My first bicycle was not, in fact, a bicycle. I rode it in 1968, when I was two years old and as tubby as a bear cub. It had four wheels, not two, and no pedals: strictly speaking, it was a scooter. But Playskool called it a Tyke Bike, so I say it qualifies, and aside from the matte-black, aluminum-alloy number that I’ve got now, which is called (by the manufacturer dead seriously, and by me aspirationally) the Bad Boy, the Tyke Bike may be the swankiest bicycle I’ve ever ridden. According to the box, Playskool’s scooter—red and blue and white, with a yellow, leopard-spotted wooden seat, chrome handlebars, and black, white-walled wheels—offered “smart high style” for the “preschool jet set,” as if a little girl in a diaper and a romper were about to scoot along the jetway to board a T.W.A. flight bound for Zurich.
Before being handed down to me, my Tyke Bike, like most of the bicycles in my life, had belonged to my brother, Jack, and to both of my sisters, and, earlier still, to cousins or neighbors or some other family from Our Lady of Good Counsel, whose annual parish sale was where we always got our best stuff, bless the Virgin Mary. By the time I got the Tyke Bike, the paint was scuffed, the leopard spots had worn off, and the white plastic handlebar grips had been yanked off and lost, most likely buried in the back yard by the slobber-jawed neighborhood St. Bernard, a Christmas-present puppy whose name was Jingles and who was eventually run over by a car, like so many dogs on our street, which is another reason more people should ride bikes. I didn’t mind about the missing handlebar grips. I tucked a stuffed bear into my red wagon, tied its rope to my seat post, and scooted down the sidewalk, dragging the wagon behind me, my first bike hack. Far from being a jet-setter, I have always been an unhurried bicyclist, something between deliberate and fretful. Jack, a speed demon and a danger mouse, but above all a gentleman, would wait for me at every telephone pole. Jack and Jill went up the hill, everyone would call out, as we wheeled past. Pbfftttttt, we’d raspberry back.
Still, the act of writing poses a predicament for anyone who recognizes the temptations of pride and self-aggrandizement. We simultaneously desire to attract recognition and seek to avoid it. We want to engage an audience, yet we see that approbation flatters our egos and that criticism is painful. Although wiser people tell us not to read comments, with today's technology, readers' responses are exceedingly difficult to evade. And try as we might to ignore them, the words of critics can still wound us.
How, then, should we think about displaying ourselves — or at least our thoughts and words — in public? And where does the allure of public writing leave the activity of scholarly writing?
I always knew why I loved reading happy endings, but it wasn’t until I became a writer that I understood the appeal for their creators: the consolation of leaving one’s characters to a now-uneventful future where nothing too dramatic will ever happen again. But lately in the pandemic, as I reread my favorite novels, I have fallen victim to the allure of something much harder to pin down: the unhappy happy ending.
If you wanted to write a screenplay for a blockbuster film, Aristotle is the last person you might ask for advice. He lived more than 2,000 years ago, spent his days lecturing on ethics and earthworms, and never saw a movie in his life. But some of the best contemporary writers of stage and screen, such as Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet, think that this ancient Greek philosopher knew exactly how to tell a gripping story for any age. ‘The rulebook is the Poetics of Aristotle,’ Sorkin says. ‘All the rules are there.’
In the 15 years since he began “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” his Food Network flagship, Mr. Fieri, 54, has become perhaps the most powerful and bankable figure in food television, the éminence grise of the eminently greasy. And by dint of that show’s success — and Mr. Fieri’s runaway celebrity, and that golden porcupine of hair, and maybe that one review of his Times Square restaurant a while back — certain perceptions have attached to him through the years, perpetuating the caricature he still often seems eager to play.
He would like a word about all that.
“Secret City,” by James Kirchick, is a sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights. But it’s also a whodunit to rival anything by Agatha Christie. How did so many promising men in government wind up dead before their time, by such variously violent means?