Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. It occurred to me, belatedly, that the trip lists I’d seen online had included species that were only heard, not seen, while I needed to see a bird to count it. Franzen is a controversial figure in contemporary literature, beloved by many critics and hated by many readers. But I don’t think it’s specific to the US. “One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], ‘Well, that won’t have to be my problem’. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”. Which party you went to on Friday night, how you were treated by a flight attendant, what your take on the political outrage of the day is: the presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective micronarrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in a diary, but of sharing with other people. I quit cigarettes for the second time in 1997. Why was I excoriating fellow liberals when the denialists were so much worse? Amber Ruffin’s First Late-Night Monologue Likes You Too, “That’s the type of stuff you get to do when you get your own show.”. A few paragraphs later, he feels it necessary to point out just how ugly Wharton was: As Franzen contrasts Wharton's female protagonists — all beautiful — with the author herself, he arrives at the conclusion that her lack of physical attractiveness may have contributed to Wharton's abilities as a writer. This is what essays do. Anabel's characterization hasn't gone without notice. Critics have pointed to the absence of religion in Franzen’s novels and he explained: “I don’t believe in a God who’s sitting in some undisclosed location at a switchboard receiving and answering prayers. Lise Sarfati’s Aza & Alexandra #2, Moscou (1992). Learn more about Franzen’s life and work. Never mind that she’d mishandled her emails and uttered the phrase “basket of deplorables”. I wished I’d listened to my panics in the night and kept my opinions to myself. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death. Somehow I’d taken the figure to mean that the world might be, worst case, 30% shittier after election day. Without even reading those salvos – simply from knowing that other people were reading them – I felt ashamed. So, his perfect response... is a bad gay joke. Because my sympathies were with the left – reducing carbon emissions is vastly better than doing nothing; every half-degree helps – I also held it to a higher standard. Colorado rejected an anti-fracking initiative. Although his administration’s travel restrictions did later make it harder for writers from Muslim countries to have their voices heard in the United States, the one bad thing that could not be said of Trump, in January, was that he had in any way curtailed free speech. Like so many people, I don't know Franzen personally, so I can only judge him by the things he says in public. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. And here is another way in which the essay differs from superficially similar kinds of subjective speech. How do you screw up a movie in which Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and John Malkovich face off against each other? Human nature is a tougher foe than carbon emissions. He said: “The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. To make sense of Donald Trump’s victory in an election he was widely expected to lose, it’s tempting to construct a this-followed-that story: Hillary Clinton was careless with her emails, the Justice department chose not to prosecute her, then Anthony Weiner’s emails came to light, then James Comey reported to Congress that Clinton might still be in trouble, and then Trump won the election. James Comey’s report to Congress had unsettled the campaign before I left for Africa, but Nate Silver’s authoritative polling website, Fivethirtyeight, was still giving Trump just a 30% chance of winning. It was exactly as I’d feared. On one of our calls, he asked me if I had any interest in the tobacco industry – the subject of a major new history by Richard Kluger. To me it was especially not evident that a think piece should follow the rules of drama. Largely through dumb luck, I produced a publishable article about the US Postal Service, and then, through native incompetence, I wrote an unpublishable piece about the Sierra Club. It ceded the ethical high ground, insulted the intelligence of unpersuaded voters (“Really? But I really am compulsive. That cloud isn't an uncommon quality among the male postmodernists of the last 20 years or so. He offers a darker version of the same old argument that some existential threat requires far more intrusive government than Americans will accept unless they are “permanently terrified.”. But Kaplan also echoed a common theme: “Framing our response to change as a choice between mitigation and adaptation is misguided. “I read The Corrections,” he said. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now.