I was on TV yesterday: https://www.c-span.org/video/?531964-1/falling-place
Years ago, after a remote interview with Garry Kasparov in Europe, one of Bill Maher’s guests asked: “Do you ever get the feeling that they’re playing chess and we’re playing checkers?”
The French, at least when I lived there, called Americans “les enfants du monde.”
I thought of both those comments when I heard that Time magazine’s Person of the Year was Taylor Swift.
A recent starred review in Publishers’ Weekly of a work of fiction quoted two lines from the book: The first, a racist comment from a peripheral character and the second, another character’s statement about the prevalence of racial hatred. And I wondered: Do writers win points these days simply by citing the currently approved obsessions? Wouldn’t readers be more impressed by the sharing of some telling observation from the author, a brilliant apercu perhaps, or an unusual or interesting use of language?
AARP's Movies for Grown-Ups Award for best picture went to Top Gun: Maverick, confirming what the French have always said about Americans, that we are "les enfants du monde."
Last night I watched a documentary on the life of Bob Dylan which featured a clip of a very young Joan Baez singing a religious folk song. It was the perfect antidote to Sunday's halftime show, though it made me question our evolution as a nation.