrote a series of novels about Vera Stanhope, and another series of novels on which the series “Shetland” was based. I also liked “Shetland” quite a bit - and now you know what I did during the pandemic - and I thought it might be time to read an Ann Cleeves book, just to see if I like them. I started with The Crow Trap, the first Vera novel.

Vera is a very static character in this first novel - we see her rough edges and her rumpled appearance but we don’t know what she’s thinking. She is not even mentioned until about a third of the way into the book, unless you count her brief appearance at a funeral, where she’s described as a mysterious middle-aged stranger. Those of us who have seen Vera on TV will guess, as I did, that this unnamed stranger was Vera but readers who are beginning at the beginning won’t have a clue.  

The Crow Trap is about three women who live in a rustic cottage together while they complete some field work for an environmental study. The three are not friends. In fact, they don’t like each other much. When the youngest of the three is murdered, Vera comes in as the lead investigator. The book formed the basis of one of the show’s early episodes, but I couldn’t remember what happened until the very end. Like any good mystery writer, Ann Cleeves throws lots of red herrings in with the clues, keeping us guessing until the end. But I don’t really read detective novels and on the rare occasions when I do, I don’t really care who the killer is. I just like to become absorbed in a compelling story with interesting characters and great writing, and Ann Cleeves delivers all of this. Vera herself is not so much a character as a personage with whom everyone is forced to contend; and their reactions to her reveal something about themselves. While Vera is fairly static (she comes out of this whole story exactly as she is at the beginning) the other characters, even the minor characters, are complex and interesting and flawed and unpredictable. 

I have two more Ann Cleeves novels in my Kindle queue, so maybe I do read detective novels now. Maybe I’ll start gardening and watching birds. Maybe I’ll find a diner and go there every day and order nothing but soup. I’m 60 now and it’s time to embrace my elderly lady era. Vera Stanhope can be my fashion inspiration. 

Letters from an American in Petrograd

I’m sick today. It’s Wednesday at noon and I’m not at work. I’m on my couch bundled up in a baggy sweater and soft pants, shivering a bit and hoping to regain my energy. I hate being sick but I have to admit that a sick day is a very nice thing to have, and I’m grateful that I can rest when I’m sick and not worry about my paycheck. It’s a privilege, although it certainly shouldn’t be. Everyone should be allowed to take a day when they need it. Everyone should be allowed to rest when they’re sick. 

*****

A day later, and I’m much better. No fever, no disgusting GI symptoms about which the less said the better, and I’m back to about 80 percent of my normal energy level. I did very little yesterday other than binge-watching “Shetland,” reading, sleeping, and watching and reading news coverage of the off-year election, which was so much better than last year’s catastrophe. Here in the DMV, we’re finally free of the “I’m speaking” lady - IYKYK. 

“Shetland” is my favorite down and out TV show. Most of the time, I don’t even care who committed the crime - I just like looking at the beautiful Shetland landscape and listening to the Scottish accents. And unlike many fans of the show, I like the Ruth Calder seasons just as much as the Jimmy Perez seasons. The newer seasons still have Tosh and Billy and Sandy and Cora, and they still have Shetland itself. “Shetland” is medicinal. I’m pretty sure that three episodes cured whatever it was that was ailing me. 

*****

Lest it seem that I spent a whole day watching BritBox, let me also tell you about what I was reading, or rather re-reading. I watched the movie “Reds” for the first time right after Diane Keaton died, and immediately put Ten Days that Shook the World on my TBR list. I read 10 Days in college, but I barely remembered it. And at the time, I also didn’t know anything about the Bolshevik Revolution or the early days of the Soviet Union. It’s not that I’m an expert now, of course, but I’ve read enough to know about Kamenev and Zinoviev and the other Old Bolsheviks, and to know what happened in the wake of the 10 days. 

Someone once said that journalism is the first draft of history. I don’t know if that’s true of all journalism, especially not now when we have “respected journalists” writing books about one President’s supposed senility and saying not a word about the obvious decline of the current President. But it’s certainly true of 10 Days that Shook the World. Reed was observing and reporting and even participating as the events of 1917 unfolded, and if you read it and think “I still don’t get what happened in this part,” then it’s probably because Reed himself didn’t always get what was happening; or rather, he knew exactly what was happening in front of him but he hadn’t yet pieced it together with what was happening throughout Petrograd and Moscow; and he hadn’t yet seen the aftermath that would make the importance of those ten days so much clearer. 

*****

John Reed’s writing is beautiful in some places and choppy and abrupt in others. I thought that Reed had written most of the book during or immediately following his time in Russia, but I learned that he was just taking notes in preparation for writing the book after he returned home to New York. The American authorities, who had long been watching Reed, confiscated his notes and materials as soon as he got off the boat and held them for seven months. When his papers were finally returned to him. Reed holed up in a friend’s house and wrote day and night for two weeks until the book was ready for the publisher. 

Ten Days that Shook the World was banned in the USSR under Stalin, even though it depicts most of the Bolshevik leaders as brave and principled, and even though John Reed’s pro-Communist sympathies are evident throughout the book. Lenin even wrote an introduction to the first edition. But Stalin was barely mentioned, and so Reed’s version of history conflicted with the Stalinist version in which Joseph Stalin was the most important figure of the Revolution, with only Lenin himself as an equal. 

*****

A week or so ago, Bari Weiss’s very silly internet publication, hilariously named The Free Press, ran an opinion piece on the historian Heather Cox Richardson. Full disclosure: I read HCR’s Letters from an American almost every day, and I admire her immensely. You will not read balanced and unbiased commentary on HCR on this blog. This is, as they say on social media, a Heather Cox Richardson stan account. 

Anyway, The Free Press writers, unsurprisingly, are not HCR fans. Writing about Letters from an American, which people will be reading decades from now, they whine “the history in her telling is never neutral. It is a morality tale in which Republicans play the villains; Democrats, the weary defenders of reason.” 

A second full disclosure: I didn’t read past that line, which was in the first paragraph. Life is too short for me to waste time reading a hit piece on my beloved HCR, not to mention reading the opinions of people who are too stupid to understand that history is never neutral, and there are not always two equal sides to every story. Knowing the difference between right and wrong and allowing that knowledge to inform her writing doesn’t make Heather Cox Richardson an opinion writer. Historians are supposed to interpret events, not just record them. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now, almost a week later, and I’m not working again because it’s Veterans’ Day and even though I’m not a veteran, I still get the day off. I do love a mid-week, no-reason-at-all holiday. I’m still reading Ten Days that Shook the World, a little bit at a time. It’s going to take me more than ten days to finish that book, if I actually do finish it. The debating and fighting and name-calling are wearing me out. I can’t imagine what the 2025 version of Ten Days will look like. Readers will need valium just to get through a chapter. 

Still, that’s what makes the book still interesting and compelling 108 years later. Red vs. White. Kerensky vs. Trotsky vs. Lenin. Mensheviks vs. Bolsheviks. Bolsheviks vs. everyone. It’s like a time capsule from 1917. It's like reading John Reed's blog - like "Letters from an American in Petrograd."" 

Nobody's Girl

I bought Virginia Giuffre’s book, Nobody’s Girl, the day it was published. I was in the middle of a Nancy Mitford novel (I have much more to say about Nancy Mitford) so I didn’t get to it until a few days later. One big takeaway - Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were and are terrible, heartless people. Another big takeaway - there is just no way - NO WAY - that Jeffrey Epstein could have accumulated that much wealth based only on work or even only on investing. The man spent 24 hours a day fussing over his health and fitness routine, decorating his properties, getting massages, and - of course - raping people. He simply would not have had enough time to do any kind of meaningful, remunerative work. 

This leads, of course, to the biggest of questions: Where, then, did the money come from? How many people was he blackmailing, and for how much, and exactly how bad were their crimes that they’d pay that much money to cover them up? Because we all know that if it was just a matter of straight up sexual abuse of young women by rich or powerful men, they’d get away with it. Sure, there’d be a scandal, and lots of fuss and embarrassment, but it would all blow over, and the men in question would suffer nothing worse than cancellation, if that. Whatever is in those files is really really bad. 

***** 

But the overall takeaway is devastation. This story is devastating, and not just because of what Giuffre suffered at the hands of her father and his friends and the other men who abused her, and the resulting feelings of worthlessness and despair that made her easy prey for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. 

It’s bad enough that this happened to Virginia Giuffre and Epstein’s other victims. What’s worse is that things like this tend to happen to girls and women who lack male protection - the ones who are “nobody’s girls.” We like to talk about how men need to protect the women they love. What we should be talking about is how we need to upend this entire patriarchal system that values women only as much as it values the men they’re associated with. What we should be doing is making abuse and harassment so unthinkable and unacceptable that single women and widows and orphans and all other women and girls can live in freedom and safety - even if they don’t have kind and benevolent male relatives and friends. 

RIP, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

*****

Three Days that Did Not Shake the World

I do love a three-day weekend, even if it’s for a minor holiday - especially if it’s for a minor holiday, because I don’t have to shop or cook or decorate for Indigenous People’s Day. It’s just a nice little break. It’s a lovely Saturday morning, sunny and cool but not cold and very autumn-like. I’m still not reconciled to the end of summer, but I’ve been sitting outside for an hour, and nothing has bitten me, so I have to acknowledge that fall isn’t all bad. And I do like to wear sweaters. 

*****

I keep thinking about October 2024, the gosh-darn good old days, when I had 99 problems but Donald Trump being President wasn’t one. I never thought that he COULDN’T win but I did think that he WOULDN’T win. I was hopeful, even optimistic. I miss the October 2024 version of me. 

*****

It’s Sunday now, rainy and gloomy and very October-ish. It’s a soup-making day, so I’m going to make some soup. Yesterday turned out to be a rather nice day. I did my usual Saturday household tasks and errands, and we spent most of the afternoon hanging around outside in the absolutely perfect early fall weather. Then we went to the movies. 

*****

I’ve never read any of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, but I think I’ll read Vineland, which was apparently the inspiration for the movie we saw last night, “One Battle After Another.” That movie was insane (and insanely long), but very good. I’m sure that Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn will be nominated for all the big awards, but Regina Hall is the one who stood out for me. She’s only on screen for a short time, but her performance as the kind and courageous revolutionary Deandra was beautiful and memorable. DiCaprio was very good, too, as was Teyana Taylor as the revolutionary femme fatale Perfidia Beverly Hills. Sean Penn was Sean Penn. He’s fun to watch, if nothing else, and the rest of this cast was more than equal to his scenery chewing. 

*****

It’s Monday now, and I’m not working because it’s a holiday. Today is Indigenous People's Day, FKA Columbus Day. When my children were growing up, IPD was never a school holiday. Instead, it was open house day because so many Montgomery County parents work for the government in one way or another, so it was a good time for parents to visit their kids’ classrooms. My husband and I also always went out for a late morning breakfast on IPD. We'd eat eggs and toast and laugh about how mad our kids would be if they knew we were at the Tastee Diner without them. 

The Tastee Diner is gone now, may it rest in peace. Our kids are grown, but the IPD breakfast tradition continues at our beloved Silver Diner. Eggs and toast taste so much better with diner coffee in a thick white mug. 

*****

I went shopping yesterday. It was raining, and so the mall was as good a place to go as any other. I don't shop in actual stores very often, and maybe I should, because I left that mall empty handed, which is perfect because I don't need a darn thing. Nordstrom has some very nice clothes right now, and I tried things on but nothing inspired me, and so I went home with all my money. 

And I did make soup, and then found out that no one else was going to be home for dinner. This was also perfect because now I have a huge pot of soup and I don't have to cook anything tonight. Soup is always better the next day, anyway.

*****

My husband had to go to work after our late breakfast on Monday, and it was a gloomy wet day, perfect for hanging around the house and watching a movie, so that’s what I did. I had never seen “Reds” before, and so I watched it in honor of Diane Keaton. My feelings about this movie are complicated. First, it was quite brave of Warren Beatty to make a 3.5 hour epic about the Bolshevik Revolution, when “Doctor Zhivago” was not all that old in 1981, and comparisons were inevitable. BLUF: “Reds” is very good, but “Doctor Zhivago” is better. 

Things that I really liked about “Reds” - I loved all of the witnesses’ first-hand stories, but I cannot understand why Beatty didn’t identify them onscreen. Maybe they didn’t want to be identified. Once a radical, always a radical. I also loved the great acting (especially Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman), beautiful cinematography, and amazing dialogue. But of course, misogyny is always going to be one of the biggest stars of any movie made in 1981. Louise Bryant, played by Diane Keaton, comes across as whiny and entitled and a little boring. John Reed (Warren Beatty directed himself), on the other hand, comes across as selfless and heroic and charming. But Louise comes through at the end, so maybe the perceived misogyny is just my imagination. 

See? I’m gaslighting myself now. 

Warren Beatty as John Reed is one of those performances that makes me think that the actor wishes that they were the character. I thought the same thing as I watched Brad Pitt play Billy Beane in “Moneyball" (one of my favorite movies), and Morgan Freeman playing the President or the Speaker of the House in who knows how many different movies. Julia Roberts won an Oscar for “Erin Brockovich” because she wanted to be a tough working-class broad sticking it to the man. I can watch “Hidden Figures” any time because Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae played it as though they wanted to be Black female mathematicians at NASA in the Jim Crow south. I bet Warren Beatty still thinks it would have been cool to be an intrepid American reporter witnessing the Bolshevik Revolution first-hand. 

*****

I was sad on Monday night. I should have done more this weekend, I thought. I should have had people over, or gone hiking or done something memorable.  But I’m in survival mode right now, like the rest of non-MAGA America. At least I made soup, right? At least I went to the movies. The Capitals beat the Islanders and the Rangers. I read Nancy Mitford and added two more books (Vineland and 10 Days that Shook the World, which will be a re-read) to my TBR list. I took the money that I would have spent at the mall and donated it to our local food bank. It was a nice though not spectacular weekend; a quiet little interlude. Sometimes, that’s enough. 

Artifice

Have you heard about “work slop”? Work slop is AI-generated work product that looks really pretty and professional but is actually - wait for it - slop. LinkedIn is all abuzz about work slop. People are shocked - shocked! - that people who would use Gemini or ChatGPT to write their memos or their slide decks or their data tables would also not bother to check their work and to correct what doesn’t make sense. 

Not long ago, I was handed a pile of work slop. Someone asked me to edit a document and I realized just a few words into the first paragraph that I was reading something whose only human contribution was the initial AI prompt. I had to rewrite it completely. 

Part of me felt vindicated. AI thinks it can take my job, does it? Well until they come up with a generative AI application that can write like a human being who actually uses and understands the English (or any other) language, good luck to it. 

But I’m me, of course, so I immediately imagined a worst-case scenario. The WCS is my default setting. What if AI becomes so dominant that it no longer needs to try to mimic us, because we will be mimicking it? What if we all end up speaking and writing - and even thinking - in the language of AI-generated social media scripts and marketing collateral? 

*****

A few months ago, I read The Portrait of Dorian Gray for the first time. Dorian Gray was published in 1890, so we can’t say that preoccupation with the superficial and desire for an unnatural level of physical perfection are 21st century phenomena. Oscar Wilde recognized obsession with youth well over a hundred years ago. I wonder what he would have made of Kristi Noem or Martha Stewart or that crazy tech CEO dude who spends millions of dollars trying to stay young forever (unsuccessfully, I might add - he’s in his 40s, and he looks like he’s in his 40s - he could have achieved those results for free). 

I’m thinking about how AI would figure in a modern retelling of Dorian Gray. Maybe instead of a portrait, there’d be an AI double who would deteriorate with age while the real Dorian Gray built billion-dollar electricity-gobbling data centers and exploitative gig work platforms and sports betting empires and cryptocurrency exchanges. The forever-young Dorian Gray would have 1b followers on social media watching him hustle and grind and self-optimize, and wondering how he manages to never look older than 21. The AI Dorian Gray would look like Stephen Miller at age 80. Real Dorian would employ Blackwater mercenaries to guard the safe room where the holographic AI Dorian is projected on a wall, aging in real time. 

Look at me, out here writing fan fiction. 

*****

“Have you ever heard about the dot com bubble?” That was my 24-year-old son to me at dinner the other night. Yes, I had heard about it. I lived through it lol. My son believes that we’re sitting on top of an AI bubble, and he can’t wait for it to burst. He might be right. If enough people have to read and edit the kind of “writing” that I dealt with this week, and if enough people start to notice that their electricity and water bills are much higher than they should be, and if enough older people like me understand that AI is a big part of the reason why their new college graduates cannot find jobs, and if everyone finally realizes that the AI edgelords actually don’t have our best interests at heart, then the AI backlash could gain steam. 

I read somewhere that Microsoft “invested” in OpenAI by giving them “credits” for free use of Microsoft supercomputer labs. Microsoft then claimed those credit redemptions as “revenue.” If one company claiming an imaginary multi-billion dollar “investment” in another company and then calling that company’s use of its imaginary credits “revenue” isn’t the clearest ever example of fake accounting, then I don’t know anything about anything. And I don’t know anything about anything, really. The stock market and the futures markets and the currency markets have always been black boxes to me, completely incomprehensible. But I have a grasp of the basics, and one of the basics is that bubbles that burst are usually built on dodgy financial practices. 

*****

It’s all very grim, but despite my initial WCS projection, I am uncharacteristically optimistic, at least about this one thing. I think that people are going to push back, and we’re not going to let AI take over and do all of our thinking and creating for us. Other than a certain very creepy college professor, I don’t know anyone who actually wants to watch Tilly Norwood on screen. 

One day out of 107

Oh what a time to be alive in America. I’m reading 107 Days, Kamala Harris’s memoir of her 107-day presidential campaign and my gosh, I cannot believe that this all happened just a short year ago. Less than one short year, we are 70 percent down the road toward the fascism finish line, and the rest of the road is downhill and icy (in more ways than one). 

I was about to say that I can’t believe how bad it’s actually been, but I absolutely can and do believe it. I’ve been expecting the worst since 2015, pretty much since the day Trump came down that infamous escalator. Ten years later, he is still wreaking havoc and still riding escalators and every day is proof of the idea that you can be shocked and unsurprised all at once. Every day, I’m shocked by what these people are doing to this country, but I’m never surprised. 

*****

One of the many things that I find really humbling is that when I read books about recent history, I will realize as I’m reading that I remember little or nothing about episodes that were huge news just five or ten years ago. Same thing goes for biographies of contemporary figures, people I think I know a lot about - I find that I know pretty much nothing. But I read VP Harris’s earlier memoir, The Truths We Hold, just a few months ago, so I was pretty solid on her biographical details. As for the historical details of the 2024 campaign, I found that I remembered pretty much everything Kamala Harris describes almost exactly as she describes it, and as though it all happened yesterday. I mean, it DID happen yesterday, relatively speaking - it’s not even a year since the 2024 election. But it also seems like part of a bygone era. When I look back to the very recent time just before the 2024 election, it feels like I’m looking across a deep chasm, like we have crossed a line from the before time to now that we’ll never be able to cross back again. 

*****

107 Days is written in short diary-like chapters, titled for the number of days remaining until the election. Most of the entries have an in-the-moment or just after the moment quality. The book reads as though Kamala Harris still hasn’t really processed the events of the summer and fall of 2024, and she probably hasn’t. Most of us haven’t. Some critics have complained that she blames others for the campaign’s (few and far between) mistakes and for the “loss” to Trump, but that is nonsense. I think Kamala Harris was near-perfect in that campaign, but she made a few minor mistakes as anyone would, and it feels like she’s still beating herself up over those mistakes. 

A few takeaways: Tim Walz is great but she probably should have gone with Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro or even Pete Buttigieg even though he wasn’t on the short list. The Venn diagram of people who won’t vote for a Black woman and people who won’t vote for a gay man is a closed circle, so Buttigieg would not have harmed the ticket, and he is the smartest, sharpest politician in the United States. Mark Kelly is also brilliant, and he’s tougher than Walz. Kamala is 100 percent right that Tim Walz was far too nice to JD Vance during that debate; and that’s partly because he is a decent man who is nice to everyone but it’s more because (like a lot of politicians) he is still playing by the rules of two decades ago when we thought that “both sides” had the country’s best interests at heart. This is no longer the case. 

*****

My son had a swim meet at Gallaudet University the weekend before the election last year. Gallaudet has an absolutely terrible swim team but the Gallaudet meet is great. Some of their swimmers are completely new to the sport, and it’s amazing watching them compete. Last year, a Gallaudet swimmer who is almost 30 years old took over two minutes to swim the 100 freestyle. Both teams applauded enthusiastically as he finally finished, jubilant and exhausted. 

We walked from the NoMa-Gallaudet Metro stop to the Gallaudet aquatic center, just about a mile. It was a gorgeous autumn day. Harris-Walz signs were everywhere, right next to Halloween decorations that hadn’t been taken down yet. People were out walking and sitting on their front porches. People smiled and waved at us as we walked by, and we smiled and waved back. Marymount won the meet, of course, because a lot of high school teams would beat Gallaudet. The walk back to the Metro was just as lovely as the walk to Gallaudet, with the autumn sky turning pink and orange and purple and the leaves crunching underfoot on the tree-lined neighborhood streets. But that’s not why it was a perfect day. 

*****

107 Days does not end happily, as we all know. As much as I enjoyed this book, I did not enjoy reliving the night of November 6, 2024, when Kamala Harris and her team and all of her supporters watching the returns on TV realized with growing apprehension and eventual horror that Donald Trump had “won” the election and that we were facing a second Trump presidency. And everyone knew that the second Trump term would be far worse than the first, and everyone who knew that was right. 

When I think about how much has happened in just a few short months, I think back to that Saturday in November, walking the neighborhood streets from the Metro to Gallaudet and back and smiling back at all of the smiling, hopeful faces, and feeling not exactly sure but extremely optimistic about the prospect of Kamala Harris as our next President. It was a beautiful day. 

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

I’m reading so slowly lately. It wasn’t that long ago that I plowed through a book, sometimes two books, in a week. Now I’m lucky to finish a book in two weeks. And it’s not because I’m so busy that I’m reading slowly. I’m just distracted. I can’t concentrate. All of this (gesturing wildly at everything) is a lot. But I did finally finish the book that I’ve been reading for the last two weeks: Paula Byrne’s The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, a literary biography of one of my very favorite authors. 

*****

I’m not sure why England in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s is such a calming alternative to the present. Things were a lot in pre-war and wartime and postwar Britain, too. Maybe it’s because I know now that everything turned out OK; whereas I have no idea if things will turn out OK here in the United States in 2025. It’s an evolving story. It’s a fluid situation, as they say on the news. 

Also, I’m on the fence about literary biographies. I’m not sure it’s fair to an author to dig through her personal diaries and papers and then try to connect events in her life to events in her books. Or rather, it’s absolutely 100 percent fair because everything that’s in writing is discoverable - especially if the writer published it. And it’s also a reasonably accurate way to examine an author’s life. Most of Pym’s characters were based on herself and her friends, to varying degrees. That’s true of most fictional characters. We can only imagine so much. 

Muriel Spark, another of my favorite 20th century British authors, wrote a memoir called Curriculum Vitae. I read Muriel Spark for the first time when I was young - I found old hardcover copies of Memento Mori and The Girls of Slender Means at Lame Duck Books, a used bookstore in Philadelphia, and then I made a point of reading everything she wrote. I bought Curriculum Vitae the moment it was published in 1992, and read it in a day, and was then astonished to learn that critical reviews were mixed because critics felt that Spark was vague and selective in recounting the events of her life. Duh! Of course she was vague. Of course she was selective. We all tell others what we want them to know. 

So my objection to literary biographies (not that it stops me reading them obvs) has nothing to do with fairness or accuracy - it’s just that I don’t always get the point of writing about writers, period. I’d rather let them speak for themselves. 

*****

But back to Barbara Pym and her adventures.  BLUF: Barbara Pym was an interesting person who lived a rather complicated life. Something I never knew about Miss Pym (and would have preferred not to know) is that as a young woman, she was briefly infatuated with early Nazi Germany. She wasn’t the only one, of course; and unlike Diana and Unity Mitford, she soon saw the truth about the Nazis. Still, this was a shocking lapse in moral clarity for a writer with so much understanding of history and human nature. 

Barbara Pym was also unlucky in love, falling for one unsuitable man after another. She allowed men to treat her badly, and she was  a bit of a stalker. But she was intensely curious about other people in general, not just men with whom she was obsessed. What sometimes crossed the line into stalking often just started as people-watching. 

*****

Characters in the Pym novels set in the immediate postwar years through the early 1950s were preoccupied with economy; and so was Barbara Pym herself. Everything was in short supply, especially food and clothing; and housing was very scarce in London and the other cities where so many buildings had been damaged or reduced to rubble in the bombing raids. Pym and her sister, Hilary, both Oxford-educated upper middle class women who worked full-time (Barbara Pym had a job with an academic institute in addition to her writing, which made very little money during her lifetime), still had to borrow furniture for their first flat in London, and also had to be careful with their everyday expenditures on everything from clothing and food to electricity and heat. Pym’s diaries often mention prices and economizing measures. 

*****

Barbara Pym’s work fell out of favor during the late 50s and 60s, and after publishing six novels, she went a long time without publishing anything. And then just when she thought her career was over, she was back in fashion almost instantly following the appearance of a now-famous Times Literary Supplement issue dedicated to the most overrated and most underrated 20th century British authors. Pym was the only author to be mentioned twice as underrated - by Lord David Cecil and by Philip Larkin. Almost overnight, Barbara Pym was in demand again, with reissues of her previously published books and new interest in publishing previously rejected manuscripts. She won awards and was inducted into prestigious literary societies and appeared on TV and radio programs and was generally the toast of the English-speaking literary world. 

*****

Barbara Pym died of cancer in 1978. Her diaries and literary papers are held in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, where the young Barbara Pym read and wrote and studied and flirted and cried when she was a St. Hilda’s College undergraduate in the 1930s. She was one of the greatest English language novelists of the 20th century - because, and not in spite of her focus on the lives of ordinary women. Read Byrne’s biography of Pym, by all means - it’s very good writing about a really interesting person - but read her novels first. There are at least three Barbara Pym novels that I haven’t gotten to yet, and I intend to remedy this forthwith. 

Eldest daughters

I keep thinking that I’m going to run out of obscure mid-20th century English women novelists to read, and I’m sure I will eventually, but not yet. Not today. I just discovered Elizabeth Caddell and I’ve never even touched Ivy Compton-Burnett. It’ll be years before this genre runs dry.  

Elizabeth Caddell was born in India in 1903 to a British officer and his wife. Based on my first experience with her, the delightful Iris in Winter, she wrote comic society novels - more light and silly than Barbara Pym, less unhinged than Margery Sharp, less cynical than Muriel Spark, but similarly preoccupied with social mores amid the routine of everyday postwar British life - especially food.  You can’t read Barbara Pym or Muriel Spark or Margery Sharp or Elizabeth Caddell without wanting a boiled egg and toast and maybe a nice cup of tea.

Iris in Winter’s titular character is the younger and more glamorous sister of Caroline, a young widow who has settled in the fictional country town of High Ambo. Caroline, a placid and peaceful person, would probably have been quite happy to keep in touch with her boisterous sister and her outrageous brother Robert and his young fiancee by mail and telegram, but the whole crew come and descend upon her, leaving her to contend with a very busy household full of lively and interesting and and slightly crazy close relatives who naturally expect her to feed them all and clean up after them all and generally upend her quiet life to accommodate them. 

*****

Did you know that August 26 was National Eldest Daughter Day? As an eldest daughter myself, I approve of a day dedicated to recognizing us. Iris in Winter spoiler alert: Caroline is an eldest daughter, so of course she welcomes her crazy siblings and takes care of them and cleans up after them, literally and metaphorically. What else is she going to do, let them starve? 

*****

LIke almost every other female protagonist in a post-war British novel, Caroline is preoccupied with food - procuring it and preserving it and preparing it and making a little go a long way. Caroline notices with dismay that Iris and Robert and Polly consume far more butter and sugar and milk and eggs than their combined rations allow, and it falls upon her to figure out how to stretch their food stores to keep everyone fed. And of course, no one other than Caroline gives a thought to housekeeping or economy, except for sweet, spoiled Polly, who tries to help with the cooking, predictably making a mess in the process. 

*****

On Sunday, my husband hosted a fantasy football draft at our house. I helped him arrange everything; and about an hour before his guests were to arrive, I asked him if I could do anything else to help, and he said “No, just do me a favor and don’t make any messes.” 

Excuse me? Have you met me? I’m an eldest daughter and I have never made a mess in my entire life.

*****

OK, back to the book. When Iris, an aspiring young reporter, comes to High Ambo on assignment from her editor, she meets a handsome young schoolmaster on the train from London. She falls in love with him, and is utterly flummoxed and confused when he doesn’t immediately fall in love with her in return, because most men do immediately fall in love with young, beautiful, charming, fashionable Iris. Why wouldn’t they?

Meanwhile, the school where the young schoolmaster teaches is struggling to remain afloat, and the insufferably arrogant and selfish Robert ends up saving it. Lots of other things happen, too - Caroline and Iris befriend a charming little band of schoolboys, who help with repairs in exchange for the occasional treat (everyone in postwar Britain is obsessed with food), and Iris is nearly arrested for sneaking into the wrong house to steal back an umbrella that had been earlier stolen from her by a kleptomaniac old man, and the flighty and whimsical Polly goes missing for a bit. It's all very screwball comedy. 

But everything turns out as it should and everyone ends up where they should be, or at least close to where they should be Ideally, Iris and her beloved schoolmaster would finish their courtship in a Margery Sharp novel, and they’d be married and on a plane to New York by the end. Caroline would spend the rest of her quiet life arranging jumble sales and inviting the curate for tea in a quiet Barbara Pym London suburb. Robert and Polly would end up at Blandings Castle or at Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia’s country home. Aunt Dahlia would try but fail to evict them and then she’d force Bertie to come down from London so that Jeeves could get rid of them for her. But even Robert would be no match for Lord Emsworth.