Christian Lorentzen has worked as an editor at US Weekly, the New Leader, Harper’s and the LRB and has edited two volumes of pieces from n+1. He has a newsletter on Substack and hosts the podcast Quality Lit Game.
It was in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950. They had a ‘pleasant talk’. In True...
There’s a morbid aspect to Libertyville, the Chicago suburb where Pan, Michael Clune’s first novel, is set: ‘At night in the Midwest in winter,’ we are told, ‘the raw death of the endless future … is sometimes bare inches above the roofs.’ It’s the kind of thought that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama....
Crossroads, watershed, turning or tipping point, whatever cliché falls just this side of revolution: that’s the way the New York Democratic mayoral primary on 24 June will be remembered decades from now if Zohran Mamdani wins. Or it will be just another occasion when the Clintonite centrist zombies of the Democratic Party – in the surly guise of the former governor of...
After two hours on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result of redistricting, after decades in the House of Representatives. Like me, she was on her way to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention. The next morning she was due to have...
The tin cup is empty, and the ass has gone under. Joe Biden’s political career is over, and he had to do it by autocoup. His two most trusted aides came to him at Rehoboth Beach and told him from a distance – because he has Covid – that he no longer had a path to victory. The money had dried up, he was trailing in all the usual swing states, and even in states the Democrats usually win without spending much money, like Virginia and New Mexico. The next day he posted his resignation letter to X (formerly Twitter) and followed it up with an endorsement of his vice president. Oh, yeah, c’mon, man, keep her around. So came to an end a month of blather about the way Biden had become King Lear. The final reckoning was less like Julius Caesar than like sending the president to the self-checkout till at Tesco to pay for his own hemlock.
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