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Published on April 27, 2017 15:22

Life with a Rare Genetic Disease: The Science, the Suffering and the Hope

This content was originally published by MISHA ANGRIST on 27 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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In these two books we hear again and again about people who have — or fear they have — “the gene for” a devastating disease. I confess that my inner geneticist chafes at this language — by and large, we all have the same 22,000 or so genes. Some of us have differing versions of those genes — a particular DNA mutation or variant in a gene that causes disease, for example — but not a distinct “gene for.” Without the descriptor “mutated” in front of the word gene or “variant” after it, it’s a bit like saying “I have an engine for a faulty timing belt.” That said, I recognize that the usage battle is probably lost; moreover, after reading these books, one can hardly blame the authors for such language, given how little modern medicine has had to offer the families they write about — “gene for” connotes an inevitability that, sadly, remains far too apt. Despite this, and as the subtitles suggest, both books contain a welcome measure of hope — they are not merely medical procedurals that end with diagnoses and death, but family stories fraught with difficult choices and palpable compassion.

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In “Mercies in Disguise,” Kolata, a veteran science writer for The Times, tells the story of the Baxleys, longstanding pillars of Hartsville, S.C. Bill, the pater familias and a chemical engineer, is increasingly bewildered by simple tasks like opening a package of crackers. “Something is wrong with Dad,” his son Mike says. We eventually learn that the something is Gerstmann–Sträussler–Scheinker syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder whose mechanism baffled scientists for decades. G.S.S. belongs to a family of diseases that includes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human version of “mad cow” disease) and fatal familial insomnia (described in heartbreaking detail by D. T. Max in 2006’s “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep”). Kolata takes a couple of detours into the history of the competitive quest to understand how these adult-onset diseases are caused by infectious proteins that start with a mutated gene and how they leave patients’ brains riddled with microscopic holes. These excursions are a useful reminder of both the ego-driven ambitions that so often propel scientific discovery (in this case, the payoff was two Nobel Prizes) and how remote such discoveries usually are from the development of effective treatments.

Bill Baxley’s four sons — two of whom are physicians — struggle to understand what happened to their father and to come to terms with their own inherited risk. As Kolata frames it: Would you want to know if you carried a fatal gene mutation? Not everyone does. The second half of “Mercies in Disguise” brings this abstraction to life through the eyes of the Baxley granddaughter Amanda and her sister Holly, whose father, Buddy, succumbed to G.S.S. like his father, Bill, before him. The deeply religious Holly rejects genetic testing for G.S.S. and declares that, in this case, hope and knowledge are mutually exclusive. “While I don’t know, I have hope.” For Amanda, on the other hand, knowledge is power, even if this particular bit of knowledge is incomplete and frightening and the power it confers is uncertain at best.

“Mercies in Disguise” is at its strongest when it wrestles with the stark realities of rare disease. Amanda’s story presents an unflinching look at the financial hardships (likely to be exacerbated by any repeal or weakening of the Affordable Care Act’s exemption of pre-existing conditions), indifferent medical institutions, abortion politics and the way delicate family dynamics are complicated by the prospect of a debilitating condition that strikes otherwise vigorous healthy people.

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In “The Family Gene,” Joselin Linder describes her father’s mysterious illness beginning with nonspecific symptoms — puffy ankles, a heart murmur— through an accelerated decline culminating in the accumulation of massive amounts of a milky-looking, fatty lymph fluid in his abdomen that has left his organs “practically fused together.” As far as anyone knows, this collection of features has never been seen outside of her family. The narrative thus becomes a mix of family history, medical detective story and memoir.

Her father, a physician, is both a diligent observer of his own failing health and a cantankerous patient who is infuriated by it. His last words to his daughter are an expletive; Joselin doesn’t take it personally. In addition to bestowing unconditional love on her dying father, she is busy negotiating her own health along with adulthood and all of its accouterments: feckless and sometimes tragic boyfriends, punk bands, dead-end jobs, and an ample supply of booze and cigarettes. It is this lack of sentiment that, in part, makes “The Family Gene” both congenial and engaging, despite the long shadow of a broken gene.

Early on Linder finds someone willing to make an abiding commitment to figuring out her family’s wonky lymphatic system and strange constellation of complaints. The Harvard cardiologist and geneticist Christine (Dr. Kricket) Seidman periodically brings the Linders to her laboratory to take family histories, run tests, look for mutations and, perhaps most important, dispense a bit of bedside manner; after Linder undergoes a surgical procedure to unblock her hepatic vein, Seidman sends her flowers. Dr. Kricket is an empathetic embodiment of the blurry reality for rare-disease patients like Joselin Linder: Research and clinical care can be hard to distinguish from one another — maybe sometimes we shouldn’t bother trying.

“The Family Gene” is occasionally beset by incorrect explanations of the science. BRCA1, for example, is not a gene variant as Linder describes it, but rather a gene that can harbor any one of hundreds of rare variants, or DNA spelling errors, that dramatically raise a woman’s risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer. For its part, “Mercies in Disguise” sometimes suffers from a general humorlessness and heavy-handed prose (“Now he felt for the first time the wallop of tragedy”). But did I cry anyway? Yes — twice. In the end, these stories are less about didactic scientific explanations or transcendent language and more about how human beings respond to immensely challenging ailments that we don’t understand very well if at all.

Yes, there is hope here, but it is hard-won. The overarching lesson that came from the completion of the Human Genome Project was that DNA is not destiny. But too often, for those living with untreatable inherited conditions, it can still feel that way.

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Published on April 27, 2017 03:07

2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 27

This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 27 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day; so carry around a poem in your pocket today. Or roll like me and carry a poem in your pocket every day.

For today’s prompt, use at least 3 of the following 6 words in your poem (using a word or two in your title is fine); for extra credit, try using all 6:

pest
crack
ramble
hiccup
wince
festoon

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Re-create Your Poetry!

Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.

Click to continue.

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Here’s my attempt at a Six-Word Poem:

“cubs win”

i don’t want to be a pest
with my little baseball ramble
but your festoon makes me wince
with every crack of the bat
a mere hiccup between one title
& the next for my cincinnati reds

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He’s glad the Cubs broke their curse last year, but he’s ready to see his Reds get back to winning titles again.

Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.

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April 26, 2017

Bookstore News: April 26, 2017

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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NYU Bookstore changing management; Follett sued for unpaid overtime; How to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day around the country; plans for Authors for Indies Day in Canada; and more.

NYU Bookstore To Be Leased to Follett: The university is negotiating moving management of its bookstore to the education services company could reduce course materials by as much as 50%, but unionized bookstore employees object.

Lawsuit Filed Against Follett for Overtime Pay: Two former assistant managers at Follett campus bookstores have filed a lawsuit against the company alleging unpaid overtime.

Cleveland Indie Bookstores offer IBD "Passport": Nine bookstores in Cleveland have banded together to promote Independent Bookstore Day this Saturday.

Seattle Bookstores Special Events for IBD: The Seattle Weekly previews some of the special events for Independent Bookstore Day at local stores.

Where to Celebrate IBD in L.A.: The Los Angeles Daily News rounds up events at area bookstores for Independent Bookstore Day.

Indie Bookstore Day in West Virginia: Empire Books in Huntington, W.V. has numerous authors scheduled to read on Independent Bookstore Day.

Brooklyn Bookstore Set to Open: CNN previews the opening of Books are Magic in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn next week.

A Secret Bookstore in New York City Revealed: Michael Seidenburg runs a small used bookstore out of his apartment called Brazenhead Books.

Authors for Indies Day in Vancouver: A dozen bookstores in Vancouver are participating in Authors for Indies day this Saturday, Canada's equivalent of Independent Bookstore Day.

Authors for Indies Day Road Show: Canadian publishers have sponsored vehicles to transport authors to bookstores outside the greater Toronto area for Authors for Indies Day.

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Published on April 26, 2017 23:01

Granta’s list of the best young American novelists | Books

This content was originally published by Guardian Staff on 26 April 2017 | 3:18 pm.
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Jesse Ball, 38, was born in New York and has published six novels, a number of poetry and prose collections, a book of drawings and a pedagogical monograph, Notes on My Dunce Cap. Ball currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Halle Butler, 31, is a Chicago-based writer. Her first novel, Jillian, published in 2015, was called the “feelbad book of the year” by the Chicago Tribune.

Emma Cline, 28, was born in California and is the author of The Girls, shortlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction first novel prize and the 2016 John Leonard prize from the National Book Critics Circle.

Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen, 36, was born in Atlantic City. He has written five novels including Book of Numbers as well as short story collections and a work of non-fiction, Attention! A (Short) History.

Mark Doten, 38, is a Minnesota-born writer currently living in Brooklyn. His debut novel, The Infernal, was published in 2015. He is the literary fiction editor at Soho Press and teaches in Columbia’s graduate writing programme.

Jen George, 36, was born and raised in Thousand Oaks, California. She is the author of the short-story collection The Babysitter at Rest. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1 and the Paris Review Daily. She lives in New York.

Rachel B Glaser, 34, published her first novel, Paulina & Fran, in 2015. She studied painting and animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and poetry and fiction at UMass Amherst.

Lauren Groff, 38, was born in New York; her most recent novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book award and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle award.

Yaa Gyasi. Photograph by Cody Pickens

Yaa Gyasi, 27, was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama. Her first novel, Homegoing, earned her the 2016 John Leonard award.

Garth Risk Hallberg, 38, was born in Louisiana and grew up in North Carolina. He is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family and City on Fire.

Greg Jackson, 34, is the recipient of a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation for his story collection Prodigals.

Sana Krasikov, 37, a Ukrainian-born writer, lived in Georgia and Kenya before returning to the US four years ago. Her latest novel The Patriots was published this year.

Catherine Lacey, 32, was born in Mississippi and is the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing, a novel that won a 2016 Whiting award and has been translated into five languages.

Ben Lerner, 38, was born in Topeka, Kansas. He is the author of three books of poetry and two novels (Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04). His most recent book is the monograph The Hatred of Poetry.

Karan Mahajan was a finalist for the 2016 National Book award for fiction. Photograph: Molly Winters / Viking

Karan Mahajan, 33, was born in New Delhi. He is the author of Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs, which was a finalist for the 2016 National Book award for fiction.

Anthony Marra, 32, born in Washington DC, is the author of the collection of stories, The Tsar of Love and Techno and a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle award. He is currently the Jones lecturer in fiction at Stanford University.

Dinaw Mengestu, 39, was born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois. He is the author of three novels. He won the 2007 Guardian First Book award and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012.

Ottessa Moshfegh, 35, was born in Boston. Her novel Eileen was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize.

Chinelo Okparanta has won the Lambda Literary award twice

Chinelo Okparanta, 36, was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She is the author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water, and is a 2014 O Henry award winner, as well as having won the Lambda Literary award twice.

Esmé Weijun Wang, 33, is a mental health advocate, essayist and the author of the novel The Border of Paradise. She won the 2016 Graywolf Press non-fiction prize for her book of essays, The Collected Schizophrenias.

Claire Vaye Watkins, 33, was born and raised in the Mojave desert, California. Her story collection, Battleborn, won the 2013 Dylan Thomas prize.

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Published on April 26, 2017 20:59

At PEN Gala, Sargent Speaks to the First Amendment

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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At the 2017 PEN Literary Gala, Macmillan CEO John Sargent spoke to a room filled with publishing luminaries about the importance of the First Amendment.

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Published on April 26, 2017 19:57

Viet Thanh Nguyen Reveals How Writers’ Workshops Can Be Hostile

This content was originally published by VIET THANH NGUYEN on 26 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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What would be in fashion: voice, experience, and showing rather than telling. So it is that workshops typically focus on strategies of the writing “art” that develop character, setting, time, description, theme, voice and, to a lesser extent, plot. Plot is usually seen by workshop writer-teachers, or teacher-writers, as the property of so-called “genre” writing: science fiction, crime, romance, young adult and screenplays — as if literary fiction were not also a genre.

As a young aspiring writer, I was troubled by how these workshops, aside from the “art” of writing, did not have anything to say about the matters that concerned me: politics, history, theory, philosophy, ideology. How does one write a poem, a short story or a novel that deals with any of these things? I did not realize at the time that such issues were often beyond the horizon of concern of the workshop because they threatened its very origins.

As an institution, the workshop reproduces its ideology, which pretends that “Show, don’t tell” is universal when it is, in fact, the expression of a particular population, the white majority, typically at least middle-class and often, but not exclusively, male. The identity behind the workshop’s origins is invisible. Like all privileges, this identity is unmarked until it is thrown into relief against that which is marked, visible and outspoken, which is to say me and others like me.

We, the barbarians at the gate, the descendants of Caliban, the ones who have no choice but to speak in the language we have — we come bearing the experiences and ideas the workshop suppresses. We come from the Communist countries America bombed during the Cold War, or where it sponsored counter-Communist efforts. We come from the lands America occupied, invaded or colonized. We come as refugees and immigrants, documented and undocumented. We come from the ghettos, barrios, reservations and borders of America where there are no workshops. We come from the bedrooms and the kitchens of the American home, where we were supposed to stay, and stay silent. We come speaking languages other than English. We come from the margins, where English is broken. We come with financial aid and loans and families that do not understand what “creative writing” is. We come from communities we do not wish to renounce in the name of our individualism. We come wanting to do more than just sell our stories to white audiences. And we come with the desire not just to show, but to tell.

But what is that art that is also political, historical, theoretical, ideological and philosophical? How is it to be taught? It must be taught not only as an isolated craft or a set of techniques. It must be taught in relation to, or within, courses on history, politics, theory and philosophy, as well as ethnic studies, gender studies, queer studies and cultural studies.

The history and aesthetics of the workshop must be made visible rather than assumed, and the capacity of writing to save lives and change the world must be seen not as something that is innate only to the writing but as something that is enabled by, and in turn enables, social movements, revolutions and the struggle for power. In short, the answer is not to be found solely in the workshop, which is why it is worrisome that so many writers of color, women writers and working-class writers who are excluded from the model of the workshop continue to subscribe to its powers. As if, Flannery O’Connor (herself the graduate of the most famous workshop of all, at the University of Iowa) said, the workshop wasn’t a case of the blind leading the blind.

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Published on April 26, 2017 18:56

The age of anxiety: what does Granta’s best young authors list say about America? | Books

This content was originally published by Michelle Dean on 26 April 2017 | 3:50 pm.
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It is a strange time to be making declarations about the nature of American writing. The country’s not exactly feeling well. And even before the events of last autumn, it used to be easier to know what people meant when they spoke of Great American Novels. They meant, chiefly, fat realist ones, usually authored by men. Philip Roth was the avatar of success in that model. He’d put America in the title, construct his characters around some kind of American archetype, and he was off and running.

Those markers of greatness are largely gone now. We live in an age of more fractured authority. In contemporary literary circles, Roth is reviled just as much as he is revered. Big fat novels by older white men are no longer in the ascendancy as they once were. For the last decade or so, the agitation has been to open up the forms and subjects considered serious, to let more women and people of colour into the canon. And if the third Granta list of the best young American novelists is evidence, that agitation has been successful. Judged by authors Patrick DeWitt, AM Homes, Kelly Link, and Ben Marcus, the list turns out to have a majority of women writers (13 to nine men). It is also diverse.

The most striking thing about the list is how little its inhabitants might be said to have in common, as writers. Stylistically, they run the gamut, from a lyrical realist such as Emma Cline to an absurdist-complete-with-font-size changes such as Jesse Ball. We also have traditionally a “ambitious” novelist here, one who bit off a larger subject than he could chew: Garth Risk Hallberg, whose much-hyped City on Fire was a big tower of Babel kind of book. In Yaa Gyasi, too, we have someone working in the familiar mode of the big historical novel. But this list also contains several novelists whose ambitions are more directed at form: Lauren Groff, whose Fates and Furies had a few structural fireworks, and Ottessa Moshfegh, who is devoted to avoiding traditional forms of literary satisfaction for the reader, such as plot and character development. And we have Ben Lerner, whose work usually stands in for the closest thing American literature has right now to a bona fide trend: autofiction.

Emma Cline, a lyrical realist. Photograph: Neil Krug

The list does not cover all the bases, of course. There are the usual confusing omissions. Téa Obreht is absent, perhaps a function of the long interlude since her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, appeared in 2011. Another is Nathan Hill, whose The Nix was something of a sleeper hit last year. I’m surprised not to see Alexandra Kleeman’s spirited You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine here either. And while looking at those absences, one gets hung up on the age thing, too. The artificial cut-off of 40 eliminates Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel The Sympathizer won a Pulitzer prize last year. Nell Zink and Hanya Yanagihara are shut out too. If the point of these lists is to highlight the best work being done by new voices, “young” might not be the marker we’re looking for. “New” could be better.

Other than that, however, the list’s apparent lack of theme or consistency feels quite appropriate to the moment. These writers don’t group very easily into “schools”. There isn’t really an American literature at the moment, but rather American literatures. Most novelists are not explicitly reaching for “American” themes. Though the power and the strife of the country might be at the forefront of their minds, especially now, especially after November, I would be surprised if any novelist on this list thought of themselves as having articulated something about that big fractious concept known as “America”. The ambitions of writers now follow narrower channels, for both good and bad.

Strange omission? Téa Obreht. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

In the 1990s and in the early 2000s, it did seem as if writers were involved in connected projects, interested in common questions. Past residents of these lists were more obviously in conversation with each other and with the literature of the recent past. On the 1996 list, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides were something like friends. On the 2007 list, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer were married. Most young writers now, by contrast, seem to be working out of carefully chosen, idiosyncratic foxholes. It’s not easy to draw a line from the work of Catherine Lacey (whose Nobody Is Ever Missing is beautiful and abstracted) to the work of Greg Jackson (whose Prodigals was an exercise in muscular realist prose). There is a subject or a conceit that is interesting or useful to them, and they go full bore at working it out. This perhaps allows them to create purer art, but there is less of a sense that it is useful or necessary to group them together.

There are those writers who will insist that their art will be untouched by the general chaos in America

Fair enough when you consider America’s like that too. There isn’t one America, or even the two people wanted to talk about after the election. There’s more like five or 10 or 20, or perhaps 20 million. The diversity of perspective, the unwillingness to generalise: those are good traits in countries as they are in art.

The problem, of course, for the American novelist, young or otherwise, is that their work now comes to us in the midst of one common denominator: their country has been through a nervous breakdown, and the prognosis is not quite clear yet. There are those writers who will insist that their art, being designed to survive the times they live in, will be untouched by the general chaos. But I find it very hard to imagine that there are so many literary novelists who are not still asking themselves, quietly, what it is they are supposed to do now, especially if they are among the “best”. It seems to impose an obligation, to offer what insight one can.

In Granta’s issue introducing its list, you can see a writer or two try to work that out directly. It has a sombre mood that seems to reflect the gravity of the geopolitical situation. Mark Doten, who wrote The Infernal (2015), does it with fiction, trying an absurd run-on sentence farce that, like most satire these days, seems like documentary. “Mr President,” a lackey informs the commander-in-chief, “we can get you into a bunker with full communication equipment and you can give your address there, you just can’t do it in a goddamn plastic blimp at the start of World War III.” It doesn’t quite hang together, but one suspects that Doten never meant for the piece to be a polished product, just a cri de coeur. As that, it works.

But people would like to hear more from writers on this subject, if only because the absurdity of the present situation in America has everyone scrambling to get a foothold somewhere. They might as well get it from art, and the literary arts have a way of coming at a big catastrophe in a clever way, something which sheds new light on a fraught subject. Sana Krasikov’s essay in Granta, on working in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall after a massacre, is one example. Although not present for the tragedy itself, she finds herself fantasising about the escape route she might have used that day. The voyeurism of the experience unnerves her, a bit. “Was it the torment of other experiences I was fascinated by, or the inescapability?” she writes.

Westgate shopping mall, under attack in September 2013, is the subkect of Sana Krasikov’s essay. Photograph: Dai Kurokawa/EPA

Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs, takes terrorism as his subject too. He is more wry than philosophical in describing the (fictional) bombing of a literary reading in Delhi. “Midway through item number 2, most people were sorry they had attended this boring flattery-festival; most were dead by the time item number 3 began.” , whose paragraphs are masterpieces of pacing, contributes a tense story too, about a man who learns that his uncle has died under terrible circumstances.

Here, unlike in their past work, there was something stitching these writers together, something you could call anxiety. It is hard not to read that anxiety as related to the present. Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another. There is no crisis in American writing, of course, but there is a kind of crisis in America, a worry that the centre is not going to hold. The promise most of these “young” writers hold is the ability to guide us through it, in bad times and good.

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Published on April 26, 2017 17:55

Manga Grows at C2E2 with Classic Reprints, New Licenses

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Manga publishers such as Viz Media, Kodansha andTokyopop were out in force at C2E2 in Chicago.

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Published on April 26, 2017 16:55

The Man to Blame for Our Culture of Fame

This content was originally published by JON MEACHAM on 26 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Walter Winchell, columnist and broadcaster.

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Edward Steichen/Condé Nast via Getty Images

It’s gone now, replaced by a small, unobtrusive park, but in the middle of the 20th century the Stork Club, on East 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, was the center of an emerging national culture of celebrity. As Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his landmark 1961 book THE IMAGE: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, fame, which had once been based largely on achievement or on high birth, was becoming more a matter of “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” And the Stork Club was the temple of the high priest of this new cult of fame for fame’s sake, the columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell, who presided over a mélange of stars, athletes, politicians and the merely notable from the club’s Table 50. In Winchell’s reporting, “The death of ten thousand people in Ethiopia was followed immediately by a Hollywood divorce or romance,” Neal Gabler wrote in his brilliant 1994 biography WINCHELL: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. “Dozens of these items raced past listeners each program, not only abutting one another but most given the same urgency and drama. Nothing was differentiated.” Winchell’s reach was enormous. One listener recalled “strolling one Sabbath evening for six blocks through a residential section of Birmingham [Alabama] and never losing a word of W.W.’s broadcast as his voice came through a succession of open windows.”

Virtually forgotten in our own time, Winchell is an undeniable architect of the way we live now — which makes Gabler’s biography essential reading. “A mention in his column or on his broadcast meant one was among the exalted,” Gabler wrote. “It meant that one’s name was part of the general fund of knowledge. It meant that one’s exploits, even if they were only the exploits of dining, rated acknowledgment. It meant that one’s life was validated.” Politically, Winchell, once an enthusiastic booster of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, claimed to have introduced the New York lawyer (and later Donald Trump mentor) Roy Cohn to Senator Joseph McCarthy and the broadcaster’s program became a platform for the Red-baiting of the 1950s. Culturally, Winchell helped create the ambient world of celebrity that permanently blurred the lines between politics, policy, sports and entertainment. “This culture,” according to Gabler, “would bind an increasingly diverse, mobile and atomized nation until it became, in many respects, America’s dominant ethos, celebrity consciousness our new common denominator.”

To understand the narcissism of the first decades of the 21st century, it may help to realize that it is neither a sudden nor an entirely new phenomenon. “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,” Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry remarked in 1890’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “and that is not being talked about.” The world Wilde anticipated and Winchell crystallized can be explained by a few key texts that illuminate how we find ourselves with a president of the United States who used to call up New York tabloid writers (and would very likely have called Winchell, had Winchell still been around) posing as Trump spokesman “John Miller” or “John Barron” to talk about … himself.

Much of what Winchell wrought was described in philosophical terms by Boorstin in the oft-quoted (but less read) “The Image.” Aside from his definition of fame — a similar point to Andy Warhol’s better-known remark that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes — Boorstin’s key contribution was the notion of modern life as a series of “pseudo-events.” A pseudo-event, Boorstin wrote, was, first, “not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview” — or a tweet. Second, it is “planted primarily … for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media.”

Public life in particular is thus not organic but manufactured and manipulated for the maximum advantage of those doing the manufacturing and the manipulating. Winchell’s pal Joe McCarthy was, in Boorstin’s words, “a natural genius at creating reportable happenings that had an interestingly ambiguous relation to underlying reality.” As Richard Rovere of The New Yorker wrote in his book about the senator’s rise to power, McCarthy “invented the morning press conference called for the purpose of announcing an afternoon press conference. The reporters would come in … and McCarthy would say that he just wanted to give them the word that he expected to be ready with a shattering announcement later in the day, for use in the papers the following morning. This would gain him a headline in the afternoon papers: ‘New McCarthy Revelations Awaited in Capital.’ Afternoon would come, and if McCarthy had something, he would give it out, but often enough he had nothing, and this was a matter of slight concern. He would simply say that he wasn’t quite ready, that he was having difficulty in getting some of the ‘documents’ he needed or that a ‘witness’ was proving elusive. Morning headlines: ‘Delay Seen in New McCarthy Case — Mystery Witness Being Sought.’” And so McCarthy, simply by asserting things that may or may not have had any connection to reality, dominated the life of the age.

For a grand but accessible view of the evolution (or, depending on your point of view, devolution) of technology and culture, Neil Postman’s 1985 AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is indispensable. Linking our changing consciousness to fundamental shifts in the means of human communication, Postman identifies two key turning points: the move from speech to text and from text to moving images. “To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning,” Postman writes. “It means to uncover lies, confusions and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another.” The Enlightenment was made possible in large measure by the rise of mass print as the principal means of discourse, creating, according to Postman, “a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content.” Once the telegraph was introduced, displacing books and pamphlets, news began coming with unprecedented speed, shortening attention spans — a development that grew exponentially with television. Suddenly “the typographic mind,” in Postman’s formulation, was supplanted by a “peek-a-boo world” of journalistic and political showmanship. More information than ever was now available to more people, but in shorter bursts that newspapers and periodicals and then radio began to use as fodder for drama rather than exposition or illumination. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in “Walden.” “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Then the introduction of television made the telegraphic era seem quaint. The point of television, Postman argues, is to entertain, not to educate — thus, as any viewer of contemporary television news knows, the motive force of such programming, and therefore of the conduct of our minute-to-minute political life, is the classic elements of drama: conflict, novelty and clearly identifiable heroes and villains. (Or at least clearly identifiable for that segment; the imperative to keep the story moving, the perennial imperative of dramatists since the world began, means “breaking news” often connotes a shift in who’s the hero and who’s the villain for that given moment.)

Postman died before the invention of social media, but it doesn’t take much to apply his arguments to the age of Trump. Twitter is a kind of 21st-century telegraph, bringing us bursts of news and opinion with little to no context, appealing to the emotions rather than to the intellect; the typographic mind requires more than 140 characters to do its work. Cable news offers us dramatic serials, entertaining in their twists and turns and outsize characters — or, to be more precise, its outsize character, the 45th president. It’s Walter Winchell’s world. The rest of us are just living in it.

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