For the New Yorker, Merve Emre writes about James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was published one hundred years ago. Considering just two sentences from early in the novel, Emre wonders: “Is the yellow gown an afterimage of Homer’s Dawn, flinging off her golden robe? What to make of that peculiar word ‘ungirdled’? The cords of the ungirdled gown draw my mind to the ungirdled tunics of the warriors in the Iliad; to Shakespeare’s fairy Puck, who boasts that he can ‘put a girdle round about the earth / in forty minutes’; to the plump, ungirdled Romans in ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. How many novels encourage such wanderings?”
David Wallace-Wells talks to Chuck Klosterman about his new collection, The Nineties: A Book, which covers that long-lost decade in pop culture. Klosterman argues that one reason the era seems hazy now is because it was somewhat divorced from history: “In the ’90s, there was almost a perverse excitement over discounting the past. I remember I was interviewing a member of the band Korn in the late ’90s, and he was like, ‘We don’t care about the Beatles. For us, it starts with Jane’s Addiction.’”
ProPublica and the Texas Tribune report on the push by far-right Christian conservatives—and now school administrators—in Hood County to remove books deemed “pervasively vulgar” from public school libraries without review by a committee. The group has succeeded in electing Melanie Graft and Courtney Gore to the once-nonpartisan school board, who both “promised to comb through educational materials for any signs of ‘indoctrination’ in the form of books or lesson plans that they charged promote LGBTQ ideology of what they referred to as critical race theory.”
In a Washington Post op-ed, Erik Wemple looks at the defamation lawsuit that Sarah Palin has brought against the New York Times and considers the role of both-siderism in the paper’s editorial process.
Sophie Haigney writes about Celebrity Book Club With Steven & Lily, a podcast by comedians Steven Phillips-Horst and Lily Marotta about tell-alls by famous people. Marotta tells Haigney that their love of celebrities is unironic, though not always uncritical: “We love exploring the desperation of what it takes to be famous, because on the one hand we want it, but we’re as interested in how funny the process of getting famous is. You have to have, like, a cheesy headshot.”