Johanson wasn’t so sure that consensus would stand the test of time. “Tracy’s not actually a bad person,” Johanson reasoned. “It’s only in McAllister’s head that she’s dangerous, and as a fellow misanthropic Xer, I see his point — Tracy is annoyingly eager, determined, and devoted to her school to the point of self-sacrifice.” Yet everything that made Tracy seem so annoying and even malicious to McAllister could, Johanson pointed out, be considered heroic — especially by the generation that was at the time just beginning to be called millennial.
More than 20 years later, Johanson has been proven correct, up to a point. As Tracy makes her return to pop culture in the form of Perrotta’s new Election sequel, the novel Tracy Flick Can’t Win, she’s being greeted with the form of pop culture mea culpas that we have become used to rolling out for most of the prominent women of the Y2K eras: think piece after think piece about how we were wrong about Tracy Flick way back when. She has become a sort of fictional amalgam of all those wronged women, Britney and Hillary and Monica rolled into one obstreperous package.
Which are which can be hard to tell. But if you can take the time to distinguish compared to from compared with, discerning those rules worth fighting for is surely worth the effort too.
This past November, a health checkup by the Zoological Society of London revealed what the group hadn’t seen in the River Thames for more than 60 years: promising signs of life. Hundreds of species, including 115 types of fish, 6-foot sharks, seahorses, eels, and the occasional stray whale now call the body home. The Thames—the River of Death, the zombie river—can finally shed its “biologically dead” label, according to the society’s report. The resurrection has brought benefits both to the creatures who dwell within it and the ones who live, work, and play on its banks.
Crouch doesn't linger. He knows how to do a chase, when to blow stuff up and when to bring the house lights down. Like I said at the top, he's walked similar trails before. He knows where he's going.
But what makes Upgrade special is that his path is unique. He takes turns that are unexpected, explores some stunning vistas along the way, and even if the endpoint is a little bit obvious, watching him get there can be a lot of fun.
Despite its medieval milieu, “Lapvona” is a quintessential Moshfegh book. It has the warped earthiness of the author’s first two novels, featuring incest and sundry other perversions. There is a powerful undercurrent of allegory—the distance between reader and setting only emphasises how little has changed for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Here everything is corrupt, all motives are grubby, and you feel you need a shower to rinse the book off once you put it down.
The retired Canadian mycologist (fungus scientist) has written an accessible primer on a much-maligned category of organisms whose lives sustain our own. Without fungi, forests could not grow, agriculture would grind to a halt,carbon could not be recycled. There would quickly be no life at all.
In the early morning hours of Sept. 5, 1793, a couple of blocks from what is now New York’s City Hall, a gentleman with a reputation as a “rake” raped a 17-year-old seamstress whom he had carried into a brothel by force. No doubt countless cases like this one are lost to history — papers didn’t report on them, records (if anyone kept them) rarely exist, and they rarely went to trial. In fact, in the decade since the end of British rule, there had only been two sexual assault prosecutions in the city of New York. But this case was unusual for several reasons: Lanah Sawyer, the young victim, had the mettle to report the crime. The state prosecuted it vigorously. And an English lawyer newly arrived in America with a personal interest in rape prosecutions (his patron’s son was under indictment for the same) decided to take notes, producing the first published report of such a trial in the United States and the material for “The Sewing Girl’s Tale,” John Wood Sweet’s excellent and absorbing work of social and cultural history.
Dear Allen Ginsberg, I invoke you now,
the sandal-footed, supermarket bard.
We thought of you the other night, by chance,
though California wasn’t where we were.