Are you at an interregnum point in your high-profile career? Did you recently come out of a very stressful situation? And are you trying to stay relevant but semi-retired and/or just have your hands in a lot of different things but still want to do a little more? 

Might I suggest that you consider becoming a disinformation guy? Since 2017, it’s been the move for at least a few people who maybe don’t have a lot going on, but soon will, or have a bit going on and want to add a bit more to it. After dipping his toes into it for the past year, President Barack Obama notably became the latest and most prominent disinformation guy in a speech yesterday on the subject at Stanford, but he is not the first.

The former Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign manager Robby Mook and former Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign manager Matt Rhoades were the earliest examples of disinformation guys I personally came across. In 2017, Harvard’s Belfer Center launched the D3P, which stands not for the next exceptionally talented dual-threat quarterback or the latest hot new point guard, but for Defending Digital Democracy. Shortly after its inception, it announced that Mook and Rhoades would be brought on as “co-leaders of the initiative.” The project said its mission was to “identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.” 

More recently, after his very public break with the British monarchy, Prince Harry (now just Harry?) came out swinging hard as a disinformation guy. Last March, he was appointed to the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder to help with a six-month study on American misinformation and disinformation. At the end of the sixth months, he found that things were not good, calling misinformation a “global humanitarian crisis.”

And of course, by the very nature of being the most clouted human being alive, after his speech at Stanford yesterday and accompanying preview of it in the paper of record, Obama is now the preeminent disinformation guy.

For roughly the last six years, Republican politicians have essentially been acting like the adults in that one Twilight Zone episode with the kid with godlike powers, putting on a big show about how everything Donald Trump does is “good” out of fear that he’ll cast them into the otherworldly cornfield from which there is no return. But according to New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, there was at least one brief window where top GOP officials seemed ready to stiffen their spines and prevent their leader from ever holding office again: the days following the January 6 Capitol riot. 

On Thursday, the Times published an edited excerpt from Martin and Burns’s new book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, which claimed that Republican Party leaders Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) contemplated a series of drastic measures to remove Trump from office: including invoking the 25th Amendment, pressuring him to resign, and even impeachment. 

In public, McCarthy stayed true to his lily-livered persona, objecting to the election results and saying that the Democrats’ attempt to impeach Trump would “put more fuel on the fire.” He has since adopted a characteristically esoteric defense of Trump’s actions on January 6, saying that the real fault lies with Nancy Pelosi, who he (ridiculously) claims to have allowed a “security lapse” at the Capitol. 

However, in private conversations, McCarthy was irate and fully willing to lay the blame squarely on Trump’s shoulders. On Jan. 8, 2021, he reportedly told House Republicans that Trump’s conduct had been “atrocious and totally wrong” and blamed him outright for inciting the mob to storm the Capitol. During a Jan. 10 meeting, he claimed that he’d ask Trump to resign from office and allegedly said that he wished that the Big Tech companies would strip some far-right lawmakers of their social media accounts. 

“I’ve had it with this guy,” he reportedly ranted to a group of Republican leaders. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it.” 

Actor LeVar Burton will be hosting the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee. The spelling bee started in 1925 and aims to help students “learn concepts and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives.”

The choice of host comes naturally as Burton is a lifelong advocate for children’s literacy and was the former host and executive producer for PBS’ Reading Rainbow as well as last year’s fan favorite for becoming the new Jeopardy! host.

Over 200,000 people watched live last year as 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde from New Orleans became the first Black American to be named the spelling bee champion, winning a $50,000 prize.

This year, the semifinals and finals will air live on June 1st and 2nd, respectively, and take place near Washington, D.C. It can be viewed on the ION, Bounce, and LAFF networks.

I first encountered Gail Scott’s sentences in Calamities, a book of glorious short essays by Renee Gladman, one of Scott’s closest readers. “These were the shortest sentences I’d ever seen,” Gladman writes, “yet they were not the kind of sentences that allowed you to rest when you reached the end of them. They pointed always to the one up ahead … They pushed you off a balcony; they caused fissures in your reading mind.” When I finally read Scott, it was two novels back to back: Heroine, a young lesbian’s feverish account of living in a Montreal boarding house in the early eighties, and My Paris, the precisely calibrated diaries of an often depressed Quebecois woman living in Paris. It was easy to see how you might want to live in Scott’s sentences forever, or, as Gladman did, transcribe them from memory onto your living room wall. I read them again and again for the pleasure of pure description; for the unnamed women who move through them without warning, wearing loose black pants, an olive-green jumpsuit, silk socks, and irrepressible perfume; for Scott’s impressions of Quebecois political-left consciousness in the second half of the twentieth century. “Heroine is more a work of reading than of writing,” Eileen Myles wrote in the book’s introduction, which was also published by the Review in 2019. It’s the deceptive work of accumulation, too, that drives both these novels—in the kind of ravenous prose that seems to revise itself as it’s already in motion. From My Paris: “The marvellous is to be had. I thinking at 5:30a. Looking out window. Pale blue sky beyond anarchy of chimney pots. You just have to pierce the smugness of the surface.”

—Oriana Ullman, intern

“History repeats itself.” This repetition, the relentless circularity of time, is the subject of Time Shelter, the latest novel by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel. It follows an unnamed Bulgarian narrator as he finds himself drawn into the creation of a Zurich-based “clinic of the past” for Alzheimer’s patients, dreamed up by Gaustine, a philosopher prone to uttering enigmatic sentences like, “No one has yet invented a gas mask and bomb shelter against time.” The clinic is neatly divided into floors, each of which is dedicated to a decade of the patients’ lives—but these floors eventually begin to spill over into one another. Mayhem ensues. Soon, nonpatients want in, too, and politics enters the scene. Referendums are held: Should Europe be returned to its past? Strewn with aphoristic meditations on the history, fiction, the nature of time, and the construct of Europe, this is a novel that feels both prescient and like a dream. Or like a moment of déjà vu: At the book’s end, is it 1914 in Sarajevo, a time and place that decided the course of modernity as we know it—or is it a reenactment of that assassination, happening in 2024? At what point does that which is reenacted merge with that which is real? As Gospodinov illustrates, it’s pointless to bet against the past. The house always wins.

One night, my stand-up comic brother, David, and I were sitting on my couch, talking about the joke that concludes Woody Allen’s 1977 film, Annie Hall. We’d watched the movie together dozens of times growing up, and we’d always assumed that we interpreted the ending—about how people get into relationships because we “need the eggs”—the same way. That night, we discovered we did not, and even after much talking, we found we couldn’t agree on the joke’s meaning. In the weeks that followed, I longed to restage and expand our conversation, and hopefully to answer some of the questions it had raised, so I invited a few other people into the discussion: Zohar Atkins, a rabbi and poet; Nathan Goldman, a literary critic and editor; and Noreen Khawaja, a professor of religion who has written a book on existentialism. Could we, together, get to the bottom of this profound and amazing joke?

DAVID HETI

The joke came up one night when Sheila and I were talking.

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Iredell-Statesville Schools in central North Carolina have dealt with near nonstop book challenges and read-alouds over the last six months during school board meetings. Moms For Liberty has a large and vocal presence in the community, and that group led the efforts to challenge 75 books in the district.

One of the leaders of the book challenges has made a name for herself by harassing the school administration and by attempting to break into one of the local middle schools to take photos of two particular books she said she “knew” were in the collection. Paula Mimnaugh has been a staple at Iredell School Board meetings since last summer. She proudly wears a Moms For Liberty shirt, and she’s shown up at other school board meetings in her area. At one, she tied wearing masks to Marxism. She was aghast she was not allowed to just enter the school library and look for books.

The Iredell-Statesville school district came to a decision in mid-April about the list of challenged books. Fewer than 12 books will be reviewed, including Lawn Boy, All Boys Aren’t Blue, Ask Me How I Got Here, Another Day, Out of Darkness, Blankets, Flamer, George, and Girl Mans Up. A full list has yet to be released.

At the latest school district meeting, Iredell’s board took a new approach to responding to public comments about books. As people queued up to speak — several of whom planned to continue reading passages from books they disagreed with aloud, with the requisite caveat that young people in the audience should leave because the content was not appropriate for minors — the board chair asked the speaker once they began whether or not they had filed a formal reconsideration for the book.

As the first speaker approached the mic wearing her Kelli Moore for North Carolina shirt (Kelli Moore is a tea party affiliated candidate and involved with the “Mama Bears,” another group akin to Moms For Liberty), the board chair Todd Carver asked if she’d filed a formal complaint over the book.

I’ve been learning lessons from literature for as long as I’ve been able to read. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve been learning lessons from literature for longer than that – my parents used to read me bedtime stories, and I always fell asleep to fairytale audiobooks. You know, the ones that came on cassette tape? The dark ages, if you will. Those lessons have stuck: for one thing, if your prospective mother-in-law tries to make you climb a gazillion mattresses to prove that you’re good enough for her son, just assume she’ll be insufferable all her life and move on.

Anyway.

Once I did learn how to read, the world of sources to learn from expanded. This wasn’t always a good thing, mind you. I read a lot of classic children’s books that were rife with problematic content. I was a child who thought that books were all but sacred, so it meant a lot of unlearning as I grew older and learned to think for myself. It also meant that I tried to do a lot of weird things – weird, at least, for a person whose age was in the single digits. I wrote a will (in a notebook, with a number 2 pencil) at the age of 8 because Amy March did so in Little Women. Needless to say, my mother started monitoring my reading more closely after that. Who knew what else I’d try to emulate.

Some of my most memorable life lessons, however, I’ve found in the Brontë sisters’ books, Anne Brontë’s in particular. I’ve written previously about why I love her so, and I still stand by it. Sadly, Anne, like her siblings, died young, with only a couple of completed works. What these novels lack in quantity, though, they make up for in quality. Both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are incredible books that I reread regularly, and I’ve learned a lot from them. Shall we go over some of these life lessons from Anne Brontë?

Lesson #1: You Can’t Change People

In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen, the protagonist, falls in love with a man whose values don’t match hers. However, Helen is convinced that she can change him. It’s a common misconception, of course, especially considering that Helen is a sheltered 18-year-old girl, and Arthur Huntingdon, the man in question, is almost a decade older. Helen learns this lesson at horrifying speed when she finds herself trapped in an abusive marriage with no legal recourse.