Hi, Barbie! What books do you like to read? And what do those books say about who you are? This Barbie book quiz is designed to tell you exactly that. Are you more of a President Barbie or Mermaid Barbie? Maybe even Weird Barbie? We all have the Barbie we’d like to be, but which Barbie are we really?

Whether you loved the movie or just enjoy a good quiz, this Barbie quiz should give you a nice little serotonin boost. After all, Barbie (or at least the Barbie of the Barbie movie) is all about optimism and positivity. No matter which Barbie you get, it’s gonna be good news because all the Barbies are perfect! Well, except Weird Barbie, but we love her all the more for it.

Speaking of imperfect — at the time of writing, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are still fighting for fair wages and protections from the studios who continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith. Sounds like some serious corporate suits, if you ask me. *cue video of Mattel corporate riding the world’s longest tandem bike across the screen* Anyway, we all know which side of things Barbie would be on.

You can support the creatives and entertainers who make movies like Barbie possible through the Entertainment Community Fund.

Over the past couple of years, mental health has become a much more frequent topic of conversation. It’s refreshing to find more people discussing mental health with honesty, vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care. While we still have a ways to go as a society, I’m thankful for how much visibility mental health has now and how the stigma surrounding mental health has lessened. The more people talk about mental health conditions like anxiety, the more the stigma will erode and people will feel less alone in their experiences.

When it comes to anxiety, there are a number of resources available to help teens and young adults, from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s online resource center for anxiety to Teen Line, The Youth Mental Health Project, and more. Another Rioter created this handy guide to workbooks and books about anxiety as well.

Fiction books featuring characters navigating mental health conditions like anxiety can also provide incredibly impactful representation, emotional validation, and healing. These stories can help readers feel seen in their experiences with anxiety. The young adult years are a particularly unique and tender time of life, and helping teens with anxiety find their experiences in books can be life changing. Below, I’ve gathered together a selection of YA books featuring characters with anxiety. I hope these books help you or a teen in your life feel comforted and less alone.

There’s something so romantic about road trips. There’s so much potential romance fodder. Two people alone in a car for hours, beautiful scenery changing outside (perhaps even as the character’s hearts change), tensions inevitably escalating over the course of the trip. Then there’s a disagreement about the playlist or snack choices or which route to take that pushes one person too far and the conflict explodes all over the inside of the windshield and even gets stuck in the cup holders. But there’s nowhere for the characters to go in this middle place. They aren’t home, they’re not at their destination yet, so the only choice is to deal with the messy emotions before the journey ends.

Just like when they have to unexpectedly make an overnight pit stop, the only choice is to share the last remaining bed the motel/inn/bed and breakfast has. It’s just good sense, as Sarah MacLean says. The forced proximity makes tough emotions that have been buried surface in an expedited way that not much else can.

Road trip romances put the main characters in a pressure cooker. There’s a firm end to this arrangement, and if they don’t figure out their feelings by the time they get where they are going, it might be too late.

Have you enjoyed and savored picture books for years now, but you want to wear the big book pants now? Do books and novels without any pictures at all intimidate you a little? Do you want to find middle ground? Chapter books for 2nd graders are here to your rescue!

Chapter books are a great transition between picture books and more advanced reading. They are exciting, friendly, and filled with illustrations. But unlike picture books, they have a lot more words per page. They are also divided into tiny, digestible chapters that can be read in one sitting. A lot of chapter books are released as a part of a bigger series so you can get time to bond with the characters. You tend to feel fond of the characters and get invested in their story. They can be a wonderful way to help navigate home, school, and life by watching someone your age do so on the page.

The books in this list range from everyday events of a child’s life to learning science and even helping magical creatures together. What are you waiting for? Dive into this list of chapter books for 2nd graders to find your next favourite read!

Tarot cards have lingered on the edges of my imagination for several years. I was fascinated by how famous artists like Salvador Dali had made their own decks, drawing on their iconographic vocabularies. But recently, I came across a book that stopped me in my tracks: Claire McMillan’s recently released Alchemy of a Blackbird. Starting during World War II in Vichy France, the book tells the story of the friendship of artists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, who were on the outskirts of the surrealist movement. Tarot is a vital center of the book, starting with Varo’s desire to learn to read the cards, and it is used in the structure of several chapters.

Previously, I had encountered tarot cards in fiction in Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973). In it, a group of travelers meet in a castle and later a tavern, but all have lost the power of speech. They must use tarot cards to tell each other their stories with the corresponding cards in the margins of the book.

Between Calvino and McMillan’s works, I became fascinated by the use of tarot cards as a device in fiction. So I decided to talk with McMillan and explore scholarship about Calvino’s work to find out more.

While the book is mostly told from the point of view of Varo, McMillan ends almost every other chapter from the perspective of a different character in that chapter. Each one is represented with a tarot card. She wrote Varo’s chapter first and then went back to think about what type of card related to the character or energy of the scene. Creating her own definitions for the cards was one of the hardest parts of the book for her.

Most people know the late Harry Belafonte as a singer, but he was so much more than that. Born March 1, 1927, to Jamaican immigrant parents in Harlem, his birth name was Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr. He was raised Catholic (his father was of Sephardic Jewish descent as well as Afro-Jamaican, but Judaism is passed through the maternal line) and grew up in Harlem as well as Jamaica, where he lived with his grandmother for several years and first heard the work songs he would later record. Back in New York, he dropped out of high school to join the Navy and serve in World War II.

After the war, he found work as a janitor and — according to his memoir, My Song — was given tickets to the American Negro Theater. He fell in love with the theater and also met Sidney Poitier, who was nine days older than him. The two became fast friends, training together and pooling their money to go to as many shows as possible; they would take turns using a single ticket to get in, each describing the act they had just watched to the other as they switched places.

In the late 1940s, Belafonte took acting classes with the New School as well as performing with the American Negro Theater. He worked as a nightclub singer to pay for his lessons, backed by the Charlie Parker band. His singing landed him a contract with RCA Records in 1953, and he recorded with them for over 20 years. His debut record, Calypso, was the first album ever to sell 1 million copies and included the song “Day-O,” AKA the Banana Boat Song, which he said is “about men who sweat all day long, and they are underpaid, and they’re begging the tallyman to come and give them an honest count — counting the bananas that I’ve picked, so I can be paid.”

It’s no surprise that Belafonte considered himself an activist first and an artist second. He was extremely political, campaigning for John F. Kennedy and for Lyndon B. Johnson’s reelection after he succeeded Kennedy — and later opposing George W. Bush and supporting Barrack Obama and Bernie Sanders. But he is best known for his work in the Civil Rights movement, alongside his friends Sidney Poitier and Martin Luther King Jr. He financed King’s activism, organized the Freedom March on Washington where King delivered the I Have a Dream speech, and he bailed King out of jail during the 1963 Birmingham campaign, which was when his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was penned. He later organized “We Are the World,” performed at Live Aid, was a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and campaigned to cure AIDS and raise awareness of prostate cancer, among other actions.

Somehow, he also found time to act, and a few of his films were bookish. His first movie, 1953’s Bright Road, was adapted from “See How They Run” by Mary Elizabeth Vroman and starred Dorothy Dandridge and a mostly Black cast. In 1970 he starred with Zero Mostel and Gloria Foster in The Angel Levine, based on a short story by Bernard Malamud. He appeared in 1992’s The Player, starring Tim Robbins and based on the book The Player by Michael Tolkin. And, in his final screen role, he appeared in BlacKkKlansman in 2018, based on Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. (He also appeared in nearly everything directed by his friend Sidney Poitier.)

The other night, the performance artist Kembra Pfahler told me some top-drawer East Village Elizabeth Taylor lore: the dame crossed paths with the about-town character Dee Finley outside a needle exchange one afternoon and later paid for Finley to get an entire new set of teeth. A quick Google search when I got home revealed that the story, as reported by Michael Musto for the Village Voice, was not apocryphal: Finley recalls Taylor arriving by limo at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, circa 1997—“She had just had brain surgery. Her hair was short and blonde. Liz at her dykiest. YUM!” Taylor, who funded a lot of community work related to the AIDS crisis and had donated to the needle exchange, was apparently out and about that Thursday taking a tour to see what her dollars were doing, and also giving away bottles of her best-selling perfume White Diamonds; though Sophia Loren did it first, Taylor’s powdery Diamonds was what really made celebrity fragrances a thing. (Finley says he promptly flipped his freebie for a couple bags of junk.)

The poet and perfumer Marissa Zappas owns a pair of size thirty-eight brown leather kitten heels that once belonged to Taylor, who died in 2011. When I asked her if they smelled, she said, “Not really, vaguely of green peppers at first.” For Zappas, who’s carved out a niche for herself as an independent perfumer designing fragrances for book rollouts and art installations, as well as olfactory homages to historic figures like an eighteenth-century pirate, Taylor has been a lifelong obsession. She even used photos of her idol as visual aids to help her memorize smells when she was training to become a perfumer. Now, after establishing herself through collaborations with pros and internet-famous astrologers, Zappas has returned to Taylor as the inspiration for her latest scent, Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! Typical for Zappas, whose fragrances are more grown and nuanced than her millennial girlie #PerfumeTok fans might let on, Maggie starts off unassuming, with a warm floral musk as paradigmatically perfume-y as Grandma’s after-bath splash (it smells a bit like Jean Nate, to be specific—a summery drugstore staple since 1935). But then it develops into something more feral, a little loamy: like the inside of an empty can of Coke on a hot summer day, or freshly baked bread with a hint of wet limestone, maybe even an overripe peach traced with rot. As I lay around with my laptop in bed in the afternoon, the fragrance mixes with my sweat, its champagne and violets becoming nutty with a note as sharp as paint thinner.

The first ingredient in Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! is anisic aldehyde, a synthetic scent engineered to resemble anise seed. In its chemical structure, anisic aldehyde is somewhere between a compound that smells like vanilla and one approaching the scent of licorice. As Luca Turin explains in The Secret of Scent, modern perfumery was born in labs about a century ago, when synthetics produced to smell like lemons or roses began to replace natural extracts in fragrances. But aldehydes aren’t just one-to-one approximations of organic smells: “To understand what aldehydes do to perfumes, imagine painting a watercolor on Scotchlite, the stuff cyclists wear to be seen in car headlights,” Turin says. “Floral colors turn strikingly transparent on this strange background, at one opaque and luminous.” Aldehydes are incandescent, like Elizabeth Taylor, a delicate flower animated by something stranger, more wild. 

“Complexity is hard to define and easy to recognize,” Turin writes of perfumes. Taylor’s performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is instantly recognizable as that: frustrated and smoldering, yet defiantly vulnerable. The new perfume takes its name from one of her lines— “Maggie the cat is alive! I’m alive!”—spoken while pushing her avoidant husband (played by Paul Newman) to forget his recently deceased best friend and fuck her, God dammit. Maggie is desperate for his touch, Taylor convinces us with her leer, at least as much as she wants a baby to lock down his inheritance. One of the reasons we like the woman is that she’s candid about her maneuvers. She doesn’t feign any kind of moral high ground. And while she’s hardened in her determination, she’s soft enough, through Taylor’s piercing portrayal, not to hide how her husband’s neglect stings. A woman self-possessed but not uncorrupted, surrounded by all the fetid decay of a Mississippi plantation during a heat wave, willing to flirt a bit with her father-in-law, she’s a perfect Southern Gothic figure to be interpreted through perfume. Taylor playing her only makes it more fitting: Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! captures the stewing desire of a sex symbol unsexed. 

Soon it will be August in New York City, a period when everyone is theoretically out of town—they’re always saying this, anyway, in books like August by Judith Rossner. This is mostly a fiction, that everyone’s at their country house and everything is shutting down, but it’s sort of fun to imagine; who doesn’t secretly enjoy having fun while others are away? For the month of August, the Review is trying a little experiment—highlighting some things that are going on during this supposedly quiet month. Every week, we’ll be compiling roundups of cultural events and miscellany that the Review’s staff and friends are excited about around town. (And maybe, occasionally, out of town.) We can promise only that these lists will be uncomprehensive, totally random, and fun.

F. W. Murnau’s Faust, introduced by Mary Gaitskill at Light Industry, August 1: Gaitskill, who was interviewed for the Spring issue of the Review, will be introducing this 1926 silent film, which, like many flops, is now a cult classic. Gaitskill saw a clip of the film online years before she had read Goethe’s novel, though she knew the basic outlines of the story of the scholar who made a pact with the devil. “That was enough for me to understand and to feel, to believe, the reality of the segment: the flailing despair, the futile vanity, the experience of running through a live, tactile murk of demons and uncomprehending humans, moving slo-mo through their own fates, trying to undo something that can’t be undone,” she told Light Industry.

Heji Shin’s “The Big Nudes” at 52 Walker, open all August: “The Big Nudes” is the photographer Heji Shin’s first solo exhibition in New York since the 2020 show “Big Cocks.” The cocks in question, by the way, were a series of roosters photographed in shocking detail. “The Big Nudes,” meanwhile, will include photographs of pigs posed to evoke fashion models. This show comes recommended by our contributing editor Matthew Higgs, who says, “This relatively rare gallery presentation promises to be something of a midsummer event.” It opened recently and will be up through October 7.

“Live Jerry Garcia Band Set Lists” by the Garcia Project at Brooklyn Bowl, August 5: Recommended by friend of the Review and occasional Review softball first baseman Adam Wilson, this will be an attempt to faithfully re-create actual set lists played by the Jerry Garcia Band between 1976 and 1995. If you never had a chance to see Jerry’s soulful side project live, this is probably the closest you will ever come to it, and real Deadheads will tell you—at great length, if you’d like—that JGB is actually, sometimes, even better than the Dead.

He texted me something during staff meeting. I didn’t answer until it was over and I had closed my computer and wasn’t looking at him anymore, and then I told him not to text me, please, for these weeks, like we had said. Then I was upset, and I drove to the other side of the lake, where I parked outside a trailer. It was for work: my job required me to interview people, usually showing up unannounced to where it was possible they lived, or didn’t.

A teenage girl opened the door. She was wearing a hot pink sweatshirt with purple sleeves, and her dog was black or dark gray with white on its face. It didn’t make noise as it went around her legs in the doorframe. I turned around, and it bit into the back of my calf. I yelled for a while, and then I was on the ground. Nothing hurt. I put my finger in its mouth to get it to let go, but it bit it. I screamed louder until I realized there wasn’t a point to screaming, because the girl was already hitting the dog with something, maybe a chair, and there was no one else to alert.

Then I was free, and the door to their trailer was open, and then I was inside, and I had closed the door behind me. Then I was leaning on the arm of their green couch, and then I was sitting on the seat of another, whose color I don’t know, because I was looking at the small lakes of blood on the floor. They were already congealing, and inside the pools were small flecks of white. I realized they were my fat when I saw similar pieces on the thighs of my jeans.

I called him. I told him where I was and that I had been attacked by a dog. He said, “Mm-hmm,” in a light tone, the way he talked to his neighbor when he helped him with his taxes, or to me if I needed help with my computer. There was another girl inside the trailer then, maybe the same girl, and she was looking at me with her hand over her mouth. She asked me what to do, and I told her to call 911. She was upset but she did it.

My story in the Summer issue of the Review starts with a character receiving a letter from a boyfriend of twenty-five years ago, and one of the Review’s editors, in search of recommendations for this column, asked if I’d like to write about a piece of epistolary fiction that inspired me. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a particular inspiration, is the thing, and when the editor’s email arrived, I had a flu and a few degrees of fever, so I put her request aside and got back on my sofa and under my blanket, returning to The Demon Lover and Other Stories, which Elizabeth Bowen wrote during World War II. My husband gave me the book more than a decade ago, and for some reason, it was finally calling out to be read.

The first stories in the book are sketches of Londoners dislodged from their identities by aerial bombings. A recent New Yorker article about disaster care describes the small items of function and decoration in people’s lives—pencil sharpener, teakettle, photo in a frame—as the “furniture of self,” and many of Bowen’s characters find themselves feeling uncanny and disenchanted after the loss of items that once made up their context and setting. In the middle stories, Bowen goes at the problem from the other end, writing about people unsettled by the unexpected return of things that once gave them context. A woman inherits a skeleton clock that she is told she cared for passionately as a child but has no memory of. Another woman, in a nightclub on a boozy date, hears a dance tune that her father used to try to sing. And in the title story, “The Demon Lover,” a third woman, returning to her bomb-cracked, boarded-up house to rescue a few items, finds a letter from the man she was engaged to during World War I—twenty-five years prior. 

The coincidental resonance/overlap with my own short story was eerie. Maybe I had read this story before and repressed it, the way Bowen’s heroine represses the memory of her skeleton clock? I don’t think so, though I’m at the age where that can’t be ruled out. Maybe twenty-five years is just a resonant interval, for me as well as for Bowen—it’s the time it takes for youth to turn into middle age. It’s also roughly the gap between World War I and II, which may be why it reappears in story after story of hers. As the reader advances through the collection, her stories turn out—more and more explicitly—to be ghost stories. A woman two-timing her husband starts to feel “disliked” by a presence in her bedroom. In perhaps the most beautiful story, “The Happy Autumn Fields,” a woman dozing in a bomb-shattered building dreams of having been another person altogether, in another century, and can’t shake the sense that her dreamed self is her real one. 

In a postscript to the collection, Bowen writes about why the past seemed more vivid during World War II—why it haunted the present—and her language is weirdly evocative of what it felt like to live through COVID. “In war-time many people had strange deep intense dreams,” she writes. 

Last night I had a dream that Kim Kardashian and I were planning a lunch for a whole bunch of people. I have no idea who those people were. I just know that Kim and I had to plan a lunch together, a small one, maybe a lunch that would serve as a planning session for a second, larger lunch. It is my suspicion that in this dream I was working as a publicist, which serves me right, because I have been short with a few publicists in my life, though I do love a good publicist and appreciate that I myself would not be a good publicist. But in this dream I seemed to be holding my own.

Kim and I talked on the phone for a long time, making plans, debating salads, sandwiches, “small plates,” and the amounts of each that we needed. What would people drink? How many different canned or bottled drinks did we need? We said “uh-huh” and “mmmm” a lot. I was intensely bored but also aware that I was talking to Kim Kardashian. I could see Kim in my dream even though I was talking to her on a landline, a situation where you do not see the person you’re talking to. I was in the dream and watching it too.

I should have known I was in a dream because both of our phones were old-fashioned ones, with long coiled plastic cords. Kim’s phone was avocado green, mine bright yellow. Both of the phones in my house growing up—one attached to the kitchen wall, and one the kind you could walk around with, with an extra long cord, that was stationed in my parents’ bedroom—were white or off-white.

Let’s start with the dark stuff. On Saturday night in San Francisco, after the second-to-last-ever Dead & Co. show, every single ATM near the ballpark was apparently out of cash, because people couldn’t stop buying balloons filled with nitrous oxide, huffing them on the street for just a few more seconds of feeling high. The bars nearby were overrun, quite literally, long after everyone should have been at home. People go down at shows—it happened right in front of us one night, the medics rushing in and carrying someone out. There are, not infrequently, overdoses. There is too much of everything, sometimes. “I’m at that point in a bender where beer isn’t really doing anything for me anymore,” I heard someone joke on day three of the three-show run.

It is not that easy to drink yourself to death, actually, which I know because I have watched a lot of people try, but I could imagine it happening to many people in the context of the long slide of years or decades spent following the band. I always think “There but for the grace of God go I,” and I really mean it. So many people are dead and gone, among them the Dead’s lead songwriter, guitarist, and singer Jerry Garcia, who was killed by his own addiction to heroin at the age of fifty-three. “Do you think of Jerry as a prophet or a saint?” my friend asked me on Sunday as we got ready for the last show ever. The mood was elegiac, though the fact of finality wasn’t really sinking in, which might be why we kept repeating it over and over. “I can’t believe it’s really the last one,” someone said, not for the first time. “What are we even going to do next summer?” my friend lamented. “Are we going to like … have to get really into Phish?” “We are NOT getting into Phish,” someone else insisted, though we all agreed we would probably go see Phish at Madison Square Garden in August.

We put on our last clean Dead T-shirts—we were all running low and trading with one another—and headed back to the ballpark. A few of us had decided last minute to upgrade our tickets so we could be on the floor. I had never been on the floor for a Dead & Co. show; we always don’t spend the extra money and regret it later, so this time, one last time, we were not going to make that mistake. I said I wanted to hear “Bertha,” and we got it, right away, and right away we knew that every single member of the band was completely on, locked in. Bobby, as my friend observed, was “really cooking.” Jeff Chimenti, Oteil Burbridge, Mickey Hart, also cooking. And Mayer—I have never seen him, perhaps, cook like that, leaning into every moment harder than I have ever seen him lean, and he always leans in hard, given that he is probably among other things one of the greatest living guitarists.

We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads.

The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE.

Being on the lot is basically just about wandering around and looking at stuff, so that’s what we did. One of my friends wanted to get a new Online Ceramics Dead T-shirt; another one wanted to buy a tiny ceramic mushroom to hold during the concert. My brother and I weaved in and out of some stalls, looking at shirts and stickers that said things like “Not like other girls” and “5-8-1977 was an inside job.”

“There was this apple last night that I was eating and I couldn’t stop eating it, I even ground up the seeds and then I think I was worried that I had arsenic in my body, so I got a bit disturbed during ‘Space,’ ” I heard one guy telling his friend, bent over a camping stove where he was frying some onions and nursing a beer.

Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars.

It was the first night of a three-night run of the final shows for this iteration of the Grateful Dead—the last tour ever, the last shows ever, though, as everyone knows, the Grateful Dead has been ending for nearly twenty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, everyone thought that was the end. In 2015, many of the original band members played a tour that was literally called “Fare Thee Well.” And yet, miraculously, it continued. But this time: Bob Weir is seventy-five, and John Mayer, the unlikely force behind this version of the band, has other things to get on to. At the very least, this is probably the last time they’ll ever sell out huge stadiums. So this was a major event that I had flown out from New York to see with five friends. I had been hearing for days that SFO was “like Bonnaroo for Deadheads.” On another friend’s flight in, the pilot told them they were flying over a wildfire in Colorado. “Wow, it’s literally ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ ” someone behind her said.

In line, everyone checked out the scene, craning their necks to see how good other people’s tie-dyes were. One guy was wearing a cape.

“Is that Andy Cohen?” someone asked.

An early-summer, late-afternoon light was catching a porcelain figurine of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus on the windowsill of Johnnie’s Italian Specialties, the twenty-eight-year-old family-owned restaurant in South Philly where, in May, I dialed up my personal hotspot, hoping to get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert taking place in the city later that night. My cheesesteak sub was dry and insufficiently cheesy and entirely beside the point—it was a formality, if a regionally appropriate one, meant to justify my seat at this funky restaurant as my sister and I refreshed four different ticket resale websites waiting for prices to drop. We were not two of the lucky 2.4 million who had gotten tickets to the Eras Tour when they’d gone on sale several months earlier, in a rollout so vexed and disorderly it caused an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into antitrust violations by Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

At first, this didn’t bother me. I do not have the patience to wait in something called a virtual queue, and also I have a job. So I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would not be attending the Eras Tour, Swift’s 131-show survey of her ten studio albums—which I suppose we now call eras and not albums—and the logical, world-beating end point of her willful evolution from gee-whiz country darling to too-big-to-fail pop supernova. But then, in March, the Eras Tour commenced, and for several weeks thereafter my Twitter feed was overrun with clips from the show, which runs close to three and a half hours, includes forty-four songs, and is structured episodically as a Homeric celebration of Swift’s discography. It looked like the sort of thing I’d regret missing, the premise of a memory I could tell my kids or at least my friends’ kids about. 

Nine days earlier, my sister had texted me to see if I’d be down to drive to Philadelphia from New York the day of the concert on a lark. “Idk how I feel about that,” I wrote back. “Is that a thing?” I am constitutionally risk averse, and the idea of driving there and failing to get tickets was less attractive than not having them at all. But Swift herself once said that nothing safe is worth the drive, and my sister had done her due diligence. On TikTok, she told me, a whisper network of unticketed Swifties were documenting their journeys to whichever city Swift was playing that night, scooping up the remaining tickets at 5 or 6 P.M., when scalpers realized they could not sell them for $2,500 a pop. Not unjustifiably, Swifties get a bad rap. They are defensive and belligerent, boastful about streaming numbers and record sales and tour profits, which is a function of Swift’s own valedictorian disposition. But they are also funny, resourceful, canny creatures of the internet whose parasocial hungers Swift not only treasures but responds to, like a benevolent monarch. 

It was Swiftie plaintiffs who, in righteous indignation at price gouging and incompetence more generally, forced Ticketmaster executives to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. (It was also Swifties who forced me to witness Amy Klobuchar interpolating the lyrics to “All Too Well” in a pandering screed against the ills of corporate consolidation.) Swifties make Twitter accounts, like @ErasTourResell, to sell available tickets at face value to real fans, thereby keeping them out of the hands of scalpers. “LA SWIFTIES ,” goes one tweet, which is best read in the voice of an auctioneer. “We have a seller …” When Swifties demanded additional tour dates in neglected cities, Swift, who had initially overlooked Singapore, responded with six of them. And on TikTok and other sites, they document and live stream the Eras Tour rigorously for absent fans, so much that I could find out, from an account called @ErasTourUpdates, that Swift changed her costume for the 1989 portion of the concert in Cincinnati—from a beaded lime green top and skirt to an identical set, but in fuchsia—thirty seconds after she appeared on stage.

Péter Esterházy once wrote that Péter Zilahy is the white raven of Hungarian literature who can observe the world each time as if for the first time, always fresh and original. While it’s labeled a novel, The Last Window-Giraffe is essentially uncategorizable, a hippogriff of a creation fashioned from fragments of history, autobiography, and wild invention. How such a wealth of elements—from childhood memories to political atrocities to the poignant evocation of the correspondence between sexual awakening and the deaths of dictators—could be gathered and spun into such a coherent narrative is a kind of aesthetic miracle.

Zilahy uses the Hungarian alphabet to present a wonderful mix of historical facts, poetry, and visual images, an approach inspired by the time he spent in Belgrade in 1996, when citizens took to the streets to protest Slobodan Milošević’s electoral fraud. The Last Window-Giraffe evokes many memories of my own past in the former Yugoslavia. There’s a wizardry in Zilahy’s ability to shrink an entire historical epoch to human scale while at the same time elevating ordinary experience to mythic significance. This is intellectual alchemy of the highest order, executed with wit and compassion. Zilahy can murder a sacred cow and canonize an unknown victim of totalitarianism in a single sentence.

H is for:
három puszi = three kisses
háború = war
harag = anger
halál = death
hatalom = power
híradó = news bulletin
hazudnak = they’re lying

U is for:
ur = space
ur = blank
ur = nothingness