Let Us Now Bro-Hug Famous Men
It’s always interesting browsing between magazines pitched to similar audiences for differences in intent. Among the upper brow, the LRB can exude a sense that maybe the system needs blowing up in some finely-tuned, non-physical way (we’ve all read enough philosophy to rebuild it better from memory, haven’t we?)
In The New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert’s climate change pieces use cool tones the way a calm voice evinces the scariest tempers.
New Yorker profiles tend stay more at the level of “that’s interesting.” Nicholas Lemann really did compare Brazil’s system to the Houyhnhnms ruling the Yahoos, and ten pages in wrote that the American process of the New Deal becoming a victim of its own success would, in Brazil, be regarded as leaders using “their time in power to turn the country over from the Houyhnhnms to the Yahoos.”
He also received a hug from former president Lula:
not one of those carefully calculated bro-hugs but a long, full-on, two-armed, belly-meets-belly embrace.
Philip Gourevitch’s Sarkozy profile is gleefully ruthless, noting that Sark is “the first French head of state since Napoleon I who could say he’d won a war,” and taking up “represidentialize” from Sarkozy’s advisors, i.e., “now might be a moment to represidentialize…”
He also finds a mood that sounds increasingly familiar:
“French people are very pessimistic by nature,” Marc Weitzmann, a novelist who used to edit the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, told me. “It’s a sign of narcissism. They’re obsessed by their own identity, and everything else is ‘We’re threatened, the future is going to be awful.’”
