“Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing. In this respect every generation begins primitively, has no different task from that of every previous generation, nor does it get further, except in so far as the preceding generation shirked its task and deluded itself. This authentically human factor . . .
In her forthcoming memoir, Blue Nights, Joan Didion remembers the way her daughter’s (above, left) psychiatric diagnosis kept changing. Manic depression became OCD; OCD became something else, something Didion can’t remember now, but something that ultimately gave way to a succession of other conditions before “the least programmatic of her doctors settled on one that actually seemed to apply”: borderline . . .
“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief,” wrote Jack Kerouac, who, alongside St. Augustine and Mark Twain, features in Rachel Shteir’s cultural history of shoplifting.
If you’ve read of my love for Friday Night Lights, you might remember I grew up rooting for the Cowboys. But you did you know there’s another, better, more authentic way to make nachos than the soggy pile-up we’re all used to getting at bars after too many beers at 2 o’clock in the morning? All mysteries (and recipes) revealed . . .
At the Awl, Kate Christensen and I discuss her latest novel, The Astral, and many other things, including cheating hearts, failed marriages, bad therapy, male muses, inner dicks, and (briefly) her next book, Gin on the Lanai. “I write about people wrestling with various internal conflicts in ways that ripple outwards and cause more external conflicts,” she says. “Repressed, obedient, . . .