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Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa before his death, in April, besides some high-level lore—his role in the Latin American Boom, his failed presidential bid, the time he socked Gabriel García Márquez in the face. Soon after, I decided enough was enough and picked up his historical novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000. Through the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic until his assassination at the hands of revolutionaries, in 1961, Vargas Llosa explores how the wounds inflicted by a dictatorship remain long after it officially ends. But as gritty and dark as the novel gets—and it gets dark—The Feast of the Goat is one of the most readable books I’ve ever encountered. That’s both because Vargas Llosa’s crisp prose makes the 400 or so pages fly by and, more important, because his novel never loses sight of the power of human resilience.
I was a bit more familiar with the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who also passed away earlier this year. Although best known for his 1981 book, After Virtue (if you haven’t already, read David Brooks’s reflections on how its arguments help explain President Donald Trump’s appeal), MacIntyre also wrote Dependent Rational Animals. The book offers one of the most persuasive cases I’ve read against treating individual autonomy as the highest ideal, as well as a plea to view our limitations—aging, illness—and dependence on one another not as failings but as constitutive elements of human nature. Oh, and MacIntyre dedicates long stretches of his book to the intelligence of dolphins. Which is great.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: “If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight,” by Courtney Barnett. Loud: “Femininomenon,” by Chappell Roan.
Something I recently rewatched: Before earning box-office cachet with the Dune series, Denis Villeneuve directed Incendies, a modern Sophoclean tragedy set during a civil war in the Middle East. Nearly 15 years after its release, the film remains one of the most sobering portrayals of familial ties on-screen—of how they can at once inflict unspeakable pain and inspire courage and selflessness.
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The latest season of FX’s exquisite The Bear.
The last thing that made me snort with laughter: For my money, Conan O’Brien is the king of American comedy, though part of his greatness is that he’s always reveled in playing the fool. He doesn’t have the commanding swagger of a Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr, opting instead for a style that my colleague David Sims has described as a “mix of silly surrealism with an old-timey flair.” I’ve been keeping up with O’Brien since his Late Night days, when I would get home from school and play the previous night’s episode, so watching him get the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor earlier this year felt plenty nostalgic. The full ceremony is on Netflix now, and it’s a comedic cornucopia for any Team Coco stans.
The last thing that made me cry: A few weeks before Independence Day, while visiting New York City, I ended up going to mass at Ascension Church, which has a jazz liturgy on Sunday evenings. Most of my favorite church music leans traditional, yet to my surprise, I felt incredibly moved by the unconventional reverence of melodies with echoes of Art Blakey and Miles Davis. One highlight: the jazz mass’s version of the hymn “This Is My Song.” These lines in particular felt providentially relevant for anybody searching for a more warmhearted patriotism:
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Museo Nacional de Historia, in Mexico City.
A musical artist who means a lot to me: The Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler isn’t super well known in America—though he did write the first Spanish-language song to win an Oscar for Best Original Song—but he’s pretty acclaimed in Latin America and Spain, especially for his lyricism. He can use scientific principles (the law of conservation or the evolution of cells, for example) as metaphors for love, or meditate on weighty political questions (migration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) without coming off as preachy. No musician means more to me than Drexler, whose art teems with the wonder of a wide-eyed humanist.
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Two in the Campagna,” by Robert Browning:
Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
The Week Ahead
- The Naked Gun, an action-comedy film starring Liam Neeson as a hapless yet determined detective (in theaters Friday)
- Season 2 of Twisted Metal, a postapocalyptic action-comedy series with murderous clowns and a deadly demolition tournament (premiering Thursday on Peacock)
- Black Genius, an essay collection by Tre Johnson that identifies overlooked examples of genius in the Black community (out Tuesday)
