December 29, 2017

From The New York Times:

In 2014, the economy was 2.5 times larger than it was in 1980, but the bottom half of the population made only 21 percent more, on average, even after including government benefits. America’s middle — families earning more than the bottom 30 percent but less than the top 30 percent — gained only 50 percent in those 34 years. By contrast, the after-tax incomes of Americans in the top 1 percent — families like President Trump’s or Senator Bob Corker’s — tripled.

From Harper's:

Being visited by a rival male causes male fruit flies to defer sleep until later, but being visited by a virgin female eliminates the need for sleep altogether.

From The Economist:

Marriage idealises permanence, and yet it is changing more rapidly than at any time in its history. Almost everywhere it is becoming freer, more equal and more satisfying.

From The Economist:

As women earn more and the stigma of divorce fades, more men are finding that they cannot treat their wives as servants (or, worse, punchbags), because women can credibly threaten to walk away.

From The Paris Review (Spencer Bokat-Lindell on Favorite Books of 2017):

It has been more than a year since I last read a novel quite as winning, and so warmly poignant, as Andrew Sean Greer’s fifth, Less. Endearing, hapless Arthur Less is a writer of tepid reputation—a  “midlist homosexual”—on the brink of his fiftieth birthday, and, as such, “the first homosexual ever to grow old.” Rather than suffer through an ex’s wedding, Less strings together a series of literary engagements—also midlist—in seven countries and embarks on a prolonged junket around the world. But half a century is not so easily outrun: his journey, like his memory, is littered with stray assignations and lost connections, all of which threaten to tow him back into the past. “What was it like to live with genius?” someone asks Less at a symposium, in Mexico, about another, more famous ex’s work. “What is it like to go on knowing you are not a genius, knowing you are a mediocrity?” Less waves off the question, but, like the rest of his life, it insists on coming back, unbidden: “The work, the habit, the words, will fix you,” he tells himself on a flight. “Nothing else can be depended on, and Less has known genius, what genius can do. But what if you are not a genius? What will the work do then?” There are flashes here of To the Lighthouse’s Mr. Ramsay, and—not surprisingly—The Hours’ Clarissa Vaughan: much like those characters, Arthur Less cannot stop mourning the loss of his former and forgone selves.

The risk of misfire in such a story would seem formidable: if aging is a singular tragedy, it is also a general affliction; all of us will at some point have youths misspent, or not misspent but, in any case, gone. Yet in Less an awareness of pain’s banality leads not to mawkishness—the predictable destination—but to a kind of wry world-weariness. The author—the real as well as the fictional—becomes free to explore the soberest of topics. Chief among them is how suddenly a life’s center of gravity can appear to shift, as it always does, away from the future and toward the past, so that one day the mind wakes and finds itself stuck—if not tragically, then at the least inescapably—in memory’s orbit.