The night of the Iowa caucus, I wanted to quit my job and pack a bag for Chicago or New Hampshire or wherever the action was. I didn't go to either of those places, and I put off my political wanderlust for an embarrassingly long nine and a half months, but I did end up where the action was. Though I now live in Connecticut, I grew up—and my parents still live—on what unexpectedly turned into a fault-line for the 2008 campaign: the Indiana-Ohio border.

Of the myriad people, things, and ideas that have come under assault during the last eight years we should not forget about privacy, which took a consistently harsh beating at the hands of the Bush administration. Remember finding out that back in 2002—in secret, ironically enough—the President authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on communication originating within the United States. With cooperation from giants of the industry, the NSA monitored the phone calls of hundreds and probably thousands of citizens, without ever having had to show due cause for doing so.

Just as the '90s witnessed the American canonization of one important foreign writer—W. G. Sebald—the current decade has seen the same happen to the wandering novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño, who spent his boyhood in Chile, his youth mostly in Mexico, and who died in Spain in 2003, at the age of 50, after a decade of Stakhanovite productivity. His massive novel 2666, unrevised at his death, is only now appearing in translation, earlier books like the monologue By Night in Chile, the tragic mockumentary The Savage Detectives, and that vicious counterfactual lark Nazi Literature in the Americas having already secured the highest praise. Bolaño's canonization has taken place so rapidly and completely, and with so little demurral, that one can only reluctantly pile aboard the bandwagon. But Bolaño is the real thing, as urgent, various, imaginative, and new as any writer active in the last decade. The question is: why not canonize anyone else? Why reserve for him the once-in-a-decade beatification? Read More

Early on Saturday morning, the weekend before Election Day, I drove down to Philadelphia with my old college buddy James to put in some get-out-the-vote work for the Obama campaign. James, a staff member for a union of service workers, was obligated to work long hours in a variety of grassroots campaign work. I had never done this before.

We showed up at party headquarters for the 33rd Ward around 9:30. This was in a vacant storefront in a downtrodden strip mall on a hill (a vantage point appropriate to the military tenor of campaign work). James hailed fellow veteran union men and women from around the northeast, all in loud Obama t-shirts with union insignia. I studied the ward map. Here in Kensington--an impoverished, post-industrial majority-minority neighborhood in the northeastern part of Philly--most of the campaign’s efforts were directed to registering and mobilizing new voters. So far there had been a groundswell. Neighbors persuaded neighbors, parents petitioned children and vice versa, spouses and lovers had nagged and pleaded with one another. There were a lot of older people at the campaign office, but a lot of younger people, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, were showing up too: grabbing coffee out of Philadelphia Eagles-branded Dunkin' Donuts boxes, stepping up as Spanish-speakers, holding doors open and giving pragmatic advice to one another. “Tryin’ to make it happen,” said one of the old ladies manning the bottled-water buckets outside.

Read More

Here are some things I remember, from being an old person.

I remember the turnstiles in the Willie Horton ad, representative of Michael Dukakis’s commitment to releasing black rapists and murderers.

I remember the 1991 SNL skit, a fake ad against the Brady Amendment (requiring a seven-day waiting period for hand-guns), where Chris Rock and a masked accomplice rob a nice white family as they sit at home waiting for permission to buy a handgun to protect themselves. The masked accomplice ends up shooting Chris Farley, who collapses dramatically into the coffee table, and then Chris Rock says: “Nice shot WILLIE HORTON! Why’d you have to go and do that, WILLIE HORTON?”

I remember the New Yorker Talk of the Town when the first rumors of the Lewinsky scandal came out. One of Clinton’s aides was interviewed, not knowing whether the rumors were true or not, convinced (as was the case) that the Republicans, looking for one thing (Whitewater), had found something else (Lewinsky), but adding: “If you want to know who I blame, I blame Clinton. I blame him.” Read More

To visitors, and there aren't many of those, Matteo says his apartment is a pied-à-terre, that he lives in Milan but that he's in town temporarily for scientific research. For a pied-à-terre, his apartment is nice. It's got rats, but no one notices. At night, when it's quiet, Matteo hears them gnawing. True enough.

Matteo is employed by a science magazine, Nature Methods; four days a week he does administrative work for that magazine. It started off as an after-school job, but after he graduated he never left. He's seen editors come and go, including the editor-in-chief. Read More

I. Round one: Z Zegna

Like ants in a colony, the men and women in town for Fashion Week have thin black exoskeletons, specialized social functions and valuable cargo to transport. A swarm of these people has formed on a September afternoon in front of the West Village showroom where Z Zegna will exhibit its Spring-Summer 2009 collection. I don't know what Z Zegna is, apart from an Italian menswear line whose website has an alphabet theme. Words that begin with "S" scoot across the introduction page and fade into a photograph of a guy on a motorcycle—Seduction. Sporty. Style. A press release I downloaded opened with a paean to the expected letter Z: "The ultimate letter, the most distinguished of the alphabet." An invitation to the show is sandwiched between two candy bars in my purse, like a boarding pass. In terms of Fashion Week hierarchies, I get the feeling that Z Zegna is Greyhound to Zac Posen's Amtrak and Marc Jacobs's Concorde. Read More

Many students at Pomona College had Dave Wallace as a professor. (He insisted we call him "Dave"; we always called him "DFW" when he wasn't around.) And many students also considered him a friend—even if being a friend meant dealing with his byzantine yet internally consistent and fair network of rules for social contact with the world. I came to think that this interface was necessary for him as a teacher, that it acted as a sort of membrane to let students in and keep critics and literary paparazzi out. In any case, I'm thankful he made this effort with my classmates and me. What follows here is exactly the sort of thing he hated. He couldn't stand being the center of attention. He'd found that even praise could be harmful, and so he'd brush it off as if it was beside the point, or as if he wasn't worth it. Of course he was worth it. But if a workshop got particularly warm and congratulatory, Dave would say, "Let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs." Read More

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of "dignity." She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn't think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels. We were endlessly self-reflexive individuals who had been marked by dabbling in drugs and semiotics; the media world we inhabited made life feel squalid, disposable, and fearful; we could hear, when we opened our mouths, the culture industry's language and not always our own. We were trapped inside ourselves—and in there wasn't even a "self." More like an empty lot crisscrossed by gusts of addictive compulsion, and littered with cultural debris. The situation made you feel ashamed. It bankrupted concepts like "dignity." Read More