St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street (Norton, $28) has a title you might gloss over, or perhaps dismiss as an ironic aside or forgotten punk-rock lyric. Oh, but no. If we may hazard a spoiler, the upshot of this zippy history by Ada Calhoun is that whatever era of cool you’re looking for, whether hippie, gang, punk, gay poet, Victorian, German immigrant, Warholian, drag queen, or Puerto Rican New Wave, it is absolutely extinct. What’s more, it’s been replaced by something much more static and deadening than the “nothing good” that prior hipster pioneers will
Basically, whenever a Hemingway has a baby, child services should swoop in and snatch that chisel-cheeked moppet away. It’s not that the Hemingway tribe is all that hideously abusive or monstrous, but some combination of dark genetics and family assholicness just makes for emaciated, nervous children who can be suicide prone and occasionally delusional. Of course, a lot of families are like that. With every celebrity-family memoir, one has to stop and ask: How much worse is this family than mine? Eh, not much—and we didn’t even have a share of the royalties to fight over.
I always tell people that my favorite book is Reckless Disregard. That is Renata Adler’s account, published in 1986, of two high-profile libel trials that took place in New York City in the early ’80s. Those are Westmoreland v. CBS et al. and Sharon v. Time.
In December, Franklin Foer was deposed from atop the New Republic. Facebook-millionaire owner Chris Hughes and his content-flacking flunky Guy Vidra clumsily installed onetime Gawker editor Gabriel Snyder as Foer’s successor. TNR, it was announced, must become a competitor in the Internet’s content-mining industry. Then almost everyone quit!
Until recently, Hollywood was the most famous American place in the world. Over the past decade or so, it’s been dethroned by Brooklyn (“Are you from Brooklyn? Do you like Interpol?” is what you are likely to be asked on Air France) and, of course, the World Trade Center. Still, third place is nice. Hollywood is a terrific and justifiably iconic American thing. It’s served ever since its founding as a cultural capital of sin as well as a focal point of American anti-Semitism.
Rich Kids of Instagram is a series of products of somewhat unclear ownership and membership. It is, or began as, a Tumblr. That website collects Instagram pictures of depravity and wastefulness: yachts, bikini bodies, alcohol, cars, watches (so many boring expensive watches!), nightclubs. They are often funny. It’s usually unclear whether the taker of the photograph was the one who caused it to be published on the Tumblr or whether it was swept in by mockers—or admirers?
Carl Van Vechten was, by the late 1920s, “the nation’s unrivaled expert on the Negro, the man who had unveiled to the world the remarkable truth about the United States’ hidden artistic genius.” He was also one of New York City’s great narcissists. And he managed to distinguish himself even within this self-enamored group by carefully crafting his image for posterity—hoarding great stockpiles of material related to himself and feeding them to Yale and to the New York Public Library. So he is recognized as the connective tissue between Lincoln Kirstein and Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes and the Fitzgeralds
Ugliness was fun for a while, but then it got too real. After kitsch—which bottomed, or perhaps topped, out in the middle of the last century—came a dark commercial anti-kitsch, an ugly so enveloping and horrid that it couldn’t be celebrated. Mass culture and aspirational brand culture drove right into each other, merging into a hideous beast that vomits Target “designer” lines and QVC frocks and polyester “fleece” blankets in sunny colors. There’s nothing charming about the ugliness that governs how we buy what we live with now. All that’s worse is the production regime under which it’s all made.
The stunt book is a great American genre. For reasons of capitalism and lack of imagination, however, the stunt-writing industry took a sad tumble a while back, just about 118 years after Nellie Bly set out to travel around the world in under eighty days. Picture it: The year was 2007, and A. J. Jacobs published The Year of Living Biblically, while Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, began living eco-consciously (though his book wasn’t published until 2009, by which time the planet had already failed to be saved). “The whole ‘Set Time Period During Which I Tried To Make
Arianna Huffington is a person with quite a few moments. She relays one at the beginning of her fourteenth book, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (Harmony, $26).
