American English, like America, seemed inherently excessive to me. You didn’t just sleep, you passed out. Until the age of about 20, it seemed, you weren’t merely young but a kid. A favorite adjective amongst the students at my high school was belligerent. You didn’t simply get drunk or annoyed or tired, you got belligerently so.
British English, by contrast, is designed to minimize. When I was growing up, “quite nice” was considered a high compliment. Forget being called hot or beautiful, if a boy described you as “a bit of alright,” you were on cloud nine.
No, what looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.
There used to be a time when unannounced gastronomic pop-ups were a thing. There was neither a spread of promotional materials nor an infectious pre-event hype on social media—they just went viral along their own cosy street.
These flash bazaars simply showed up and, literally, brightened up the neighbourhood.
One of the triumphs of “The Cartographers” is the exploration of what it means to make a map. Does the act of surveying, measuring, drafting and drawing the map affect the landscape it represents? Is it possible to map something without altering it in the process? How accurate can any map be, given that it only represents a snapshot of that landscape at one point in time, and to what extent does this matter?
“The Cartographers” explores these questions with deep, vivid intensity; it will make you think twice about the power of paper maps, especially in a world where they’ve been supplanted by electronic devices.
Reading The Exhibitionist is like eating a rich, delicious and wildly elaborate cream cake. You know you’ll regret devouring the whole thing at once, but it’s very hard to stop.
American parochialism can become American ignorance, a condition that has long frustrated geography teachers in the U.S. and delighted late-night talk show hosts. (Take a cringe-filled stroll through YouTube’s vast catalog of segments such as Jimmy Kimmel’s “Can You Name a Country?” in which several random passersby in Los Angeles fail to identify a single country on a world map.) But this lack of familiarity with the world beyond U.S. borders has also had dangerous consequences, for both the U.S. and the world. Ignorant of local condiations, American policymakers have made disastrous assumptions—the conflation of Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein comes to mind—and leapt into war.
How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? The answer, Sam Lebovic’s new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, convincingly argues, largely comes down to American policy in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
For her mostly revelatory new memoir, “Ancestor Trouble,” blogger, critic and essayist Maud Newton has spent the last several years reckoning with the personal and historical legacy of her ancestors, starting with her fractured immediate family and working backward in time, through and beyond her great-grandparents.
Stephen Galloway’s dual biography, Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and The Romance of The Century is a worthy addition to film history libraries, using insight gained over decades not to judge or excoriate its subjects, but to view their accomplishments and struggles through a new lens, encouraging readers to look at how much they were able to accomplish despite insurmountable personal issues and extremes of emotion.
In 1966, Stewart Brand was an impresario of Bay Area counterculture. As the host of an extravaganza of music and psychedelic simulation called the Trips Festival, he was, according to John Markoff’s “Whole Earth,” “shirtless, with a large Indian pendant around his neck … and wearing a black top hat capped with a prominent feather.” Four decades later, Brand had become a business consultant. At a meeting with the Nuclear Energy Institute, he promoted the virtues and inevitability of nuclear power. He also wrote a book endorsing genetically modified organisms, geoengineering and urban density.
Tracing the relationship between these two Stewart Brands, and what the distance they cover might say about the American environmental movement, is Markoff’s challenging task. A former New York Times technology writer who has explored the intersection of the counterculture and computing in previous work, Markoff now focuses on Brand’s unpredictable path as a “quixotic intellectual troubadour,” a “provocateur” and, in Brand’s own words, an “eco-pragmatist.”