"But without reliably insightful book reviews, literature risks becoming 'an unweeded garden that grows to seed.'"

"We’re left depending only on the whisper network of our own clique, exchanging the same tuna casserole back and forth. I realize this wobbly jeremiad reeks of self-interest: After 30 years of summarizing the plots of literary novels, I can do literally nothing else. But if journalism is still, at least partially, a public service, then book reviews are one of its most eloquent contributions — one we should defend until the very last page."

Writes Ron Charles, in "The future of book reviews looks grim/The Associated Press will no longer produce book reviews, though it will pursue stories about the publishing industry" (WaPo).

Let's talk about the tuna salad and the unweeded garden. The unweeded garden is in quotes, but there is no attribution. We're talking about literature, and if you're one of the last remaining Americans who care about actual literature, you're presumably supposed to know "an unweeded garden that grows to seed." But we can all google and find the attribution. I know I did.

I've sat through "Hamlet" a few times in my life — and read it too — and the first soliloquy is familiar to me: "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!" I know some other lines: "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!" But I didn't recognize "Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed...."

And what of the tuna casserole? How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the tuna casseroles of this world! The tuna casseroles are those books your friends and internet contacts talk about. The comfort food, the genre novels. Bleeh. Makes Hamlet the Book Reviewer want to kill himself. "O... that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!"

That it should come to this! No book reviewers! If there are no book reviewers, there will be no literary fiction. Ron Charles spent 30 years "summarizing the plots of literary novels." Well, AI can summarize the plot of any novel. That can't be the function of a book review, at least not anymore. It must be that the reviewer is supplying some special discernment, choosing what to elevate to the high plane of literature and convincing us that we should aspire to be the kind of people who read things like that.

By the way, I find it hard to trust a writer who dresses up the word "nothing" with the dreadful intensifier "literally" and plunks the phrase a few words away from "literary": "After 30 years of summarizing the plots of literary novels, I can do literally nothing else." He's defending his own livelihood. That counts against his opinion. What am I to think of Ron Charles anyway? Here he is, 14 years ago, displaying himself as "totally hip," opining on an author who is, if nothing else, truly striving to produce literary fiction:

"Every one of these jurisdictions [that permit physician-assisted suicide] has a total fertility rate below the replacement threshold."

"I do not think this is a coincidence. About 30 years ago, P.D. James’s prescient novel 'The Children of Men' imagined that a birthrate crisis would induce governments to facilitate the suicides of the elderly in a ritual known as 'the Quietus.'... The population pyramid is increasingly inverted.... This poses an existential threat to welfare systems, which rely on young workers to fund entitlements and health care for older adults. Those who hope that liberal immigration policies will solve this problem forget that immigrants themselves get old, and their birthrates tend to converge with those of the greater population over time. If birthrates do not recover — and at present, they show no real signs of doing so — eventually we will be forced to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history up until recently: Older people will be cared for privately, typically by their children and grandchildren, and those without families will have to rely on charities, such as they are. In the meantime, we are in a period of transition. Welfare states limp on, but in conditions of increasing stress...."

Writes Louise Perry, in "The Perverse Economics of Assisted Suicide" (NYT).

"... Mr. Haskell paid $500 to several day laborers to haul away several heavy black plastic trash bags from his home.... When they looked inside one of them, they found human body parts, prompting them to return the bags..."

"... and money to Mr. Haskell, whom they photographed — along with the bags — and reported to the police, prosecutors said. That same afternoon, investigators said, Mr. Haskell was seen in security camera footage removing a trash bag from the trunk of his Tesla and disposing of it in a dumpster in a parking lot in nearby Encino, Calif. A person sifting through the dumpster the next day found a beheaded torso.... During an initial criminal proceeding in December 2023, Mr. Haskell appeared shirtless in court, wearing a smock intended to prevent inmates from using it to hang themselves. At the time, his lawyer told Fox News that the Sheriff’s Department had forced him to appear that way, creating speculation that Mr. Haskell might harm himself...."

From "Son of Ex-Hollywood Agent, Jailed in 3 Murders, Dies by Suicide, D.A. Says/Samuel Haskell, 37, was accused of dismembering his wife and his in-laws. He was the son of Sam Haskell III, an Emmy-winning film producer and veteran talent agent" (NYT).

The father, we're told, "had several A-list clients, including George Clooney, Ray Romano and Whoopi Goldberg," was a producer of "several films and shows about Dolly Parton," and headed "the Miss America Organization until... he resigned amid reports that he and other pageant leaders had made misogynistic and derogatory comments about the competition’s contestants." The link on "resigned" goes to the 2017 HuffPo article, "The Miss America Emails: How The Pageant’s CEO Really Talks About The Winners/Internal correspondence reveals name-calling, slut-shaming and fat-shaming in emails between the Miss America CEO, board members and a pageant writer."

"People called her impulsive. Reckless. Even other rescuers — people who should’ve stood beside her — joined the mob.... The rescue world cannot keep cannibalizing its own."

Said a statement from KJ Farms Animal Rescue, quoted in "Mikayla Raines, Who Rescued Foxes and Other Animals, Is Dead at 30/She founded Save a Fox Rescue to care for foxes that had been abandoned or bred for their pelts on fur farms. She gained millions of social media followers along the way" (NYT).

We're told "Her husband, Ethan Frankcamp, said the cause of death was suicide."

"The most extreme end of the promortalism movement is 'Efilism,'which takes its name from 'life' spelt backward..."

"... and argues that all sentient life should be extinguished to prevent suffering. Gary Mosher... one of its most prominent proponents... endorses violence towards women, even claiming he will murder any woman he gets pregnant who refuses an abortion. 'The end goal is for the truth [Efilism] to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilising this planet of the disease of life,' he wrote in an online manifesto. But after the IVF clinic in Palm Springs was bombed, he distanced himself from the violence. 'The fact is that there’s people in the world who are lonely, and some that are crazy, and this, that and the other thing,' he said on [YouTube]. 'They have some reason to be despondent, and they have low investment in their existence, and those are dangerous people.'... [I]t is not hard to find members recommending various methods for killing oneself, or using the term 'CTB' — or catch the bus — for suicide...."

From "Inside the ‘strangest terrorist movement the US has ever seen’/Guy Bartkus tried to destroy an IVF clinic to save the embryos the pain of existence. Alarmingly for national security, his ‘promortalist’ philosophy does not die with him" (London Times).

"[Guy Edward] Bartkus was said to have identified with 'pro-mortalism,' a philosophy that claims death is preferable to being born in the first place."

"His extremist beliefs, which he recorded in manifestos, included being against bringing babies into the world without their consent to spare them from future suffering. The suspect attempted to live-stream the explosion, although authorities said the video failed to upload.... Bilal Essayli, the US attorney for Los Angeles, wrote on social media that Bartkus appeared to be 'anti pro-life.'"

From "Terrorist bombed fertility clinic ‘to spare babies suffering’/Guy Edward Bartkus was the only fatality in the explosion at a facility in Palm Springs, California" (London Times).

I don't think there is an organized "anti pro-life" movement (to be distinguished from the pro-choice opponents of the pro-life movement). Here's the L.A. Times article about Bartkus's manifesto:

"She lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking."

Said a statement from the family of Virginia Giuffre, quoted in "Virginia Giuffre, Epstein and Prince Andrew accuser, takes her own life/The mother of three died aged 41 in Australia, her family said" (London Times).

She was one of the first women to publicly accuse Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 in a New York detention facility awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges....

They keep using that word. Without scare quotes.

"Giuffre told the Miami Herald in 2019.... that she had confided in Epstein and Maxwell about being sexually abused as a child and running away from home. 'They seemed like nice people so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then,' Giuffre said."

Meanwhile, last month, Giuffre wrote on Instagram that a school bus had hit her car and that she only had 4 days to live. Giuffre and her husband had separated and were fighting over custody of their children Christian, Noah, and Emily. 

"I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done."

"I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant."

Said Daniel Kahneman, on March 19, quoted in "There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death" (NYT). On March 27th, he followed through with his plan to die by assisted suicide.

Another quote: "I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go."

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in "behavioral" economics. You may know his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

"Americans are too ornery to fall for TikTok propaganda/Banning TikTok may be legally sound but not really necessary."

Writes Megan McArdle (at WaPo)(free-access link).

I am wary of Chinese control over such an influential app and, potentially, its user data. But the internet is spying on us all the time, and I presume the Chinese already get a hold of a lot of that data. As for the Chinese influence over what we see... the Chinese government will surely slip some subtler nudges in among the makeup tutorials and cat videos.... But if you think that kind of gentle sculpting is so effective, you need to explain why the more overt efforts of countless establishment institutions, including our major social media companies, failed to get the American public to mask up, lock down and repudiate Donald Trump. I suspect the Chinese propagandists will simply discover what Americans already know: We’re too ornery to be controlled by anyone, including an algorithm.

We are affected by speech, and speech is important because it affects us, but the way it affects us is infinitely complicated. It's cute to use the word "ornery," but it doesn't express what we really are, and it's deceptive to refer to "control," because even if we can't be "controlled," we are open and vulnerable to complex influence. I'm "ornery" enough to resist this assurance that speech doesn't matter. I defend freedom of speech because speech does matter. 

And it troubles me to see "makeup tutorials and cat videos." People who talk like that are revealing that they don't use TikTok. They don't know what it is. I could show you thousands of things that are not transitory fluff, but just as an example, let me show you this man:

"But Livelsberger, who was an active member of the Army’s elite Special Forces, was known to be a 'Rambo-type patriot' and staunch Trump supporter..."

"... and law enforcement officers are investigating if he had purposefully picked a Cybertruck to limit civilian casualties, rather than for political reasons, the sources said. If he had used a normal vehicle, the explosion would have likely taken out the glass doors of the building and possibly the lobby — potentially killing innocent bystanders. The Cybertruck’s impenetrable steel design contained the explosion, while still giving off large flames...."

From "Cybertruck bomber Matthew Livelsberger’s wife broke up with him days before explosion outside Trump hotel in Las Vegas: sources" (NY Post).

UPDATE: Notes left by Livelsberger on his phone: "This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives."

Quoted by the NY Post, here. There's also this, from an FBI Special Agent: “Although this incident is more public and more sensational than usual, it ultimately appears to be a tragic case of suicide involving a heavily decorated combat veteran who was struggling with PTSD and other issues."

"More than 400 passengers were on board a high-speed train near Paris on Christmas Eve when the driver opened his door and apparently jumped off..."

"... leaving the passengers to speed away at 186mph. But within half a minute, the train’s controls averted disaster: they detected the driver’s absence and brought it to a halt 1.5 miles down the track by Melun, 25 miles south of the capital.... As trains up and down the line were slowed and halted, no contact could be made with the driver, who had been alone, locked in his cabin.... 'We really couldn’t understand what had happened'.... After 15 minutes a ticket inspector walked up the track, forced open the driver’s door from the outside and found the cabin empty. For more than two hours, emergency service personnel searched the dark line with torches. The driver’s body was spotted eventually by a fire service infra-red drone.... Suicides are common in the Christmas period but it was the first time in the SNCF’s history that a driver had jumped to his death from a speeding train...."

From "Hundreds of passengers saved after driver jumps from 186mph trainAutomatic stop technology halted the TGV from Paris to Saint-Étienne after the driver apparently took his own life" (London Times).

The transport minister gave credit to the driver for committing suicide by jumping out of the train rather than by derailing it.

"In the manifesto, called 'War Against Humanity,' the author writes that they have 'grown to hate people, and society' and calls their parents 'scum.'"

"The author also writes that they acquired weapons 'by lies and manipulation, and my father's stupidity' and describes wanting to die by suicide, but feeling like carrying out a shooting was 'better for evolution rather than just one stupid boring suicide.'"

Writes Newsweek, in "Natalie Rupnow's Reported Manifesto: What We Know" (about the school shooting that took place in my city yesterday).

The use of the word "scum" in a manifesto makes me think of "SCUM Manifesto," a 1967 feminist document. I discussed it back in 2017, when Facebook was banning some women who wrote about men as "scum." The "SCUM Manifesto" begins: "'Life' in this 'society' being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of 'society' being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex."

And yet, this new manifesto — what I'm seeing of it, anyway — uses the language of gender neutrality: "Humanity... people... society... parents." There is, however, "father." I see that Newsweek is using they/them pronouns for the killer.

Newsweek also reports President Joe Biden's hasty response: "We need Congress to act. Now. From Newtown to Uvalde, Parkland to Madison.... Congress must pass commonsense gun safety laws: Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines...."

But when he pardoned his son Hunter for violating existing gun laws, Joe Biden attacked the prosecution as unfair and biased. One might have thought he'd refrain from calling for more gun laws when he so recently and conspicuously treated a gun law as not justifying enforcement. And yet didn't we all expect it — expect that next time there's a school shooting, Joe would indignantly cry out for more gun laws? #hypocrisy

"The Sarco, short for sarcophagus, can also be voice-activated, so that physically incapacitated individuals can achieve suicide."

"Its inventor, a retired Australian physician known as Dr Death for his decades-long place at the vanguard of the right-to-die movement, tweeted on Monday that the (unnamed) American woman 'had had an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss forest.' Dr Philip Nitschke — for that is his real name — also announced, via The Last Resort, whose website describes it as 'the only accompanied suicide service in Switzerland where the 3D printed Sarco capsule will be used,' that he was 'pleased that the Sarco had performed exactly as it had been designed to do: that is provide an elective, non-drug, peaceful death at the time of the person’s choosing.' The response from the Swiss authorities has been less positive. Asked in parliament about the legal conditions for the use of the Sarco capsule, health minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider suggested that its use would not be legal, saying she doubted the device would comply with product safety law...."

From "I sat in Dr Death’s suicide pod (then had dinner with its maker)/A woman has taken her own life in Switzerland, using the Sarco. Mark Smith met the device’s creator" (London Times).

"She complained that her arranged death, which would have been the first one in the Sarco pod, had become a 'media circus.'"

"McLaughlin also said that the group had pushed her to spend her money, telling her she 'won't need it after I die.' She said: 'I felt manipulated and exploited. If I had known that the deeply heartless people who held my fate in their hands were mainly driven by their own media presence and marketing, I would never have subjected myself to this ordeal.'"

From "Makers of Sarco suicide pod 'pushed another woman to spend money before she died'" (Daily Mail).

Jon Bon Jovi talks a woman off a ledge.

"Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jon Bon Jovi and a video production assistant persuaded a woman standing on the ledge of a pedestrian bridge in Nashville to come back over the railing to safety."

"Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life...."

"... leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present. 'He was cold,' she said. 'He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.' Wilson said that, when she was a child, Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school. 'I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,' she said. 'It was cruel.'... 'I would like to emphasize one thing: I am an adult. I am 20 years old. I am not a child,” she said. “My life should be defined by my own choices.'... 'He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there.... And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.'"

From "Elon Musk's transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child/In an exclusive interview, Vivian Jenna Wilson said her father’s recent statements, including that she is 'not a girl,' inspired her to speak out: 'I’m not just gonna let that slide'" (NBC News).

Here's what Elon Musk said in that conversation with Jordan Peterson:

"It happened to one of my older boys.... I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier. This is before I had really any understanding of what was going on.... I was told oh you know Xavier might commit suicide.... It wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs... and so I lost my son essentially uh so you know they uh they call it dead naming for a reason.... the reason it's called dead naming is because uh your son is dead. So my son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus...."

It's hard to believe Elon Musk was "tricked into signing documents." Wilson doesn't believe Musk was tricked. You can see that Musk is very angry, and Wilson depicts Musk as a person who gets angry — "constantly yelling at me viciously." But this supports the position Jordan Peterson is taking, that there are deeper personal and family issues at play in these cases of transgenderism. 

"The procedure, or the appointment — none of us seem to want to say the word death — has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon."

"Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: 'I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.' 'Mom!' We splutter. 'We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!' Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to."

From "The Last Thing My Mother Wanted/Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us" (NY Magazine)(the mother opts for assisted suicide, available in Switzerland)("She had a three-pronged rationale... The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging").

I don't think I'd ever seen Bartleby used in the context of suicide, but here's a 2011 New Yorker column by Ian Crouch, "Bartleby and Social Media: I Would Prefer Not To":

What the man who burned himself to death outside the courthouse symbolizes.

This is what he symbolizes to me and also what I think he ought to symbolize: People have grown far too emotional about politics.

Calm down, everyone. Observe. Think. Don't throw away your humanity. Don't throw away your life. The anguish — the fever pitch — is not helping. 

"A young man set himself on fire on Friday afternoon near the Lower Manhattan courthouse where jury selection continued in the criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump."

"The man doused himself with a liquid around 1:35 p.m. in Collect Pond Park, across the street from the courthouse.... It was unclear what motivated his action. People rushed over to try to extinguish the fire, but the intensity of the heat could be felt several hundred feet away. After a few minutes, dozens of police officers rushed over and tried to smother the flames. The man, who appeared to be alive, was loaded into an ambulance and rushed away."

The NYT reports.

MORE: At The Guardian, in "Jury selection completed for Trump’s historic criminal hush-money trial - live":

"One of the books that I find myself tapping on repeatedly—without ever getting past forty per cent, somehow—is Richard Brautigan’s novella 'Trout Fishing in America.'"

"I’m not being compelled by an algorithm. But there’s a surf spot in Marin County that I used to go to which is very near the house where Brautigan, in 1984, died by suicide. Over the years, I told a handful of other surfers about the links between Brautigan and this spot, and later, whenever I would make it back out there, I would see the cropping of little houses on the hill overlooking the ocean, many of them with chicken runs and ruined vegetable-garden projects, and I would think to myself, with a great deal of embarrassment, that I still hadn’t actually finished 'Trout Fishing in America.'... What’s particularly distressing to me is that, although I can imagine a world in which careful regulation and avoidance of algorithms makes phones less addictive, I cannot imagine myself freed from such stubborn vanities."

I'm reading "What Phones Are Doing to Reading/It’s becoming harder, or at least less common, to read the old-fashioned way. But the new ways of reading are not all bad," by James Caspian Kang (in The New Yorker).