Walter Issacson’s recently released biography of Elon Musk will no doubt sell well, but I wonder how many potential readers will be deterred by, say, subject fatigue. I have decided, for example, to limit my interest to Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review, a hilarious experiment in both articulate exasperation and restraint. Cheap shots these are not:

Biographers don’t generally have a will to power. Robert Caro is not Robert Moses and would seem to have very little in common with Lyndon the "B" is for "bastard" Johnson. Walter Isaacson is a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer. […] Isaacson puts innovation first: This man might be a monster, but look at what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for instance, put innovation second: The man who built this is a monster!

The New Yorker also reminds us that Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad arrives next week. If you’re curious why that’s noteworthy, seek out the first sentence of her (already published) translation of the Odyssey.

Novels rarely offer an eloquent summary of their own premise, so it’s important to appreciate it when they do, like this passage from Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (2022):

But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safe-guarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

I’m still thinking about this throwaway line from Marc Maron, during his WTF podcast interview with Hannah Einbinder: “The idea, that the right accuses us, of having some sort of organized agenda, is hilarious—because we cannot (sort of) come together on almost anything—and most progressive activism is neutered because of class. There: I said it.”

More people should say it. Though, every time I offer a friend or colleague a version of this, I am immediately treated to a remedial argument—as though argument, specifically winning the argument, were the key to moving the proverbial political ball forward and not part of the problem.