Sunday’s New York Times Book Review listed the best books of the year in various categories, including Thrillers, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Horror, and Crime. It mixed genres I have very little interest in with genres I have absolutely no interest in.
The Winter issue of The American Scholar is now out, with my essay "Florida Man." It is a defense of the state against the people outside it who continue to make fun of it and the writers inside it who insist on sensationalizing it. The full essay is not yet online, but here is the beginning: https://theamericanscholar.org/florida-man/
We finished the third and final season of The Split last night, a British series about a family – mother and three daughters – all but one of whom specializes in family law (though not family harmony). It features Nicola Walker, who seems to be in every British series, and Stephen Mangan, who should be.
My post criticizing the new plaza on Las Olas Boulevard appeared yesterday in the Sun-Sentinel as a Letter to the Editor. I heard from two friends and a woman who used to read me in the Travel section.
The Sunday New York Times featured a front-page story on mango season in South Florida. And while it captured the joy the fruit brings to many of us, it got a few things wrong about summer. “The tropics,” the reporter wrote, “begin to stir.” Yes, in the tropics, but we’re the subtropics. Also: “The roads get emptier.” “Empty” is not an adjective any South Floridian would ever use to describe our roadways. “Less crowded” would be more accurate.
We live in censorious times. “We used to punish bad actions,” Matthew Parris wrote in The Spectator last week, “not thoughts.” And he had an interesting theory as to why that had changed: an increasing decline in a belief in God.
Parris, a non-believer himself, noted that in former times there was a general belief that God was watching over everyone, and knew what was in everyone’s heart. This was disconcerting, to say the least, but it relieved people of the task of judging others. When people did or said things of which we disapproved, we could let them go, comfortable in the knowledge that, in the end, God would deal with them in His own way. “Not my business,” Parris points out, was a phrase that one used to hear quite often. Not so today. Now, everything is everyone’s business. We have all become God, judging our fellows and, often, bringing punishment down on them.