I think before you build an Arc de Triomphe you should be able to identify at least un (1) triomphe

my hot take is if you contribute to a bookstore GoFundMe and the store goes under six months later, you should get your money back.

Always in life, it is interesting to see the story of one who was wild and later abandons his vices.

—Nancy Lemann, The Ritz of the Bayou

Screenshot of a nationaltoday.com article with a fabricated quote about Nancy Lemann attributed to Toni Morrison.

Having a Google alert for a book that's been really visible for a few weeks has given me a really interesting window into how much slop there is out there. Like, this quote is completely fabricated/ hallucinated / whatever you want to call it. The bots just churning out garbage copy.

I hear ads for insurance companies that talk about new features to help us"navigate" the healthcare system. We shouldn't have to navigate anything!!! Medicare for all, free insulin for all etc. (If you can't tell, I had to navigate some healthcare systems today and it's worse than ever out here.)

We're through the looking glass on all of this obviously, but maybe CVS shouldn't own Aetna! Maybe it's morally wrong for a health insurance company, let alone a drugstore company, to make healthcare decisions for all of us.

Every single facet of this country shitting on fat people for decades and then making GLP-1s unaffordable and not covered by insurance really lays bare that it really wasn't about health at any point.

My family pays $700 a month for good insurance from AN EMPLOYER. We also pay $75-100 for every specialist appointment and $300+ a month for non-generic insulin products. People who can't understand the gap probably don't have a chronic condition or someone in their family with one.

The Ritz of the Bayou, arguably the strongest of the trio, is the full-length version of a 1985 piece commissioned by Vanity Fair to cover the trial of Governor Edwin Edwards for racketeering, bribery, and mail fraud. In his introduction, James Wolcott admiringly describes how irate editor Tina Brown became when she read the draft and saw that there wasn’t any of the usual journalistic imperatives of explaining the who/what/when/where/how/why of events. It takes a certain kind of guts as a writer to trust in one’s own aesthetic instincts that much. Her account of the seemingly endless trial is all atmosphere, a kind of tone poem of charismatic corruption. It’s all smoke-filled back rooms, the gilded ceilings of the Capitol building, everyone taking long boozy lunches and getting sozzled in the insidious heat. The defense team cracks jokes while dressed to the nines and doesn’t seem a bit worried that Edwards is actually guilty or not. Born of humble origins with a gift of the gab and a saucy energy that people seemed to dig, Edwards might well be guilty, though his goose isn’t cooked quite yet. Lemann puts it like this: “there is a recklessness, a vitality, if fearful and gauche, in this manner of man and it is bred in the South…there is not really a fine line between eccentric and corrupt.” This may be true of the South, but it’s been proven accurate in the years since. As long as he isn’t boring, an ambitious fellow can get away with quite a bit in America. Lemann dryly reminds us that “politics is not the place to look for saints.”

"The Ritz of the Bayou, arguably the strongest of the trio." Many people are saying it!

artsfuse.org/327551/book-...

I increasingly think the only unifying position that we could all get behind is "total reset." I'd be fine with it. I never want to see any of these people again (even the dems).

Went on threads to check on a notification and saw something about the NHL "ripping off" Heated Rivalry by orchestrating a ceremonial Crosby/Ovechkin puck drop--like HR wasn't inspired by Sid and Ovie in the first place. People are so dumb!

Center for the Art of Translation to Open Literary Space in San Francisco The new headquarters of the nonprofit, which is home to Two Lines Press, will feature event spaces, offices, and a bookstore dedicated exclusively to translated literature. It is slated to open in 202...

Yay! Another publisher-operated bookshop!

www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

I think about this re: content creators. I saw commenters yelling at a creator because she said she was flying her son to ski practice but like 99% of the reason food accounts take off is because they have an aspirational kitchen! People seem to not realize the wealth required to get into your feed.

“A humid, meandering, late-period miniature masterpiece of the New Journalism.” -dwight garner, nyt

It is only because Lemann turns her gaze to the things that really matter to her—how people act, and what they believe in spite of the facts facing them—that the book feels like a small miracle. And she gets away with it in the same way Governor Edwards did: with an abundance of style. - brandy jensen, the new yorker

An Eisensteinian montage of zippy one-liners, anecdotes, maxims, and asides. - snowden wright the oxford american

Atmospheric, fragmented, and admirably peculiar. The book can be seen as a bellwether for contemporary politics.” -Lauren LeBlanc, The Drift

The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann has been out for about a week. Here's what the critics are saying!

Text: Screwballs like him are what make the world go round, in my opinion. It calms you down. Off in his own world. That's the thing. The sorrows of the world are such that only a screwball can truly surmount them, even in his innocence.

Nancy Lemann, The Ritz of the Bayou.

A Writer of ‘Hypnotic Repetition’ With her first new novel in more than 20 years, Nancy Lemann returns, yet again, to New Orleans and its eccentricities.

With her first new novel in 24 years, Nancy Lemann returns to New Orleans and its eccentricities—but now the cult-favorite author has widened her lens. Kaitlyn Tiffany spoke with Lemann to discuss her approach:

Some of the national pub's characterizations of new orleans / southern lit at large have been pretty baffling tbh! But also glad people get to maybe learn more about the place through Nancy's work.

The Domino Sugar plant at sunrise on a particularly moody morning.

Good morning, Bluesky.

Delighted to see Nancy Lemann getting well-deserved attention, baffled by the NYT’s characterization of New Orleans/its literary culture, including the Richard Ford quote: it “is noisy and crowded, and not a good place to be a novelist.” It’s a GREAT place to be a novelist.

Have a lot of feelings about this! Only a few are warm, I'm sorry to say.

What We’re Covering Today Trump Attacks Pope: President Trump assailed Pope Leo XIV in a lengthy social media post as too liberal and “weak on crime” and posted an image that depicted him as a Jesus-like figure, drawing swift criticism from across the political spectrum. Tensions have been mounting for months between the Vatican and the White House, with Leo’s admonishments of the war in Iran growing more pointed in recent days. Read more › Image Deleted: Mr. Trump told reporters outside the Oval Office that the image of him as a robed figure touching the head of a man in a hospital gown was “supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better.” The president said he had removed the image from his social media account. Pope’s Response: Leo, at the start of a trip to Africa, told reporters he had “no fear of the Trump administration.” He added that he was not afraid of “speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.” Read more ›

imagine showing this to your 2015 self

It's crazy that we're still constantly re-litigating whether AI slop is damaging our brains, when we have such a clear and apparent example in our chief executive.

0 Imprints: Tucker Carlson Books Skyhorse Publishing will launch a new imprint with media host Tucker Carlson. The imprint is a partnership with Carlson's media company, which has a revenue sharing agreement with the publisher, according to the WSJ. Carlson and his business partner Neil Patel "also launched a precious metals company and a nicotine pouch company." The first list will include Russell Brand’s How To Become a Christian In Seven Days, Milo Yiannopoulos’ Ex Gay, and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong's Killing Cancer. Brand's literary agent and previous UK publisher, Bluebird Books dropped the author due to sexual assault allegations. Brand faces rape and sexual assault charges, which he has denied, in the UK. Simon & Schuster canceled a book by Yiannopoulos in 2017 after a video surfaced in which he seemed to express approval for grown men having sex with underage boys; Yiannopoulos eventually self-published.

nature is truly healing

it can work here, folks

I love that the one thing that unites us all globally is a complete and utter aversion to JD Vance.

yes but it's extremely rare and never for redheaded men. The gene pool can't survive that many recessive genes.

Scene in the fugitive with young Julianne Moore playing a doctor at Chicago memorial hospital

I needed a content warning for young Julianne Moore in The Fugitive because goddamn

oop I take it back: wind.

Bell centre rushing through the star spangled banner at an even faster clip than normal tonight.

Makes me even more grateful for Casey Cep and other writers who make sure the south gets covered in in non-exotic ways in the national press.

I'm not complaining, this is all good SEO. But it's a complicating, interesting angle. The exoticizing this second writer points to is exactly why it's impossible to get traction on publishing happening from the south.