Good morning. August is over. The till and the typewriter call the fingers. Here, as ever, are links to some stories I thought you might like. They run longer at the top and shorter as you go on.
September picks
Oh man. I had never read John Jeremiah Sullivan until I read this. There’s something about it that’s still singing within me and I read it weeks ago now.
Sean sort of cocked his head. He wore cut-off shorts and a sleeveless tee.
“There is this one guy,” he said. “He’s kind of a guru. He works for the city.”
The guy’s name, he added, was Mike Sullivan, which was my father’s name.
I trust doublings like that. I called city utilities and asked to speak with Mike.
He showed up: a tall, clean-shaven man with a drawl, full of plumbing jokes.
Wore an official blue jumper and brown bangs, looked younger than he was.
He listened to my tale as if he had heard it not only before but that morning.Read this for a story that just flies along. It tells the tale of Anna Delvey – a woman who rose to the top of New York society out of nowhere – from New York Magazine. I only just read it, five years after it ran.
Jason Cowley, the editor of the NS, wrote this feature in 2008. It’s quite something. It’s about a London book reviewer he knew, Charles Hills, and how Hills’ thoughts turned to murder.
I have written a cover for us on what we’ve called the great tax con. The UK’s tax code rewards wealth over work, poorer homeowners over richer ones, the tenant over landlord, and anyone who does not inherit capital, almost all of which is passed on untaxed. The rules of the game have been fixed. Yet Labour are already ruling out changing any of these inequities. Why? The piece looks at how we got here over the past 40 years and argues Labour is ignoring wealth at its peril.
John Mearsheimer has published an 8,000-word self-congratulation on the faltering Ukraine counter-offensive. It’s good: interesting, thought-provoking. But perhaps too categoric delivered so far from the front. This thread by Professor Paul Poast on D-Day is a useful counter.
“A sniper with the call sign Cuckoo, who once spent three days lying in wait, said that in the field she only thinks of the moment, not life back home. A reporter before Russia’s large-scale invasion last year, the 32-year-old is currently fighting with the 47th Brigade in Zaporizhzhia… ‘You can train to shoot well, but psychologically you have to be calm,’ which you cannot learn, said a private whose call name is Beard.” On Ukraine’s sniper corps.
“All these damn birds have to go.” Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography has landed. (“Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where coddling was considered a virtue. One of the commonly used buzzwords at the company was ‘psychological safety’.”)
“The West’s strenuous cold war with the Soviet Union, and eventual triumph, distracted them for too long from the much bigger and more consequential event of the 20th century: decolonization.” Pinkaj Mishra is amusing on the BRICs summit, featuring the strange phrase “Whatever you think of Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito…”.
Here are three crunchy columns worth your time: Jemima Kelly on Trump, beloved by his supporters for being the anti-hero. (I know that, you think, but Jemima brings something new to it.) Ben Judah in the Sunday Times: “The world is moving from a fossil fuel-based economy to a metals-based economy. This is what the green transition means in practice.” And David Smith on eight things politicians are ignoring.
Here’s a fourth in a different vein, by Charlotte Stroud: “Man, he wrote, is ‘surrounded by things that terrify him, by things that enchant him, and obliged all his life, inexorably, whether he will or not, to concern himself with them’.”
Will Lloyd on Evelyn Waugh is one to treasure. “Instead of theory there is his lethally coherent worldview, expressed in novel after novel. A consistent and horrible vision, made much the worse for being persuasive.”
Caitlin Flanagan, one of the sharpest and more fearless writers around, defends masculinity. “If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it? It’s heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do.”
I’m increasingly becoming a big fan of John Gray, only twenty years after everyone else. James Marriott interviewed him here. (“What is valuable in human beings is not intelligence,” Gray tells me. What matters “is passing sensation: love, courage, defiance. It is passing sensations that make it worth having lived.”) We’ll have an interview with John on the NS this week. You can sign up here to receive it if you like.
Thanks for reading. Until next time. Have a good week.