The news that the British media—perhaps the world’s most ferociously unscrupulous—kept Prince Harry’s presence in Afghanistan a secret for ten weeks shocked the world. But as soon as the story broke, he was pulled off the front lines and sent home.

Americans enjoy politics-as-spectacle— this is news to no one.

We seem to be sailing in familiar waters: when a sad young literary man writes a book about sad young literary men, and when it is reviewed by a sad young literary man, the old anxiety arises that perhaps those critics were right—literature isn’t universal; it’s no more than a Narcissine pool for a particular class to enjoy. Or, at least, these were the familiar issues I anticipated having to address in my review when I began to read. So you can imagine my surprise at finding that this novel does not deal with men who are literary, or even particularly sad.

A Translation

Whitman College is grand and beautiful. I hated the decay and avant-garde pretensions of Butler’s quad as much as anyone else, and spent my gap year fearing my housing letter and the potential arrival, like some unwelcome diagnosis, of news that I would be living there. My assignment to ...