Photograph by Charlotte Hadden / NYT / Redux “The summer I finished writing my dissertation, the C.I.A. tried to recruit me—as a spy,” Jennifer Wilson writes, to begin her piece on, fittingly, John le Carré. Nothing came of Wilson’s brief brush with espionage, but her experience, she explains, reflects something present throughout le Carré’s writing: the disconnect between the real job of spying and the illusion of “escapist glamour” that it’s often associated with. Wilson, prompted by the release of a new volume of le Carré’s letters, examines the late writer’s career and considers the value he placed on honorable work. “The source of le Carré’s popularity,” Wilson writes, “might be that he understood keenly the yearning to do work that is good, in every sense, and our collective sadness that so few options exist for it.” —Austin Elias-de Jesus Some other stories from our pages: 1. “The hard truth is that no reader needs literary works interpreted for her, certainly not in the professionalized language of the literary scholar.” Merve Emre reviews John Guillory’s new book and assesses how academia may have ruined literary criticism. 2. The antisocial introvert in me was delighted by Lauren Collins’s very funny piece on a French high court’s ruling that businesses cannot force their employees to participate in “supposedly enjoyable activities.” 3. Dan Kois delves into the stylish and surreal covers of the Vintage Contemporaries series from the nineteen-eighties, designed by Lorraine Louie: “Some were crisp depictions of moments in the text. Others were nearly comic—chaotic attempts to bring a novel’s disparate elements together, as if the illustrator was cutting and pasting a portrait from the inside of the author’s skull.” 4. “The pandemic certainly seems to have given artists an obsession with anthropocide, or at least a taste for self-erasure.” Helen Shaw attends New York’s theatre festivals, where numerous artists produced works that imagine our extinction. 5. Emily Flake sketches possible reasons why some of the world’s richest men want to go to space so badly. 6. “What’s more unfortunate for a child (or anyone, for that matter): pain inflicted intentionally, with calculation, or pain inflicted by an uncalculated, compulsive urge to dominate and hurt?” Yiyun Li discusses “Wednesday’s Child,” her story from this week’s issue, with Cressida Leyshon. 7. Simon Parkin looks at how the premise of Koushun Takami’s novel “Battle Royale” paved the way for video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone, and questions whether the novelty of the survival-based game play it inspired is wearing off. 8. “In those moments, you feel as though the world belongs only to you.” The cover of this week’s issue, by Pascal Campion, perfectly captures the beauty, melancholy, and possibility of New York City slowly waking up on a hazy morning. 9. Matthew Allan speaks with the legendary songwriter John Cale and, at one point, asks him which chapter of his career he looks back on with particular pride. Cale’s response: “I don’t really look back. I sit down at the keyboard or the computer and let go.” 10. “In Pildas’s portraits, fame is inverted: the gilded names on the stars lining the Walk of Fame (Judy Garland, Marion Davies) are barely visible, while the anonymous passersby get center stage to flaunt their fabulousness.” Michael Schulman shares a collection of photos of Hollywood taken by Ave Pildas in the nineteen-seventies. Good stuff on the Internet: the New Jersey Nets’ 1997 rebranding; Conan O’Brien on “Marge vs. the Monorail”; the “Aftersun” screenplay. |
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