Last summer, I had the opportunity to teach at a 10-day program for high school writers at the University of Pennsylvania. I read their applications, and I knew that some of the students were just as preoccupied with awards and publications as I had been when I was their age. Others were just teens who wanted to tell stories and had a knack for it. I feel fiercely protective of these students, all of whom I have only met via Zoom.
I hope that they know that their writing matters, regardless of how many Scholastic medals they earn or whether YoungArts takes notice. I hope they know that there is a more joyful relationship with our writing ahead of us, if only we choose it.
The trail winds downhill following an oleander-filled valley towards sapphire sea. If I stop walking, the only sounds are bees and birds. I spot a cormorant on a rock, craning its neck. Crystalline water glints invitingly and I swim with a mask to watch the fish. Drying off on the pink sand, I wander up to the crumbling old stone sea wall, out of which are tumbling shards of broken pottery in varying patterns from who knows when.
In ballet when you lose a year, you lose a lot. It takes years of sacrifice and training to become a professional, and the performing life of a dancer is short.
For elite ballet dancers, a solid career lasts around 15 years — and that comes after roughly a decade of schooling. Could this pause alter the evolution of dance generations?
The last novelist who acted like he might save the world may have been Graham Greene. He belonged to a generation of writers who might not always share the same political opinions but who supported many of the same causes: defending jailed dissidents, protesting illegal wars, and challenging the unfairness (or even stupidity) of censoring great books. He wrote a novel, and developed its film adaptation with the intention of helping to “isolate” Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier, who contemplated having Greene assassinated in retaliation. At one point, Greene was so celebrated that the South African State Department asked him to negotiate the release of a kidnapped ambassador in El Salvador. (Greene eventually came to an agreement with the rebels, but the ambassador was killed anyway—for reasons that were never fully understood.) By the end of his life, he was known as an international public figure who partied with Capote, Yoko Ono, and Kissinger, as much as a writer of entertaining, always absorbing novels, short stories, screenplays, and essays.
I’m sitting at a red light near my house in the car. The light turns green, but I and the others behind me at the intersection cannot proceed because an Amazon Prime truck is double-parked on the other side of the street, blocking the driving lane. I bring this up not because it’s notable; it isn’t.
Alec McGillis takes the ubiquity of that scene and blows it up into something on the scale of Homer’s Odyssey in his new book, “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.” Throughout the work, McGillis’s thesis is that Amazon, aptly named after a mighty river, drowns everything in its path. But his focus isn’t on Amazon solely as a company or its history of growth, but rather “to take a closer look at the America that fell in the company’s lengthening shadow.”