I first came across the name “Gilgi” on a page of my grandmother Käthe’s diary from 1932, tucked between mentions of “Shanghai Express” with Marlene Dietrich and a performance by the Jewish cabaret star Dela Lipinskaja. “Such courage!” Käthe wrote, of the character Gilgi. I was curious for any glimpse into my grandmother’s mind during this chapter of her life when she was an expressionist dancer in Hamburg and sported boyish haircuts and berets. She had recently fallen in love with my grandfather Hermann and was summoning the courage to divorce her husband. From Wikipedia I learned that “Gilgi” was the first novel by a writer named Irmgard Keun (1905-82), who had been the It Girl of the German literary scene in the final years of the Weimar Republic. Intrigued, I ordered a copy.
When I read “Gilgi” I was struck by how contemporary the novel feels, with its portrait of a woman fighting to maintain control over her life and her body in a politically polarized society. Gilgi’s experiences of workplace harassment, her scruples about privilege and her unease with the narcotic effects of romantic love are all colored by Keun’s left-leaning politics. But they’re sketched with a light hand: This is a beach-worthy read with a social conscience.
Is “n*gger” the same as the N-word? It’s a question we chose to avoid earlier this year. When writing a piece about the differences between book titles in the UK and the US, we decided to describe Agatha Christie’s 1939 mystery as a “novel that included the N-word in its title”, judging that spelling out the word didn’t meet the test our style guide advises of being “essential” to the story. But we didn’t use the asterisk.
Before we get too far into a discussion of that word, note that this is not an essay on race – instead, it’s an apologia for the asterisk. Over the past 120 years, our poor little has morphed into the linguistic equivalent of black Xs plastered on nipples to disguise what’s underneath. The problem is: the Xs make you look; there’s a reason why the 2011 NewSouth edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn replaced “nigger” with “slave” and did not invoke asterisks: no matter what word they’re used in, we all know d\mn well what letter is being covered. The asterisk hides nothing.
Marvin Schneider, 79, flashed his New York City employee identification badge — “clock repairer” — and walked into City Hall in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning.
The end of daylight saving time was approaching — clocks are supposed to be turned back Sunday at 2 a.m. — and Mr. Schneider had gone to City Hall to turn back time.
Mr. Schneider’s actual title is a bit more grandiose than his badge description. He is the city’s official clock master and he has been tending some of the city’s grandest public clocks since the late 1970s.
Now, 10 years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers provoked a global financial panic and led to what Greenspan refers to as “the great stagnation,” the self-congratulation seems to have been premature. Both parties have largely repudiated Greenspan’s precepts, with Republicans lurching toward protectionism and a nativist hostility for globalization and Democrats lurching toward something he would surely find equally repugnant: income redistribution, ever-expanding government entitlements and identity politics.
Less a conventional history than an extended polemic, “Capitalism in America: A History,” by Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, a columnist and editor for The Economist, explores and ultimately celebrates the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction,” which the authors describe as a “perennial gale” that “uproots businesses — and lives — but that, in the process, creates a more productive economy.” While this approach risks oversimplifying centuries of American economic history, it provides a useful lens for analyzing America’s current polarization and for understanding the centrifugal forces that have given rise to a President Trump, on the right, or a Bernie Sanders on the left.
As a child, Nancy Campbell had a snow globe; in it was a diorama of a pine forest, a cottage and a figurine of an old lady picking up sticks. Campbell would shake it and watch spellbound as the plastic flakes fell through the viscous liquid. “My father was often away during those years,” she writes. “Once, having returned from a particularly long trip, he told me a bedtime story in countless instalments about how my toys were lost and trying to find their way back home.” As the tale evolved, the toys became lost in a winter forest; it seemed to her that her snow globe would offer the ideal refuge. The Library of Ice explores cultural perspectives on ice and snow, and traces Campbell’s ice-obsession to that memory of adventure, return and comfort.
“The Lake on Fire” is about the making of America, the bones on which it has always been built, and the way the wheels turn (even now) and the way they turned then, moving forward, crushing some, advancing others, and within this epic story, the making of a person, Chaya Shaderowsky, rising and falling, failing and flailing and making her painful, blazingly aware way, in our America.
But Family Trust is at its best when it's telling us a truth about Silicon Valley: that racism and greed operate here as well — no measure of assimilation or success can change that.