It’s late 1937, and you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald, the once-celebrated writer, and you’re getting paid $1,000 a week, which, especially during the Depression, and even for the gilded coffers of MGM, isn’t toy money.
From your place at the Garden of Allah apartments on Sunset, in what is now West Hollywood, you might decide to amble the couple of miles to Hollywood Boulevard, to the Stanley Rose Book Shop, knuckled right up against Musso and Frank. There, you might find other scribblers, with names like Saroyan and Steinbeck, to share a convivial drink nearby; some of Hollywood Boulevard’s many bookshops are open almost as late as the bars.
Or you’re Ray Bradbury, and on a late April day in 1946 — April the 24th, if you must know — you head downtown, to Booksellers Row, centered on 6th Street between Hill and Figueroa. You’d get there by bus or Red Car, or on your bicycle, because you do not drive, not even one single block, not since you saw that gory accident about 10 years earlier.
You walk into Fowler Brothers bookstore, which opened in 1888 as a church supply shop, and by the time it would close its doors for good in 1994, it was the oldest surviving bookstore in the city. On that day, a brilliant and fetching book clerk named Maggie McClure caught his attention; Bradbury caught hers because she thought he was shoplifting books into his vast trench coat. They married not quite 18 months later.
L.A. is a universe where you can twinkle in the galaxy of your choosing — farming, tech, academia, movies, and, for much of the 20th century, bookshops. Whole solar systems of bookstores — new, used, rare, secondhand, antiquarian — clustered in certain cities: in Glendale, along Brand Boulevard; on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley; in Pasadena, on Colorado Boulevard, from Old Town to Vroman’s, still the oldest book-seller in Southern California; on and near Hollywood Boulevard; in Long Beach, orbiting around the legendary Acres of Books, founded the year after the 1933 earthquake, with miles of shelves where Bradbury went to shop, even though the science fiction section bore the label “screwball aisle.”
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L.A. in the 1920s and ‘30s was beginning to shake off its reputation for hayseed Babbittry, or at least to acquire a critical mass of urban sophisticates possessing expansive tastes and sometimes the wallets to indulge them. The Zamorano Club, a men’s group named for the man who brought the first printing press to California, welcomed bibliophiles, oenophiles, foodies, collectors, art patrons, conversationalists, and tastemakers. Colleges and universities needed libraries to match the reputations they wanted to attain — and bought accordingly.
The movie studios needed research libraries so directors and producers could find out what Daniel Boone wore and what Cleopatra ate, and those libraries had huge budgets and farsighted librarians. California historian Kevin Starr once wrote that Jake Zeitlin — a pioneering rare-book seller and publisher — calculated that over 20 years, MGM alone spent $1 million bulking up its library.
Department stores ran book departments as big as modern-day bookstores, and in its column “Gossip of the Book World,” The Times let readers know when authors were due in town for book signings. Amelia Earhart would be at Robinson’s on Aug. 8, 1932, signing copies of her book “The Fun of It,” and as a bonus, her Lockheed-Vega plane had been dismantled, brought downtown from Burbank, and reassembled right in the store.
If you’ve seen the great 1946 L.A. noir film “The Big Sleep” — and if you haven’t, shame on you, go watch it at once, after you’ve finished reading this — one scene may have eluded your notice: Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe walks out of one bookstore and heads right across the street to another, in search of a particular book, just as a rainstorm gears up. It is the rainstorm, not two neighboring bookstores, that was the Los Angeles rarity.
Even without today’s enticements of fluffy coffees and lounging sofas, book lovers of yore managed to endure the rigors of strolling from store to store in these neighborhoods. And, like moons to the bigger stores’ planets, specialty bookshops found bibliophiles’ markets for volumes about art, fitness, science, ethnic interests, photography, erotica, comics, sports, mystery and horror, architecture, and the spiritual. The glorious Bodhi Tree on Melrose Avenue was founded in the groovy year of 1970, extolled by Shirley MacLaine’s autobiography in the 1980s, and put out of business in 2011 by the usual suspects: online book sales and metaphysical books going mainstream in chain bookstores. The Thomas Bros., makers and sellers of those seminal Southern California map guides, once had stores in Los Angeles and in Long Beach — killed off by GPS and by a consequent public indifference to knowing all by yourself which way is north.
Beyond its Hollywood mother ship, Pickwick Books, in its flush years, operated branches in Canoga Park, Costa Mesa, San Diego, San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Montclair and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Dutton’s books reached readers in North Hollywood and Brentwood. The Martindale’s chain flourished in Century City, Santa Monica, the Wilshire District and in Beverly Hills, where its clientele was so flossy that the store carried Paris Match and an Arabian-horse magazine.
Fowler Brothers’ last move was to 7th Street, among the department stores and high-end shops. Fowler Brothers had sold books to Charles Lindbergh, Bobby Kennedy, John Philip Sousa, Irving Stone and of course Ray Bradbury. Marie Leong worked there for something like 25 years, full- and part time, and loved it partly because the owners were a family, and so was the feeling of the store; “when I wanted to do something with my daughter, like something at school, they’d let me come in late or leave early — so nice.”
Fowler Brothers’ location seemed ideal. Judges and jurors came in on their lunch breaks, as did workers in need of office supplies. Weekends, downtown was still a desert, but the weekdays were hopping. And then L.A. started digging up the street for a subway. Customers couldn’t navigate their way through the chaotic breaks in the street and stopped coming. The sidewalk out front collapsed from a construction leak. “My boss said, ‘I’ve had enough; we have to close this,’ ” Leong remembered. And in March 1994, that was the end. Ray Bradbury made a swan-song visit on the last day.
Online book shopping tends to herd you further and further down a rabbit hole of your known tastes and shopping habits. Wandering through a real bookstore promises the element of surprise, and lets you discover and cultivate interests you never knew you had.
A vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection shows the Spell occult bookstore in Torrance. Its Pacific Coast Highway address is today home to a strip mall with an Italian restaurant, a liquor store and a massage parlor.
Phil Mason ran a used bookshop on Western Avenue, marked by a distinctive red door. Magnificent Montague shopped there often, on the lookout to add to his enormous archive of black Americana books and ephemera. Montague was the Los Angeles R&B disc jockey whose joyous catchphrase for some especially fabulous recording was “Burn, baby, burn!” In 1965, young men and women took up Montague’s chant with a different meaning during the Watts riots.
Mason once assured me that he was the only registered monarchist on the L.A. County voter rolls. After he died, his books were sold off at a dollar each. I made two trips there, buying all that my yellow Civic hatchback could hold, and slowly driving my treasures home.
In Pasadena, there’s a boutique coffee place, part of a chain, where Prufrock Books once stood. As a poor student, I yearned after its treasures and still wonder what became of a book I coveted fiercely, one whose title I’ve forgotten but which had been signed by all of the Hollywood Ten.
As happens so often, just when something has almost vanished, we rediscover its virtues. So it promises to be these days, with new independent bookstores bursting upon us in Pasadena, Santa Monica, Highland Park. Barnes & Noble, originally the superstore scourge of independents, must be hoping for a joyous and prosperous welcome when it returns to Santa Monica next year.
It’s a delight to see all of these, of course, but the city can’t ever regain the deep bench of booksellers so many had before the Internet Age. Certainly since then, L.A. has registered often, by many metrics, as the biggest book-buying market in the nation, undented by the arch mockery from that 212 island.
We have serious readers now, as we had before — and we had the serious antiquarian bookshops for them and for serious collectors. In 1969, The Times described the ambience of Zeitlin and his partner’s legendary rare bookshop in a red barn on La Cienega as “that of a cathedral or a museum, or at least a temple for culture with a capital ‘c.’ ” Just a few years before he died, in 1987, Zeitlin sold 144 illuminated manuscripts, some dating to the 700s, to the Getty Museum for $30 million.
Their store names are still redolent of the aroma of fine books and manuscripts, of old paper and ink and leather on their vanished shelves: Caravan; Argonaut; Heritage; Aquarian Book Shop, the oldest Black bookstore in town. A few, like Heritage books and Michael R. Thompson, still do business, but by appointment only, on private premises.
And then we come to Dawson’s, once the oldest bookstore in the city. Michael Dawson is a third-generation Los Angeles bookseller from the celebrated antiquarian book and photography sellers. It’s been a family business since 1905, and still is, with appointment clients only since the Larchmont store closed in 2010. In those great ages of L.A. bookshops, “every bookseller sort of knew each other. There was the [Larry Edmunds] film bookshop [still on Hollywood Boulevard.] I worked for Heritage bookshop in the late ‘70s before they moved to La Cienega, then to Melrose, then closed. It was a very active community.”
Rare booksellers published catalogs of their treasures and sent them to their mailing lists of collectors. Collectors came to them with wish lists for the booksellers to track down.
A vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection shows Bethany Bookstore on Los Feliz Boulevard in Atwater Village. Today the building is home to an Indian restaurant and grocery.
And then, said Dawson: “The thing that was really hard for the out-of-print book trade was the advent of the internet.” Sites like AbeBooks made it easy for people who “were looking for books at the best possible price. That made bricks-and-mortar shops less competitive.” The online sellers didn’t have to factor in overhead or as many employees, for example.
In the pre-internet age, “that one book you wanted that was out of print, that you might have gone to Chevalier to find — now you can find a hundred copies online instantly and you pick the cheapest one.” Dawson’s got online early, “and for about two years there was an uptick in our business. We were selling about $15,000 a month.” Then came a downturn, as more people calling themselves booksellers appeared online — “You just need a room and a hundred books. The value of everything just declined.”
Even rare books declined in value, because they might not have been so rare after all. “Some things you thought were always going to hold their value, but you go online and you see 10 copies of something you used to consider rare,” he said.
Dawson’s buyers “were always more or less collectors,” who “really valued the book as an object, not just for information.” He hopes — just a hope, mind you — that there’s a glimmer of this in people who grew up with the internet as their bookstore. He hears anecdotally that “they are intrigued by the book as an object. They enjoy the tactility of it. They don’t just want an e-book.” Similar to the people buying vinyl records again.
But there just aren’t many shops like Dawson’s around for them anymore. “I have thoughts about 30 or 40 years from now, people would pay money — like a cigar bar — for a place where you could go sit in an armchair and take an 18th century book off the shelf, one bound in leather, with rag paper — and live the experience of being in a rare bookshop.”
For that is the kind of thing that a bookstore must offer these days to survive — like downtown’s Last Bookstore’s slumber parties: not just a book, but a book experience.
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John F. Kennedy took George Plimpton by surprise after a dinner party one evening when he pulled his friend aside for a word in the Oval Office. The president had Reconstruction on his mind—really, though, he wanted to discuss Plimpton’s grandmother.
Plimpton was lanky and lordly, famous for his patrician accent and his forays into professional sports. The Paris Review founder did everything and knew everyone. He might edit literary criticism one day and try his hand at football or boxing the next. Plimpton had known Jackie Kennedy for years, and he had been friends with Robert F. Kennedy since their Harvard days.
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He also had another, and very different, Kennedy connection. Plimpton’s great-grandfather Adelbert Ames, a New Englander, had been a Civil War general and Mississippi governor during Reconstruction. He was an ardent supporter of Black suffrage. Kennedy had soiled Ames’s reputation in his best-selling 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, which had won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the following year. The book ushered the junior senator from Massachusetts onto the national stage, effectively launching his bid for the presidency.
Kennedy’s book presented a pantheon of past U.S. senators as models of courageous compromise and political pragmatism. One such man, Kennedy claimed, was Ames’s racist Democratic rival, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II. A slaveholder, drafter of the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, and Confederate colonel, Lamar later became the first ex-Confederate appointed to the Supreme Court after the Civil War.
Lamar and Ames were the preeminent politicians of Mississippi Reconstruction. They hated each other. (At one point, Lamar threatened to lynch Ames.) Profiles in Courage had relied heavily on the work of influential Dunning School historians—disciples of the Columbia University professor William A. Dunning, who scorned Black suffrage and promoted the mythology of the Lost Cause. Kennedy may have been genuinely misled by these historians, but he also aspired to higher office and needed to appeal to white southern voters. His book denounced Reconstruction, casting Ames as a corrupt, carpetbagging villain and Lamar as a heroic southern statesman.
Ames’s daughter Blanche—Plimpton’s grandmother—was incensed. She sent meticulously researched letters to Kennedy, demanding that he correct his book. Some of the letters had footnotes. Some had appendixes. Blanche would not let up, chasing Kennedy from the Senate to the presidency.
In Plimpton’s telling, as Kennedy took his guests on an informal tour of the White House that evening, he motioned to Plimpton for a word. “George,” he said, as Plimpton would recall, “I’d like to talk to you about your grandmother.” Kennedy begged him to persuade Blanche Ames to stop writing, complaining that her correspondence “was cutting into the work of government.”
Plimpton promised to try, but he knew it would be no use. “My grandmother was a Massachusetts woman,” he later explained, and when Kennedy refused to amend Profiles, Blanche “did what any sensible Massachusetts woman would do: she sat down and wrote her own book.”
Blanche Ames wasborn in Massachusetts in 1878, the year after Reconstruction ended in a political deal that awarded Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, the disputed presidential election in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. Blanche had the Civil War in her blood. Benjamin F. Butler, a Union general, was her maternal grandfather; he had commanded Fort Monroe, in Virginia, and had designated fugitive slaves as “contraband of war,” using a legal loophole that allowed refugees to seek protection behind Union lines. He later became governor of Massachusetts. Adelbert Ames, her father, won the Medal of Honor at First Bull Run and fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. After serving as the military governor of Mississippi, Ames became the state’s senator and then its civilian governor. He was a champion of racial rights, embracing a personal “Mission with a large M ” to support Black citizens.
Blanche, too, was a principled fighter, willing to risk her social privilege for the causes that she championed. Adelbert encouraged his daughters to attend college. Blanche went to Smith, where she became class president. At commencement, she delivered a forceful address promoting women’s suffrage, with President William McKinley in the audience. Blanche helped spearhead the Massachusetts women’s-suffrage movement, working as a political cartoonist for Woman’s Journal. She founded the Massachusetts Birth Control League. Once, Blanche sauntered onto Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue carrying a hand-carved wooden penis to demonstrate proper condom use; she was arrested, but police released her after realizing she was the daughter of one governor and the granddaughter of another. “If she was a man,” one historian has observed, “there would be five books” about her already.
Blanche Ames Ames acquired her distinctive, double-barreled name upon marrying the prominent Harvard botanist Oakes Ames, who came from an unrelated dynastic strand of Ameses. A talented painter, Blanche illustrated some of Oakes’s books about orchids. The Ames mansion at Borderland, their 1,200-acre estate outside Boston, was built entirely of stone to ensure that the library—the filming location for the 2019 movie Knives Out—would be fireproof. Adelbert Ames’s and Benjamin Butler’s Civil War–era swords can still be seen in the foyer. George Plimpton once used one to cut a cake at an anniversary party.
Profiles in Courage roused Blanche from her Borderland retirement. Eight decades had elapsed since the end of Reconstruction. The modern civil-rights movement was gaining momentum, with its promise of a second Reconstruction. Kennedy was not only taking the wrong side, but he was doing so by maligning Blanche’s father:
No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator and then Governor … [admitted] that only his election to the Senate prompted him to take up his residence in Mississippi. He was chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves and radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets … Taxes increased to a level fourteen times as high as normal in order to support the extravagances of the reconstruction government.
Lamar, meanwhile, was cast as a “statesman” for whom “no partisan, personal or sectional considerations could outweigh his devotion to the national interest and to the truth”—a selfless patriot who had helped reconcile the nation.
The truth of the matter was very different. Reconstruction-era Mississippi under Ames’s leadership arguably held more political promise for newly enfranchised Black people than any other southern state. Before the Civil War, Mississippi had contained some of the richest counties in the nation, but most Mississippians—some 55 percent—were enslaved. After the war, Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union. But the new state constitution worked to overturn the Black Codes—laws designed to limit the rights of newly freed African Americans—and Mississippi’s Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce became the country’s first Black senators. Ames himself shared his gubernatorial ticket with three Black candidates.
Democrats swept the 1874 national midterm elections in what the historian Eric Foner has called a “repudiation of Reconstruction.” Mississippi Democrats saw an opportunity: By seizing control of the legislature in upcoming state elections, they could pass measures that would essentially end Black suffrage. The year 1875 became a struggle between Ames, the elected governor, and Lamar, who was then in Congress. Ames’s administration had the support of Black voters. Lamar, meanwhile, embraced the so-called Mississippi Plan, which aimed to disrupt a legitimate election, by force if necessary. Lamar insisted that the Democrats had to win control of the state legislature to ensure the “supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race.” On Election Day, paramilitary terrorists called White Liners obstructed polling places, destroyed ballot boxes, and threatened to kill Black citizens who voted, as the journalist Nicholas Lemann has written in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Counties that were once overwhelmingly Republican saw the Republican vote drop to single digits. “A revolution has taken place,” Ames wrote to his wife, prophesying a bleak future for Mississippi. “A race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to … an era of second slavery.”
Democrats, elected by terrorism and led by Lamar, now threatened Ames with impeachment. They accused him of financial impropriety—including the high taxes that Profiles decried—despite his administration’s relative frugality. To avoid impeachment, Ames resigned and fled the state. A U.S. Senate committee investigated the Mississippi elections and produced a 2,000-page document known as the “Boutwell Report.” It concluded that Ames was blameless and that his resignation had been forced “by measures unauthorized by law.” No matter: Ames’s reputation lay in tatters.
The following year, during the presidential deadlock, Lamar helped broker the Compromise of 1877, which gave Hayes the presidency over Samuel Tilden in exchange for the return of “home rule”—rule by white-supremacist Democrats—to the South, effectively destroying national Reconstruction.
Profiles in Courageevades easy categorization. It is a historical work, written by a political team, heavily assisted by historians, and published for political gain. The book features eight senators, strategically distributed across time, space, and party. Five of the profiles focus on questions of slavery, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, and none of the featured senators took a progressive approach to Black rights. Three, including Lamar, were slaveholders. Questions about authorship arose early: Kennedy’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was rumored to be the true author. (He did, in fact, write most of the book.) Archival drafts reveal that the Georgetown University history professor Jules Davids helped overhaul the Mississippi chapter. The book’s historical vision, though, came from Kennedy.
Historians in recent years have acknowledged that the real problem with Profiles is not authorship but substance. As a critic, Blanche Ames got there first. Her personal copy of the book, a first edition, overflows with annotations. She drew arrows and corkscrew question marks around the paragraph about her father, her anger visible on the page. When Kennedy insisted that Lamar had written Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession only after losing hope that “the South could obtain justice in the Federal Union,” Blanche thundered in the margins: “Lamar had sown the seed in 1861. He was sowing it again in 1874.”
In June 1956, Blanche sent a nine-page letter to Senator Kennedy, introducing herself as his friend Plimpton’s grandmother and urging “corrections of errata for your own sake as well as mine.” She recognized diplomatically that, “in a work as ambitious as ‘Profiles in Courage’ … there are bound to be some viewpoints to arouse controversy.” Nevertheless, she argued, ambition did not excuse historical inaccuracy.
Kennedy replied the next month. He was cordial, admitting that Reconstruction was “one of the most difficult sections” to write, not because of lack of material, but because of an abundance of “emotion-packed and strongly partisan” readings. It was a politician’s apology, suffused with qualifiers. He insisted that he had relied on “reputable authorities,” but granted that “it is possible, of course, that in so doing a particular individual or incident is slighted or inadequately or inaccurately described.” He added, “If such is the case in connection with my mention of your father … I am indeed sorry.” He assured Blanche that her message “succeeded in stimulating me to further research,” but warned that he did not expect Profiles to be reprinted, so there would be no correction.
Kennedy did, in fact, do further research. According to Plimpton, during that Oval Office conversation after the dinner party, Kennedy asked Plimpton what he knew about his great-grandfather, apparently eager to demonstrate his own knowledge. He reenacted how Ames would inspect his Civil War soldiers and shout “For God’s sake, draw up your bowels!,” causing White House personnel to burst in, worried by the uproar. The president had found this obscure detail in an equally obscure book, The Twentieth Maine, which was published a year after Profiles.
But between 1956 and 1963, Profiles was reprinted more than 30 times. Kennedy did not change his account of Adelbert Ames and L. Q. C. Lamar.
Kennedy’s intransigence only fueled Blanche’s campaign. She forwarded her letters to Harper & Brothers, giving the publisher “the first opportunity” to rectify where Profiles in Courage “falls short of the Code of Historians.” The publisher declined, claiming that too much time had elapsed for readers to be able to understand any corrections. Blanche combed through Kennedy’s acknowledgments and wrote to the professors who assisted with drafting or editing Profiles, hoping that the historians might put pressure on him.
They did not. There is no evidence that Davids, architect of the Lamar chapter, ever bothered to reply. Allan Nevins, at Columbia, backpedaled, claiming that the introduction he had written for Profiles “carried no endorsement of all details … I am sure the Senator will make correction where correction is proper.” Arthur Holcombe, at Harvard, patronizingly suggested that Blanche had “misunderstood Senator Kennedy’s meaning.” Some of these academic historians may simply not have taken Blanche seriously: She was old, she was a woman, and she lacked scholarly credentials.
Blanche contacted a second circle of scholars, seeking a historian “free from bias” who might serve as an impartial biographer of Adelbert Ames. She steeped herself in the historiography of Reconstruction, coming to understand how closely Profiles followed the neo-Confederate historians Wirt Armistead Cate and Edward Mayes. “Cate copies Mayes and Kennedy copies Cate,” she wrote to the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. “Now, unless corrected, modern and future historians may copy Kennedy! This method of writing history leads around in circles of quotations of half-truths. It is a false method.”
Morison suggested a few military scholars as potential Ames biographers, but mainly recommended “Negro historians” such as John Hope Franklin, Rayford Logan, and Alrutheus Ambush Taylor. “Adelbert Ames’ career as Governor was, I believe, more important than his military career,” Morison reasoned, “and he was the champion of the Negroes.” Blanche contacted a host of prominent academics, including C. Vann Woodward, whose books had criticized the Dunning School and challenged the myth that Reconstruction governments with Black elected officials were simply incompetent or ignorant. The Profiles team had paid no attention to this scholarship. Despite her efforts, no historian would commit to the project. So Blanche resolved to write a biography of Adelbert Ames herself.
Borderland became Blanche’s archive and fortress while she spent six years—1957 to 1963—researching and writing. When her granddaughter Olivia Hoblitzelle visited Borderland, she marveled at the piles of Civil War maps and books in the library. On one trip, Hoblitzelle recalled, her father asked, “How long is it now?” “Five hundred pages,” Blanche replied. When Hoblitzelle’s father asked, “Isn’t that enough?,” Blanche “looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘Well, if Tolstoy could do it, so can I.’ ” When she finished, she was 86 years old.
Blanche’s research drew significantly on the work of Black historians, who had been publishing trenchant studies of Reconstruction for decades. White historians had largely ignored this work, dismissing it as second-class scholarship. Blanche thought otherwise. Her bibliography cited W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Franklin’s The Militant South, John Lynch’s The Facts of Reconstruction, Merl Eppse’s The Negro, Too, in American History, and George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America. Kennedy, meanwhile, had not cited a single Black author on Mississippi Reconstruction.
The stakes, Blanche believed, included not only her father’s reputation but the very meaning of Reconstruction. Her final chapter, “Integrity and History,” is a scathing condemnation of the traditional Reconstruction historiography Kennedy had parroted. Throughout the book, she linked Adelbert Ames’s promotion of racial rights in the 1870s with the modern civil-rights movement—the second Reconstruction:
In this fateful year of 1963, our Congress has a unique opportunity with its overwhelming Democratic majorities … Congress seems to hold the practical power to do away with the disgraceful suppression of Negro suffrage rights … A hundred years has been too long to wait for application of these long-standing laws of equity.
Blanche Ames’s book was published at the worst possible moment. In September 1963, she finished correcting page proofs for Adelbert Ames, 1835–1933: General, Senator, Governor. The book was lovingly bound in Sundour cloth and stamped in gold. It sold for $12.50, about $120 today—an old-fashioned, costly volume. Kennedy’s mass-produced paperback, meanwhile, sold for less than a dollar. On November 22, 1963, as Blanche’s book was going to press, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy in Dallas.
With the president’s tragic death, Profiles in Courage got a second life, landing back on the New York Times best-seller list. As Americans evaluated Kennedy’s legacy, his prizewinning book seemed a natural place to start. A televised adaptation of Profiles had been in production at NBC before Kennedy’s death. At that time, Blanche had urged Kennedy to use television as an opportunity to “bring your views into accord with the trend of modern historical interpretation of the Reconstruction Period.” After the assassination, the network pressed ahead, framing the series as “one of the finest living memorials to President Kennedy.” But Blanche may have gotten through to Kennedy’s team in the end, at least as far as the television series: When it premiered, a year after Kennedy’s death, the planned segment on Lamar had been quietly dropped. It was the only original profile not to be featured on television.
But there was still the book. Blanche wrote to Sorensen in early 1964, trying to strike a tone of mutual interest: “Must we not find a way of correcting these obvious misstatements inadvertently restated by President Kennedy? Otherwise they will be perpetuated with greater force than ever, and I do not believe that he would have wished this. Do you?” There is no record that Sorensen replied.
Blanche lived to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Born a year after the end of the first Reconstruction, she was able to witness the start of the second. But when she died at Borderland, in 1969, a belittling New York Times headline read: “MRS. OAKES AMES, BOTANIST’S WIDOW; Illustrator of Her Husband’s Works on Orchids Dies.” Despite Blanche’s best efforts, her book sold only a few thousand copies.
In 2010, a few years before efforts to remove Confederate monuments gained traction across the country, a life-size statue of Lamar was erected outside his former home in Oxford, Mississippi. The L. Q. C. Lamar House Museum’s public-outreach efforts generally commemorate Lamar not as a white supremacist or an architect of the Mississippi Plan, but as the embodiment of Kennedy’s redemptive arc: “Southern secessionist to American statesman,” as the museum describes it. Ames is not mentioned at all; Profiles is highlighted throughout the museum.
In 1980, George Plimpton donated a copy of Blanche’s book to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. “President Kennedy would know,” he said, “that a Massachusetts woman will eventually have her way.” But Blanche Ames Ames has not had her way quite yet. At the library’s gift shop, visitors can buy a 50th-anniversary edition of Profiles in Courage, published in 2006, with an introduction by Caroline Kennedy. The book has never been corrected.
This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “Kennedy and the Lost Cause.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
For some people, retirement is a long-awaited chance to sleep late, relax and celebrate the joys of life without pressure or deadlines.
For others, it’s an opportunity to finally get to work.
California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age — and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.
Within a span of a few days, I heard about two retirees who had long dreamed of becoming authors, but their jobs kept getting in the way. Then they pulled the cord, hit the keyboard and never looked back.
I was on the phone one day with former L.A. Times columnist and editor Bill Boyarsky, and when I asked about his wife, Nancy, he gloated. Her seventh novel had just been published, he said, and she was already working on her eighth.
Then I heard from L.A. County Superior Court Judge Kelvin Filer, who was talking up his brother, Duane. “He actually wrote a book documenting his first year of retirement,” the judge said. Before he excused himself with “I have to get back to my murder trial,” he added that his brother has since written several other books.
I hear fairly often from people who use retirement to chase dreams. Some set out to learn an instrument or a new language or two. Others turn volunteering into second careers. But I probably hear from more aspiring writers than any other group of people setting out to reinvent themselves.
In her writing room, Nancy Boyarsky is surrounded by her own paintings.
Boyarsky toils in a back room drenched in natural light, her cat Roxy at her side. She was a reader as a child and a fan of Jane Austen. At UC Berkeley, she took a creative writing class, “but the teacher didn’t think much of my short stories.” She recalls “a condescending smile” and a stabbing suggestion that the writing life was not for her.
And yet she went on to make a living at a typewriter, banging out articles for various publications including the L.A. Times magazine, and she was an editor for a magazine called “L.A. Lawyer. She co-authored a book called “Backroom Politics” with Bill and spent the last 18 years of her career as ARCO’s director of communications for political affairs.
While still at ARCO, Boyarsky took some writing courses at UCLA and began working on a novel called “The Swap.” The protagonist is a Los Angeles housewife who discovers on a trip to England that her husband is a cheat and that her life is in danger, a realization that transforms the “browbeaten housewife” into an enterprising private detective.
A small publishing house called Light Messages reached out to Nancy Boyarsky, saying it wanted to re-publish “The Swap” and asking the writer if she could turn her heroine into a serial sleuth.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
But when Boyarsky retired in 1998, she discovered, as so many writers have, that getting a book published is a tough racket, with your odds of success roughly similar to your chance of winning the Powerball lottery.
“I got an agent, and he sent it out to publishers, and they rejected it,” Boyarsky said.
A freelance editor suggested a major rewrite. Boyarsky did not agree, and she kept pursuing agents and publishers without success before putting the dream in a drawer and taking up painting. Her house is filled with her work, including impressive portraits and botanical art.
But Boyarsky hadn’t entirely given up. In 2013, she took advantage of a growing trend and self-published on Amazon.
“Mary Higgins Clark meets London … ’The Swap’ contributes to the women-driven mystery field with panache,” one magazine critic raved.
“I was thrilled,” Boyarsky said, and the news got better.
A small North Carolina publishing house called Light Messages reached out to say it wanted to re-publish “The Swap,” and Boyarsky was asked if she could turn her heroine into a serial sleuth. Seven Nicole Graves mysteries are now in print, and Boyarsky is hammering out the eighth while Bill, also a prolific author, works in another room on his next book.
Light Messages edits, designs, distributes and markets the Nicole Graves books on a small budget, with Boyarsky getting a percentage of sales. (“The Swap” has more than 2,000 customer reviews and a four-star rating on Amazon.) Boyarsky said she made several thousand dollars on that one, less on the others, and she wouldn’t advise book-writing for anyone looking to get rich.
But clearly, that Berkeley professor was clueless, and Boyarsky keeps writing — for love, if not for money.
Duane Lance Filer, 71, sits in the room he calls the “fffunk Lab,” where he has written nine novels. Images of Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone inspire him.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Duane Lance Filer had a bit of a different start. Rather than being told the writing game wasn’t for him, he got nothing but encouragement from his Black history teacher at Compton High School.
“Mr. Taylor,” Filer said. “Alvin Taylor. He said, ‘Pursue your dreams.’”
With that, and inspiration from the civil rights activism of his parents — Maxcy and Blondell Filer— Filer majored in political science at Cal Lutheran and wrote short stories there, joining the Watts Writers Workshop after college. Like a majority of aspiring writers, Filer had a day job, and for the last 29 years of his working life he was in the consumer affairs division of the California Public Utilities Commission, handling customer complaints.
After retiring in 2013, Duane Lance Filer spent a year writing abreezy book called “The Baby Boomers First-Hand, First-Year Guide to Retirement.”
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Toward the end of that career he wrote his first book, a semi-autobiographical novel about an aspiring young Black writer growing up in a changing Compton, a witness to white flight during the civil rights movement. Then, after retiring in 2013, he spent a year writing abreezy book called “The Baby Boomers First-Hand, First-Year Guide to Retirement.”
Filer didn’t miss the train rides to and from work. There was lots of vacuuming and cleaning to be done, and he often shopped and prepared dinner for his wife, who was still working. There were some ups and some downs, but no regrets about retiring. On Day 365, Filer entered his writing den — he calls it the fffunklab; the three Fs stand for “Filer Family Fun”—to pen the final words of his guide while listening to Etta James sing “At Last.”
The fffunk lab, by the way, is where I visited Filer. He’s carved out the space in a corner of the garage, with images of Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone surrounding him. He wore faded, patched jeans and a George Clinton Funkadelic T-shirt, calling himself an unreformed hippie. In a family of lawyers and educators — son Lance is an attorney, daughter Arinn is an assistant principal, wife Janice is a professor and retired principal — Filer is all about music (he plays bass guitar), art (he paints), and words.
A portrait of Duke Ellington rests behind a Stratocaster guitar in Duane Lance Filer’s writing den.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The fffunk lab is a supremely cluttered cave of sports and family memorabilia, along with the tributes to his favorite musicians. The desktop computer, on which the funkmaster has now written nine books, sits in one corner. He’s penned several children’s books and a novella called “The Legend of Diddley Squatt,” loosely inspired by the life of the late comedian Richard Pryor, who grew up in a brothel. Filer is now working on a sequel, his 10th book, and a screenplay about his father’s life.
The only fly in the punch bowl is that despite his dogged efforts, Filer has no agent and no traditional publisher. He has self-published, paying different companies to print and distribute his books, hoping to recover the investment through sales.
“I usually send out between 50 and 100 query letters with each book,” Filer said.
The lack of response has not deterred him one iota. He sat in on some writing classes at nearby Cal State Dominguez Hills several years ago and keeps the dream alive, noting that his father took the state bar exam over and over again — literally dozens of times — before finally passing.
Perseverance, he tells himself. Perseverance.
After retiring from the California Public Utilities Commission in 2013, Duane Filer decided to start writing books. He is currently finishing his 10th.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
He takes his morning walk while listening to his favorite music, reaching deep for inspiration. Then he enters the fffunklab, subjecting himself to the joys and cruelties of creative endeavor.
“I love to write, and here’s the thing: None of my books make any money, or, I haven’t made a lot of money,” Filer said. “But I don’t care. At some point, my little grandson can say, ‘Oh, you never gave up.’ I will never stop writing. … I think this next book is going to be my best one.”
At a July hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Republican members focused on social media companies’ moderation of largely conservative viewpoints and accused the Biden administration of working hand-in-hand with tech companies to censor critics.
The First Amendment generally restricts the actions of the government and not purely private decisions of companies. A spirited, and unsettled, debate is emerging nationwide as to the extent of government pressure on platforms that should render a moderation decision a First Amendment violation.
But some members of the Weaponization Subcommittee sought to minimize the concerns about moderation without engaging in a nuanced discussion about government pressure, or “jawboning.”
“I’m an attorney by training, and one of the things I learned very early on in constitutional law is that no right given to the people of the United States is absolute,” Rep. Linda Sánchez (D–Calif.) said when asking a witness about the harms of health misinformation. “And that includes the right to free speech because you do not have the right to shout fire in a crowded theater, because it could produce harm and death of people by being false.”
Fire in a crowded theater. If you’re discussing whether U.S. law should protect allegedly false speech, there is a good chance that someone will say these five words. That person likely wants the government to regulate harmful speech and justifies it by pointing out that the U.S. Supreme Court said that you can never yell “fire” in a crowded theater.
Like much of the speech that those invoking “fire in a crowded theater” are trying to prohibit, the statement is incorrect because sometimes you could yell “fire” in a crowded theater without facing punishment. The theater may actually be on fire. Or you may reasonably believe that the theater is on fire. Or you are singing in a concert, and “fire” is one of your lyrics. Of course, there are scenarios in which intentionally lying about a fire in a crowded theater and causing a stampede might lead to a disorderly conduct citation or similar charge.
The real problem with the “fire in a crowded theater” discourse is that it too often is used as a placeholder justification for regulating any speech that someone believes is harmful or objectionable. In reality, the Supreme Court has defined narrow categories of speech that are exempt from First Amendment protections and set an extraordinarily high bar for imposing liability for other types of speech. As the Supreme Court wrote in 2010, the United States does not have a “free-floating test for First Amendment coverage,” and the free speech protections do not “extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits.”
“Fire in a crowded theater” is a derivative of a line in a 1919 Supreme Court opinion, Schenck v. United States, an appeal by a Socialist Party official of his conviction for distributing leaflets that criticized the military draft as a 13th Amendment violation. The Court unanimously rejected his appeal, reasoning that the First Amendment’s protections yield to a “clear and present danger” such as the leaflet. Writing for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that the “most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
The crowded theater scenario was a hypothetical to support a low-burden “clear and present danger” test and the conviction of a military draft critic. Although the Supreme Court has never had the occasion to adjudicate an actual dispute involving a person yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, the Court did at least narrow its “clear and present danger test” in 1969, setting a higher standard for imminent incitement of lawless action.
Yet the “fire in a crowded theater” enthusiasts persist, and they use the hypothetical to justify regulating a wide swath of harmful or objectionable speech without seriously evaluating the unintended consequences of giving the government more censorial power. Just as you cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater, they argue, you can’t say insert false speech here.
But you often can utter or publish a falsehood without a regulator or court having the power to intervene, thanks to a long history of free speech precedent. These rights have not contracted; if anything, courts and legislators have expanded protections for false speech over the years. Of course, U.S. law does not protect all false speech. If a plaintiff meets the many stringent requirements for proving defamation, the defendant may be liable for damages. Regulators may oversee the claims that companies make about their products. Prosecutors may charge defendants with fraud, lying to government officials, and other crimes arising from false statements. There are even scenarios in which lying about a fire in a crowded theater could lead to liability. But the standards for holding speakers liable for false statements are high.
But such nuance is often absent in today’s discussions of free speech. After mentioning the crowded theater, Sánchez confirmed with the witness that social media platforms have policies regarding health misinformation. “We are not trying to censor speech,” Sánchez said. “We are simply trying to create factually correct information to prevent harm to people, including death, and that’s what they were trying to do during COVID.”
But alleged misinformation is speech. While some speech undisputedly can be regulated, the Supreme Court has explicitly rejected a broad exception for false speech. Invoking the crowded theater will not magically create an avenue for unchecked censorship.
The concerns about false speech have driven many commentators and politicians to propose new laws that would penalize at least some types of false statements that have long received legal protection. For many of the same reasons that courts and legislatures have protected falsehoods for centuries, imposing broad new “misinformation” laws would be stifling, ripe for abuse, inefficient, and largely inconsistent with the U.S. legal system’s approach to false speech.
***
Among the most notable of such recent proposals came from Gov. Jay Inslee on the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. The Washington state Democrat issued a press release that touted his support for “legislation currently being written that would outlaw attempts by candidates and elected officials to spread lies about free and fair elections when it has the likelihood to stoke violence.” State lawmakers, he said in the statement, were drafting a bill that would create a gross misdemeanor for elected officials or political candidates in Washington state who tell knowing lies about elections.
“The proposed law is narrowly tailored to capture only those false statements that are made for the purpose of undermining the election process or results and is further limited to lies that are likely to incite or cause lawlessness,” Inslee said. Inslee appeared to rely on Brandenburg v. Ohio, the 1969 case that refined the Schenck v. United States “clear and present danger” test that Holmes articulated in 1919. “The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that speech can be limited where it is likely to incite lawlessness,” Inslee’s press release stated. But the statement did not capture the narrowness of the Brandenburg opinion. In that ruling, the Court wrote that the First Amendment prohibits state regulation of advocacy unless that advocacy “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Inslee’s press release omitted any mention of an imminence requirement. As First Amendment scholar and Volokh Conspiracy blogger Eugene Volokh told Reason, imminence is a high bar. An example of imminent lawless action, Volokh said, is “standing outside a police station and yelling ‘burn it down.’” Claiming fraudulent election results, Volokh said, is not incitement.
Therein was the problem with Inslee’s initial proposal. While it was well-intentioned and arose from a legitimate desire to prevent a repeat of the unrest at the Capitol, Inslee could not easily explain how a politician’s lie about election administration rose to the level of imminent incitement of lawless action.
Throughout January 2022, Inslee tried to justify the proposal as constitutional and urgently necessary. At an event on the day of his announcement, which took place as former President Donald Trump continued to contest the election results, Inslee resorted to a comfortable and censorious metaphor. “The defeated president as recently as an hour ago is yelling fire in the crowded theater of democracy,” Inslee said. But no amount of references to fires or crowds or theaters could justify jailing politicians just because their speech was found to be untrue.
Perhaps in response to the criticism that Inslee’s announcement received, lawmakers over the next few weeks consulted legal scholars and released a revised version of the bill. The proposal begins with legislative findings that contain bold statements about Washington state’s election integrity. The bill would create a gross misdemeanor, punishable by up to 364 days in jail, for any elected official or candidate who “knowingly, recklessly, or maliciously makes false statements or claims related to any pending or completed and certified election conducted in the state, regarding the legitimacy or integrity of the election process or election results,” provided that the false speech: (1) is “intended to incite or produce imminent lawless action and do incite or produce such action resulting in harm to a person or to property”; (2) is “made for the purpose of undermining the election process or the election results”; or (3) “falsely claim[s] entitlement to an office that an elected official or candidate did not win after any lawful challenge made pursuant to this title is completed and the election results are certified.”
To the credit of those who drafted the revised bill, they at least tried to hew more closely to the language of Brandenburg than Inslee did in his press release. But even the narrower language—tying the false statements to imminent lawless action—was not guaranteed to survive constitutional scrutiny. And the revised bill covered two other types of false speech that were unrelated to the Brandenburg standard.
At a January 28, 2022, hearing on the bill, then–state Sen. David Frockt (D–Seattle), the bill’s primary sponsor, discussed the delicate balancing act that was required to address election lies while adhering to United States v. Alvarez, Brandenburg, and other First Amendment precedents. “It’s kind of like trying to drive a toaster through a car wash,” Frockt said. “You have to get it just right. And so we do not take the First Amendment for granted. I don’t. We don’t treat it cavalierly.” Others who testified were more skeptical both about the bill’s constitutionality and its potential impacts.
Paul Guppy, vice president for research of the conservative Washington Policy Center think tank, pointed to the state’s close 2004 gubernatorial election, which required a recount that lasted more than a month. “That was exactly a time period when we needed the maximum open and transparent debate of different opinions about what was happening with that election than ever,” Guppy said. “If this bill had been in effect, public officials and candidates would have been restricted or chilled or fearful about what they could say about that election.” The bill could undermine its primary goal, Guppy said. “It doesn’t increase the confidence in the outcome of the election,” he said. “It actually creates more suspicion when people are not allowed to debate the outcome of elections honestly.”
The opposition was substantial enough to prevent the bill from passing. A few weeks after the hearing, Frockt issued a statement acknowledging that the proposal would not progress in the legislature in 2022.
***
(Photo: sidewaysdesign/iStock)
Had the bill passed, would it have survived a constitutional challenge? It is hard to predict with certainty. The revised bill at least attempted to address First Amendment concerns by mimicking the Brandenburg imminent incitement standard. While adding the Brandenburg language increases the chances of the law surviving First Amendment challenges, it also reduces the number of scenarios in which the government could hold a politician accountable for lying about election integrity.
In a 1973 opinion, Hess v. Indiana, the U.S. Supreme Court highlighted the narrowness of the Brandenburg exception that it had articulated four years earlier. The case involved an antiwar protest at Indiana University. After police began clearing the street, the defendant said something like “We’ll take the fucking street later” and was arrested for disorderly conduct. The Supreme Court reversed his conviction, finding that the Brandenburg exception did not apply. “Since the uncontroverted evidence showed that [the defendant’s] statement was not directed to any person or group of persons, it cannot be said that he was advocating, in the normal sense, any action,” the Court wrote. “And since there was no evidence, or rational inference from the import of the language, that his words were intended to produce, and likely to produce, imminent disorder, those words could not be punished by the State on the ground that they had a tendency to lead to violence.”
Even with the Brandenburg language, the Washington law still might face First Amendment problems. A politician challenging the law might argue that the uncertainty about what constitutes imminent incitement would chill a wider swath of constitutionally protected speech. A politician who has legitimate concerns about how an election was administered may understandably refrain from saying anything to avoid even the prospect of being prosecuted and sentenced to up to a year in prison. Even though the prosecution would face a high burden of proving all elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, it is not inconceivable that a politically biased judge could sway a guilty verdict. Even if they were not ultimately convicted, they would need to spend substantial time and money defending the case. Perhaps it is more attractive to not say anything about their concerns.
Nor does the bill’s limitation to knowing, malicious, or reckless falsehoods directed toward particular goals eliminate concerns of a chilling effect, as illustrated in the 8th Circuit’s opinion in 281 Care Committee v. Arneson. In striking down a Minnesota law that criminalized intentional falsehoods about ballot questions, the court rejected the argument that limiting the misdemeanor to intentional falsehoods avoided constitutional problems. “The risk of chilling otherwise protected speech is not eliminated or lessened by the mens rea requirement because, as we have already noted, a speaker might still be concerned that someone will file a complaint with the [Office of Administrative Hearings], or that they might even ultimately be prosecuted, for a careless false statement or possibly a truthful statement someone deems false, no matter the speaker’s veracity,” the court wrote. “Or, most cynically, many might legitimately fear that no matter what they say, an opponent will utilize [the law] to simply tie them up in litigation and smear their name or position on a particular matter, even if the speaker never had the intent required to render him liable.”
Even if the Washington bill were somehow found to comport with the First Amendment, I question whether it would meet its goals of instilling further confidence in elections and preventing repeats of the January 6 violence. The mere presence of the law on Washington state’s books might make some segments of the public more skeptical of the state’s elections procedures, perhaps fueling speculation that politicians might be aware of problems but stay quiet out of fear of jail time. This would not be an unreasonable worry; after all, they might think, why would Washington state need to threaten politicians with jail time if its elections actually were secure?
It is far from certain that such a law would substantially reduce the most harmful false speech about elections. Trump and some other elected officials spread false claims about the 2020 elections, but they were not the only ones. Washington state’s proposed law does not (and could not) regulate false speech spread by talk radio hosts, social media trolls, foreign governments, and others.
The opposition to and failure of Washington state’s proposal reveals the many difficulties of addressing falsehoods through legal penalties. First Amendment precedent guides the legal analysis, but even if it survived a constitutional challenge, the law would reveal many practical problems in effectively regulating false speech. All the reasons for allowing falsehoods apply to arguments against new misinformation regulations. Censorial new laws threaten to chill the ability of people to express criticism of those in power. They also reduce the ability of speakers to shine light on public functions such as the elections system. And it’s unclear whether they are effective.
You would think a guy as well-dressed as Spider-Man might quit while he’s ahead, but no: If there’s one thing we know about the web-spinner, it’s that he loves nothing more than changing costumes as frequently and fabulously as a Super Bowl halftime show. Some of the game’s suits are original, some harken back to Spider-Man’s history in comics and other media, and all of them range from cool, to iconic, to downright quizzical.
In the interest of our educated readership, Polygon is providing you with this reference guide to the many outfits of Spider-Man 2, along with handy background on the stories and moments that inspired them.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for all suits in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. If you’re the kind of player who wants to be surprised by the costumes and abilities you’ll encounter, consider yourself warned. If you want to know how to get them in the game, read our guide to unlocking all the suits in Spider-Man 2.]
The Amazing Fashions of Peter Parker
Advanced Suit and Advanced Suit 2.0
Five years after the debut of Insomniac’s first Spider-Man game, the default Spider-Man costume (a higher-tech, armor-textured variation on the classic comic book design) has become an institution in itself. For their sequel, Insomniac has upgraded the look and technology of the costume ever so slightly, giving it a brighter, slimmer, and more streamlined appearance.
Amazing and Amazing 2 Suit
Both of these costumes are adapted from the suits Andrew Garfield wore in the two Amazing Spider-Man movies. While the first is a fairly dramatic departure from the standard Spidey style that leans heavily into texturing and rubbery realism, its later replacement hews much closer to the look and feel of Peter’s usual threads.
Anti-Ock Suit
A rerun from the previous game, the Anti-Ock suit is specially designed (and aptly named) to combat Doctor Octopus, whose tentacles Peter realizes can be controlled by the neural interface he himself designed. In other words, you can shut down his arms, and slap the Doc silly.
Anti-Venom Suit
Designed by artist John Romita, Jr. and created by writer Dan Slott for Marvel Comics in 2008, Anti-Venom is what happens when an alien symbiote receives the touch of Mr. Negative, turning its colors in reverse, and giving it appropriately toxic effects against other symbiote enemies. In the original comics, it was OG Venom Eddie Brock who took on the new identity; here, it’s Peter himself who receives the dubious gift.
Arachknight Suit
A mashup of Spider-Man and the slightly-unhinged-multiple-identity-hero Moon Knight, the Arachknight was a goofy product of the 2018 Infinity Warp comic event, which imagined a variety of offbeat alternate universes that played Madlibs with Marvel characters. The design and ethos, by Spider-artist Humberto Ramos, has been ported over to the game this time around.
Black and Gold Suit
First appearing in the game Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, this variation on the Stark suit is a bulkier, clunker, and more fully equipped tech suit for Peter.
Classic Black Suit/Black Suit
Designed by artist Mike Zeck way back in 1984’s Secret Wars comic book event, this look has become a staple for the Spider-Man mythos, being the distinctive look of the alien symbiote that becomes Peter’s erstwhile replacement outfit. In Spider-Man 2, what begins as (apparently) a simple suit of black threads gradually takes on more powerful and alarming implications depending on the jerkiness of Peter’s behavior, which activates his latent symbiote tendencies.
Classic Suit
An icon. A legend. A Steve Ditko original. Accept no substitutes.
Homemade Suit
Also appearing in the previous Insomniac game, this sweatshirt-based ensemble is modeled on the initial costume worn by Tom Holland in the MCU’s Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming. As the name implies, it’s a thrown-together dry run Peter creates before he gets access to his real-deal Spider-Man outfit.
Hybrid Suit
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Entertainment
Another MCU-inspired design, this one hails from 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. Built using nanites from Doc Ock’s tentacles, it’s among the higher-tech variations of the various Peter costumes.
Into the Spider-Verse Noir Suit
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Entertainment
Based initially on Marco Djurdjevic’s design for the comics, this is the suit of the alternate-reality Spider-Man who lives in a shadowed world of dingy streets, femmes fatale, and mysteries within mysteries. The particular design seen here is the sleeker, hatted variation used in 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse animated film.
Iron Spider Suit/Iron Spider Armor Suit
Designed by artist and Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada for the 2007 Civil War comic series, the Iron Spider was Peter’s very first Stark-designed and weaponized tech suit, which he wore before running afoul of Stark and his cronies in the aforementioned series. The costume has since been seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and various cartoon adaptations, before appearing in both of the Insomniac games as an unlockable suit.
Kumo Suit
The Japanese word for “spider,” this suit has an appropriately ninja-esque vibe, and is original to this Insomniac sequel.
Last Hunt Suit
Here we have Peter cosplaying as his nemesis Kraven the Hunter, whose Steve Ditko-designed suit is refashioned into gold-plated, leather-pants-ed, and fur-stole-ed fabulousness. Sadly, laser nipples are not included.
Life Story Suit
The 2019 comic series Spider-Man: Life Story imagined the career of Spider-Man as if it were told in real-time, with Peter aging and progressing through the decades since his debut in 1962. This suit, one of several appearing in that mini, was designed especially for space-themed adventures, which explains the astronaut headgear.
New Blue Suit
It’s new. It’s blue. It’s got a spider emblem in a tiny little circle on the chest. What more does anyone need?
New Red and Blue Suit
Obviously modeled closely on the classic design, this variation sports a shinier and more textured look, and has a spider-emblem reminiscent of the MCU design worn in the earlier Tom Holland films.
Saving Lives Suit
With its purple highlights and angular eyes, this suit has a look reminiscent of the John Romita-designed Prowler costume, which first made its debut in the comics way back in 1969.
Scarlet III Suit
A comic-inspired costume, this was actually the second Scarlet Spider outfit worn by spider-clone Ben Reilly. Its debut in 2017 proved so unpopular with fans that it was rapidly phased out and replaced with…
Scarlet Spider Suit
…this bad boy. A homespun outfit fashioned out of a hoodie, this extremely ’90s bit of comic ridiculousness was likely, in turn, the inspiration for the MCU’s Homemade Suit, discussed above.
Secret Wars: Civil War Suit
The 2015 Secret Wars comic event saw the villain Dr. Doom create a reality called Battleworld, where various permutations of the Marvel Universe existed side by side, most of them a riff on a past storyline. One such warzone saw the Marvel heroes in a perpetual state of Tony Stark-fueled destruction, and this Leinil Francis Yu-designed Spider-Man suit saw its debut there.
Spider-Man 2099 Suit
Here we have the suit of Miguel O’Hara, the surly Spider-Man of the year 2099, who first appeared in 1993’s Spider-Man 2099 in a costume designed by Rick Leonardi. The costume’s distinctive arm spikes and retractable spider-claws reflect the kind of edgy attitude for which O’Hara himself was known.
Spider-Punk Suit
This comic-inspired suit was the work of artist Olivier Coipel, who designed the British punk rock Spider-Man for 2015’s Spider-Verse event. A variation of the look recently appeared in animated form in this year’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse film.
Stealth Suit
This black, be-shadowed stalking outfit is actually inspired by the original, trench-coat-free version of the Spider-Man: Noir costume from the comics. It appeared previously as a free suit in Insomniac’s first Spider-Man game, and makes a return to the gamerverse here.
Superior Suit
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Entertainment
The distinctive, black-highlighted outfit of Otto Octavius, worn first during the period in the comics when he forcibly inhabited the body of the seemingly dead Peter Parker. Among other features, Otto equipped his costume with his characteristic metal tentacles, not depicted here.
Upgraded Suit/Upgraded Classic Suit
These costumes are adapted from those worn by Tom Holland in the MCU’s Spider-Man films. The classic blue version appeared as the hero’s Stark-designed outfit in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, while the black variation replaced it beginning with Spider-Man: Far From Home two years later.
Webbed Suit/Webbed Black Suit
These are the costumes worn by Toby Maguire in the Sam Raimi-directed film trilogy that launched Spidey’s big-screen career in 2002. A more realistically textured version of the standard suit, with raised, metallic web lines instead of sewn-in fabric, it comes in both standard and symbiote varieties.
The Ultimate Looks of Miles Morales
Upgraded Suit
Hewing very close to the classic design, this is Miles’ default costume for most of Spider-Man 2. It makes its debut in video games or anywhere else for the first time here.
10th Anniversary Suit
In 2021, a decade after Miles Morales debuted in the comics, Marvel commissioned artist Chase Conley to design a new suit for the character. Distinctive for its turtlenecked sweatshirt, dangling drawstring cords, and neon pink highlights, it didn’t last long before giving way to Miles’ older and more classic look.
Into the Spider-Verse Suit/Across the Spider-Verse Suit
Modeled closely on his comic book design, these versions of Miles’ suit were worn in the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse movie, and its 2023 sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse movie. Unlike its comic counterpart, it’s a more streamlined outfit that removes the red web lines, and replaces the stylized spider-emblem with a graffiti-inspired circular design.
Advanced Tech Suit
Inspired by the design of Peter’s Iron Spider suit, but with the armored fabric of the Anti-Ock Suit, this is Miles’ version of the high-tech battle outfits Peter sometimes sports. It previously appeared in the original Marvel’s Spider-Man game.
Agent of SHIELD Suit
In 2014, following the events of the Cataclysm crossover, the comic book Miles Morales enlisted as an agent of super-spy agency SHIELD (Strategic Homeland Acronym Invention Agency, true believer!). Wearing a version of their blue military-esque uniforms but with a Spider-Man flavor to hide his secret ID, this is a variation on the costume Miles briefly trotted out.
Best There Is Suit
Sometimes Spider-Man likes to take himself seriously. Other times, he likes to cosplay as Wolverine in a zipper hoodie and Doc Martens. This is an instance of the latter.
Bodega Cat Suit
The breakout character of 2020’s Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales was, of course, Bodega Cat, whose legacy remains now and forever untarnished. This suit, unlocked after completing the Cat’s Pyjamas story campaign in that game, returns for an encore appearance here.
Boricua Suit
This Puerto Rican flag-inspired costume appears in honor of Miles’ identity as a proud Nuyorican.
Brooklyn 2099 Suit
Resembling both the Miguel O’Hara 2099 suit, and the Miles Morales variation seen in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, this version features baggy pants and narrower red eyes, which are (as we all know) the hallmarks of NYC’s greatest borough in the far-off ‘90s of this century.
City Sounds Suit
This fedora-topped, sweatered outfit resembles the hottest looks of the 1920s Jazz Age. It’s Miles Morales for the Louis Armstrong set.
Classic Suit
Designed by artist Sara Pichelli in 2011, Miles’ default costume evokes the classic Peter Park look without replicating it entirely, replacing its blue highlights with red-on-black webbing. In the decade since then, it’s become as much a classic as the Ditko original that inspired it.
Crimson Cowl Suit
An homage to the comics villain the Crimson Cowl, who appeared in the Thunderbolts series with a Scarlet-Witch-esque designed by artist Mark Bagley, the look also pays homage to the hooded Scarlet Spider design (also by Bagley) mentioned above. It previously appeared in the Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales game in 2020.
Dark Ages Suit
Marvel Comics’ 2021 Dark Ages crossover imagined one of those dystopian futures of which comic creators are always so fond, in which all the heroes’ hopes and dreams have gone sour, and only the most tough and brutal remain standing. Miles’ costume for that series, designed by artist Iban Coello, is a symbiote-covered bit of leathery madness.
Evolved Suit
With its visible hair, sweet sneakers, and bright blue highlights, this new look is surprisingly appealing for both superhero action and default casual wear.
Family Business Suit
Another armored suit strongly reminiscent of the Iron Spider design, whose influence continues to make itself felt throughout the Insomniac universe.
Forever Suit
This new costume designed for Spider-Man 2 has a Wakanda-inflected design, complete with panther ears and a pointed nose. Cats and spiders living together? Now I’ve seen everything.
Great Responsibility Suit
Given as a gift to Miles by Peter Parker to acknowledge the younger hero’s risk-taking and courage to save innocent lives, this suit previously appeared in the Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales game, where its Parker-resembling look preceded the classic Miles costume.
Homemade Suit
As with Peter’s sweatshirt-based equivalent, this was Miles’ very first costume from his video game debut, fashioned at home a the outset of his superhero career.
Into the Spider-Verse Spider-Boy Suit
Miles’s first costume in the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse movie was a cobbled-up concoction made from a store-bought Spider-Man outfit, sneakers, and a towel cape. A fine Halloween idea if I ever saw one.
King in Black Suit
Continuing from 2018’s comic book Absolute Carnage event, the King in Black crossover revolves around an invasion of Earth led by Knull, the titular King in Black, and dark god of the symbiotes. The symbiote suit worn by Miles for that series was the spiky horror-show with its distinctive forehead spiral, seen here.
Life Story Suit
As with the Peter Parker version seen above, this is a space-fitted astronaut suit modeled for the game from the Spider-Man: Life Story series, in Miles Morales colors this time around.
Miles Morales 2020 Suit
Returning from the Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales game, this update of the classic Miles suit is, apparently, fit for a kid of the current decade. Because what says the 2020s if not large Walkman headphones and rolled-up jacket sleeves?
Miles Morales 2099
Another variation on the surprisingly influential Spider-Man 2099 design, this one uses Miguel O’Hara’s emblem on a hooded black bodysuit for a futuristic but youthful feel.
Most Dangerous Game Suit
Miles’ own variation on Kraven the Hunter’s absurd but glorious style is the thing to wear when you’re seeking the only prey worth stalking: Spider-Man.
Programmable Matter Suit
Returning from the previous Miles Morales game, this glowing, armor-paneled design is strongly inspired by the various Iron Man suits, whose Stark tech led to many of the Spider-Man costumes on display here.
Purple Reign Suit
A prince pun! But also inspired by the purple color scheme of the Prowler, of course, who gifted it to Miles in the previous Spider-Man: Miles Morales game. It comes with both claw-tipped fingers and a utility belt, making it a versatile costume for the cat burglar in all of us.
Shadow-Spider Suit
Designed by comic artist Sean Izaakse for the Champions series in 2018, this was the costume of an alternate-reality Miles Morales, whose dark path to avenge the death of Peter Parker follows a very different course from the Miles we know. It makes its video game debut in Spider-Man 2.
Smoke and Mirrors Suit
It’s Miles by way of the villain Mysterio – specifically the version of that nemesis who appeared, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, in the Spider-Man: Far From Home film. It’s green, purple, and has a glass headpiece so you can pull off all the magic tricks your heart might desire.
Sportswear Suit
Miles’ very first suit in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it features not only a hoodie, but a hoodie and a puffy jacket. Perfect for those Brooklyn winters.
STRIKE Suit
Sometimes your mission calls for a popped collar and oversized gauntlets, and nothing else will do. The STRIKE Suit provides.
The End Suit
Adapted from the 2020 comic Miles Morales: The End, this suit (designed by Damion Scott) was worn by an aged and battered Miles Morales as he made a last stand for humankind in the Brooklyn of the future. While the hooded sweatshirt evokes his youthful past, black camo pants speak to the worst of all possible things to come.
TRACK Suit
What’s white, black, red, and absolutely stylish? This newly debuted look for Miles Morales, baby.
In September 2019, Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote a short essay on her Facebook page after news broke that Donald Trump’s acting director of National Intelligence had withheld an urgent whistleblower complaint. It was the first domino to fall in what would later become a full-fledged impeachment probe into the former president’s now infamous call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The country was entering unprecedented political territory. And Cox Richardson’s observations left readers hungry for more.
What grew out of her pithy essay was “Letters From an American,” Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter on politics and US history that made her one of the most widely read commentary writers in the country. Now boasting over a million subscribers on Substack, Cox Richardson was named one of USA Today’s Women of the Year, and last year, was even invited to interview President Joe Biden in the White House.
But while her public persona has changed, Cox Richardson’s intellectual goals have not. She aims to historicize America’s political absurdities with a fundamental question: Whether, as she wrote recently, “the rule of law on which the United States of America was founded will survive.” This question lies at the heart of her latest tome, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, which bookends the Trump years with two sweeping, methodical accounts of US history: While one traces attempts to undermine democracy, the other chronicles attempts to protect and expand it. “Once again, we are at a time of testing,” she writes. “How it comes out rests, as it always has, in our own hands.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair:The middle third of your book offers a blow-by-blow account of the Trump years. Reading it, I realized how many specific episodes or scandals I’d already forgotten. Are there any events or moments from Trump’s time in office that you wish were more widely remembered than they are?
Heather Cox Richardson: The piece that I think shocked me most was how quickly in 2020, after the pandemic really began to sink its claws into society, Trump assumed the language of a strong man, of a dictatorship, and how quickly that escalated until the day he walked across Lafayette Square with the Bible in his hand. If you remember those few days, things were coming at us really quickly. There was that picture of the law enforcement officers at the Lincoln Memorial with their badges covered, and it took us a while to figure out who they even were. All that happened really, really quickly.
What really jumped out to me was how crucially important it was that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley came out afterward and said it was a real mistake for him to be there at Lafayette Square, and that the military does not stand with a person; it stands with the Constitution. And then there was a whole cascade of military leaders reaffirming that. That was incredibly important. It’s important that we know how close we came. It’s important that we know that the military—all the branches of it, really—stepped forward and said they were not going to be part of this.
What’s so important about that moment?
People now tend to forget that after that moment, a number of figures in right-wing media—certainly people like Tucker Carlson—really started going after Mark Milley and trying to destroy him. I think that echoes in the present when you look at Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville’s refusal to allow military promotions. The unwillingness of the military to back Trump is very much in the minds of those who would like to overturn our democracy even today.
In a similar vein, the last few years have seen many attempts to mine American and even world history for moments that can help us understand both Trump’s presidency and the small-D democratic resistance to it. Are there any historical moments you returned to for the book that you feel are underappreciated as guides to the present?
The answer is an emphatic yes, and that is the creation and the tactics of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). What really jumped out at me in this book is no matter where I was digging after 1909, which is when the NAACP officially organizes, I found the NAACP.
What was fascinating about the NAACP is that they were multifaith, multiracial, and multipolitical, if you will, from the very beginning. And while they certainly challenged segregation through the law, they also recognized very early on that in order to change the law, you had to change public opinion. It’s no accident that W.E.B. Du Bois, who can do anything he wants with the NAACP—what does he decide to do? He decides to run TheCrisis, which is the NAACP magazine. They insisted on educating ordinary people, making clear what was really happening.
Call it coincidence, serendipity, an aligning of the planets—whatever the term, the moment was creepy and amusing all at once. I was beavering away in the basement research room at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, a suburb of Los Angeles, when Henry Kissinger twice came into view—in the flat, cursive form of Nixon’s scrawl in the margins of the book I was reading, and then in the rounder corporeal form of the man himself, in the hallway outside the door.
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Kissinger, the last surviving member of Nixon’s Cabinet, was in Yorba Linda last fall for two reasons: to speak at a fundraising gala for the Richard Nixon Foundation and to promote a book he had published earlier in the year, at the improbable age of 99. The book, Leadership, contains an entire chapter in praise of Nixon, the man who had made Kissinger the 20th century’s only celebrity diplomat.
I was there to gather material for a Nixon book of my own. I had been nosing around in a cache of volumes from Nixon’s personal library. I was particularly interested in any marks he may have left in the books he’d owned. From what I could tell, no one had yet mined this remarkably varied collection, more than 2,000 books filling roughly 160 boxes stored in a vault beneath the presidential museum. Taken together, they reflect the broad range of Nixon’s intellectual curiosity—an underappreciated quality of his highly active mind. To give an idea: One heavily underlined book in the collection is a lengthy biography of Tolstoy; another is a book on statesmanship by Charles de Gaulle; another is a deep dive into the historiography of Japanese art. Several fat volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s mid-century monument to middlebrow history, display evidence of attentive reading and rereading.
Every morning a friendly factotum would wheel out a gray metal cart stacked with dusty boxes from Nixon’s personal library. On the afternoon Kissinger arrived, I had worked my way down to an obscure book published in 1984, a decade after Nixon left the White House. A significant portion of Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News named Russ Braley, is a blistering indictment of the Times’ coverage of the Nixon administration. In Braley’s telling, the Times’ treatment swung between the unfair and the uncomprehending, for reasons ranging from negligence to malice.
The book had found its ideal reader in Richard Nixon. The pages of his copy were cluttered with underlining from his thick ballpoint pen. It occurred to me, as I followed along, that Nixon was being brought up short by his reading: Much of the material in Bad News was apparently news to him.
My reading was interrupted by a commotion outside the research room. I stuck my head out in time to see Kissinger and his entourage settling into the room across the hall. A group of donors and Nixonophiles had gathered to hear heroic tales of Nixon’s statecraft.
I dutifully returned to Braley. When I got to a chapter on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, I found an unmistakable pattern: Most of Nixon’s markings involved the man holding court across the hall. And Nixon wasn’t happy with him. Kissinger, Braley wrote, had actually invited Ellsberg to Nixon’s transition office in late 1968 to explicate his dovish views on Vietnam, more than two years before the Papers were released. Nixon’s pen came down: exclamation point! Kissinger gave Ellsberg an office in the White House complex anyway, for a month in 1969—a stone’s throw from the Oval Office. Slash mark! Kissinger spent his evenings “ridicul[ing]” Nixon “in private conversations with liberal friends.” This last treachery summoned the full battery of Nixon’s marginalia: a slash running alongside the paragraph, a check mark for emphasis, and a plump, emphatic line under “liberal friends.”
Page 551 from Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by Russ Braley (Photograph by Joel Barhamand for The Atlantic)
Still, Braley went on, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, their publication alarmed Kissinger, because they posed a “double threat” to national security and to the conduct of foreign policy. “And to K!” Nixon wrote in the margin.
The contrast between Nixon’s bitter hash marks about Kissinger from the 1980s and Kissinger’s present-day celebration of his old boss offered a lesson in the evolving calculation of self-interest. It also conjured the image of a solitary old man in semiretirement, learning things about a now-vanished world he’d once thought he presided over. It happened often in the reading room in Yorba Linda: With unexpected immediacy, the gray metal cart carried the past into the present, in small but tangible fragments of Nixon himself.
The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people’s libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of “textual activity,” to use the scholar’s clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.
A book invites various kinds of engagement, depending on the reader. Voltaire (whom Nixon admired, to judge by his extravagant underlining in the Durants’ The Age of Voltaire) scribbled commentary so incessantly that his marginalia have been published in volumes of their own. Voltaire liked to argue with a book. Nixon did not. He had a lively mind but not, when reading, a disputatious one; he restricted his marginalia almost exclusively to underlining sentences or making other subverbal marks on the page—boxes and brackets and circles. You get the idea that he knew what he wanted from a book and went searching for it, and when he found what he wanted, he pinned it to the page with his pen (seldom, from what I’ve seen, a pencil).
In his method, Nixon resembled the English writer Paul Johnson. I once asked Johnson how, given his prolific journalistic career—several columns and reviews a week in British and American publications—he managed to read all the books he cited in his own very long and very readable histories, which embraced such expansive subjects as Christianity, ancient Egypt, and the British empire. His reaction bordered on revulsion at my naivete. “Read them?!” he spat out. “Read them?! I don’t read them! I fillet them!” As it happens, Nixon was an avid reader of Johnson, whose books he often handed out to friends and staff at Christmastime.
John Adams, another busy producer of marginalia, liked to quote a Latin epigram: Studium sine calamo somnium. Adams translated this as: “Study without a pen in your hand is but a dream.” Nixon acquired the pen-in-hand habit early, as his surviving college and high-school textbooks show, and he kept at it throughout his life. For Nixon, as for the rest of us, marking up books was also a way of slowing himself down and attending to what he read. He was not a notably fast reader, by his own account, but his powers of concentration and memorization were considerable. Going at a book physically was a way of absorbing it mentally.
One of the most heavily represented authors in Nixon’s personal library is Churchill, whom Nixon revered not only as a statesman but also as a historian and an essayist. Nixon’s shelves sagged with Churchill’s multivolume histories and biographies: The World Crisis, Marlborough: His Life and Times, The Second World War, A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, a series of sketches he wrote in the 1920s and ’30s sizing up roughly two dozen friends and colleagues, was clearly a favorite. When I retrieved Nixon’s copy from a box, I found it dog-eared throughout.
Nixon’s tastes ran heavily toward history, but he could be tempted away from the past to a book of present-day punditry, if the writer and point of view were agreeable. According to a report in Time magazine, when half a million citizens descended on Washington, D.C., in November 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, Nixon holed up in his private quarters with a book called The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today. The book, slim and elegant, had been sent to Nixon by its author, the historian Daniel Boorstin.
Judging by his notations, Nixon was interested less in Boorstin’s turgid cultural analysis of “consumption communities” and more in his thesis that the ragged protesters gathering outside the White House fence constituted something new in American history: They were not radicals at all but nihilists. Nixon brought out the pen, and in Yorba Linda, a continent and decades away from his White House hideaway, I could still feel the insistent furrow of his underlining on the page. He marked several consecutive paragraphs in a section called “The New Barbarians,” in which Boorstin criticized protesters for their “indolence of mind” and “mindless, obsessive quest for power.”
People read books for lots of reasons: instruction, pleasure, uplift. This was Nixon reading for self-defense.
The book I most wanted to see in Yorba Linda was Nixon’s copy of Robert Blake’s biography Disraeli(1966). A re-creation of Nixon’s favorite room in the White House was one of the Nixon museum’s prime exhibits when it opened, in 1990, a few years before Nixon’s death. (It has since been redesigned.) Nixon himself chose Disraeli to rest on his desk for the public to see. The book was given to him during his first year in the White House, in 1969, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor, prominent Democrat, and future U.S. senator from New York. To the surprise of just about everybody, the year he took office, Nixon made Moynihan his chief domestic-policy counselor, a counterpart in those early days to Kissinger as head of the National Security Council. Despite Nixon’s enduring image as a black-eyed right-winger, his political ideology was always flexible, if not flatly self-contradictory.
Moynihan the liberal hoped to persuade Nixon the hybrid to take Benjamin Disraeli, the great prime minister of Victorian Britain, as his model. Disraeli was a Tory and an imperialist, and at the same time a social reformer of vision and courage. According to Moynihan, Nixon read the book within days of receiving it. Soon enough, the president was calling himself a “Disraeli conservative.” The precise meaning of the tag was clear to Nixon alone, but we can assume it underwent a great deal of improvisation and revision as his presidency wore on.
Disraeli’s appeal to Nixon went beyond his light-footed ideology. Speaking to his Cabinet at a dinner one evening in early 1972, Nixon called Disraeli a “magnificent” politician. Now, he went on, the “fashionable set today would immediately say, ‘Ah, politicians. Bad.’ ” As he saw it, the “fashionable set”—the epithet, suffused with reverse snobbery and class resentment, is pure Nixon—believed that politicians disdain idealism and think nothing of principle. “But,” Nixon said, “the pages of history are full of idealists who never accomplished anything.” It was “pragmatic men” like Disraeli “who had the ability to do things that other people only talked about.” Nixon, who had never shied away from calling himself a politician, wanted to see himself in Disraeli, or at least in Blake’s Disraeli—this “classic biography,” to which, he told his Cabinet, he often turned for inspiration on sleepless nights. And here the book was, Nixon’s own copy, at the top of my growing stack in Yorba Linda.
Disraeli is packed with observations about political tradecraft. They are penetrating, specific, and cold-blooded. The little dicta come from both the biographer and his subject. “He was a master at disguising retreat as advance,” Blake wrote approvingly. Nixon underlined that sentence, and then this one from Disraeli’s contemporary Lord Salisbury: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.”
A line, a check mark, a circle—why Nixon deployed one notation and not another for any given passage is a question as unanswerable as “Why didn’t he burn the tapes?” But it was politics that always caught his eye, and activated his pen. Disraeli, Blake wrote, “suffered from a defect, endemic among politicians, the greatest reluctance to admit publicly that he had been in the wrong, even when the fault lay with his subordinates.” Another from Blake: Successful politicians “realize that a large part of political life in a parliamentary democracy consists not so much in doing things yourself as in imparting the right tone to things that others do for you or to things that are going to happen anyway.”
Should we take marked passages like these, with their ironic acceptance of the fudging and misdirection called for in the political arts, as a gesture toward self-criticism on Nixon’s part? Probably not: Nixon knew himself better than psycho-biographers give him credit for, but self-awareness is not self-criticism. In his chosen profession, he took the bad with the good, and his casual, creeping concessions to the seamier requirements of politics are what eventually did him in.
If you go looking for them, you can see reflections of Blake’s Disraeli throughout Nixon’s presidency, encapsulated in enduring phrases here and there. It was in Blake that Nixon came across Disraeli’s famous description of “exhausted volcanoes.” Disraeli coined it to disparage the feckless time-servers in William Ewart Gladstone’s cabinet after they had been in office a few years. Nixon underscored not only “exhausted volcanoes” but the rest of the passage from Blake’s text: The phrase, Blake writes, “was no mere gibe … For the past year, the Government had been vexed by that combination of accidents, scandals and blunders which so often for no apparent reason seem to beset an energetic administration in its later stages.”
Nixon feared the same fate for his second term—a loss of energy and direction. The day after his landslide reelection, in 1972, he called together his Cabinet and senior staff. He told them of Disraeli’s warning about “exhausted volcanoes.” And then, with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, serving as the lord high executioner, he demanded their resignations en masse.
Not everything inBlake’s Disraeli caught Nixon’s interest; certainly not everything was useful to him. As I paged through, I saw there were many longueurs, stretches of several dozen pages, sometimes more, where no filleting of any kind happened. And then—inevitably, suddenly—Nixon the reader is seized by passages of sometimes thunderous resonance, and the pen is again called into play.
“Disraeli,” Blake writes, “really was regarded as an outsider by the Victorian governing class.” One can almost see Nixon sit bolt upright and pick up his pen. This is the same ostracism that Nixon himself felt keenly throughout his personal and professional life, in fact and in imagination. The following page and a half, discussing the disdain of the “élite” for Disraeli, is bracketed nearly in its entirety. Some sentences are boxed. Some passages, like this one, are underlined as well as bracketed:
Men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy … inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.
The antagonism of the elites was not the determining fact of Disraeli’s career, but both biographer and subject perceived its profound effects, and so did the man reading about it 90 years after Disraeli’s death. As president, Nixon felt himself similarly situated: the political leader of an imperial nation, highly skilled, aching for greatness, yet in permanent estrangement from the most powerful figures of the politics and culture that surrounded him, nearly all of whom he judged, as Disraeli had, “bustling mediocrities.”
When reading about the elites, Nixon pressed the ballpoint deep into the page. We marginalia mavens, tracing our fingers across the lines today, can only guess, of course. But it may be that in 1969, sitting in the reading chair in his White House hideaway, he already sensed that this was not bound to end well.
This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Nixon Between the Lines.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
There are biographies that are biographies and there are biographies that are major news events in and of themselves. Walter Isaacson’s new book, Elon Musk, falls into the latter category. That’s not just because Isaacson, who formerly edited Time, ran CNN, and served as president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, is famous for tomes on titans like Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs. It also has a lot to do with the fact that Elon Musk, the Tesla/SpaceX CEO and Twitter—sorry, X—owner, is presently one of the world’s most polarizing and controversial figures, as well as the richest.
Accordingly, Isaacson has already made plenty of news with a steady cadence of excerpts that have trickled out over the past week. The most incendiary of these gained traction from a CNN story that reported, based on a passage from the book, that Musk “secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.”
The revelation set off a whole series of fireworks and alarm bells. By Sunday, Jake Tapper was grilling Secretary of State Antony Blinken about whether he’s “concerned that Musk is apparently conducting his own diplomatic outreach to the Russian government.” Granted, the full section in the book about the Starlink episode (chapter 70, page 428, if you want to jump right there once it hits shelves Tuesday) is a bit more complex than what was in the initial CNN piece, which Musk pushed back on. “CNN missed the nuances, and Musk understands the story the way I have it in the book,” Isaacson told me when we spoke over Zoom this past Friday. The author further clarified the matter to New York’sShawn McCreesh, whose great Isaacson profile is hot off the presses: “I realized that I misinterpreted him…when he told me he was not allowing Starlink to be used during the attack. I thought he had just made that decision. In fact, he was simply adhering to a policy he had previously implemented. So I posted a correction” on X.
In any case, Isaacson and I had lots more to talk about than Elon and Ukraine. (Of course I wanted Isaacson’s thoughts about the future of CNN.) Read it all in the condensed and edited transcript below.
Vanity Fair:Let’s start with Elongoing to warwith the Anti-Defamation League. A lot of people think it’s over the top, dangerous, and of course hypocritical in terms of his free speech crusade. Why does he do things like this?
Walter Isaacson: Let me just agree with what you said: it’s over the top, it’s dangerous, and it’s hypocritical. In the book, you see an addiction to late-night tweets when his mind is in a very dark place. Whether it’s calling some cave explorer in Thailand a pedophile or retweeting something about Paul Pelosi, he does reckless and dangerous tweets. When one of his friends said, alright, you’re in a dark space, I’m going to take your phone and put it into a hotel-room safe, Musk, at three in the morning, calls security at the hotel and makes him open the safe. So there’s an addiction to tweeting, which is one reason he’s always been fascinated with the company.
He just can’t help himself is the short answer.
This past New Year’s Eve, he and his family are sitting around and saying, what do you regret most for the year? He says, I keep shooting myself in the foot, I need Kevlar boots. He’s somewhat self-aware, but the problem is, there’s not one Elon Musk. There are multiple Elon Musk personalities and demons dancing around in his head. There’ll be times when he’s very self-aware and has good intentions, and there’ll be times he gets in demon mode and he is very dark, and you get some of these tweets coming out. As Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who’s one of his girlfriends, says, demon mode’s very dangerous to be around. It’s really awful. But sometimes, it’s demon mode that gets shit done. So the book tries to take you on this tale of an impulsive, dark, but also risk-taking dude.
How did the book come about?
We had crossed paths many times, including at a Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, and at one point, a mutual acquaintance, Antonio Gracias said, you really should do Musk. At the time, he had just become the richest person on the planet. He was “Person of the Year” of Time magazine. He had taken Tesla from the brink of bankruptcy to being more valuable than all other car companies combined. And he had gotten Americans into orbit. So I said, great idea. We had had a long talk where I said two things: I need to do this book not based on a bunch of interviews, but based on two full years of being by your side whenever I want to be, in every meeting and every meal and every walk in the factory, and just watching you so I can get stories and not just interview answers. And number two is, you have to agree that you have absolutely no control over the book. He agreed to both. And then he said, could I tell people? I said, well, I guess so. I hadn’t told my editor or my agent, and I was a guest at somebody’s house, where I was having the conversation [with him] upstairs. I went downstairs and after a few minutes everybody’s going, Hey, what, you’re doing Elon Musk? I said, what do you mean? They said, well, he just tweeted out, Walter Isaacson’s writing my biography.
Peter Thiel, the arch-capitalist fifty-four-year-old cofounder of PayPal, was throwing one-hundred-dollar bills from the main stage, trying to signify their unimportance. When members of the crowd rushed to grab them, Thiel appeared shocked. “I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists!” Raging against the “finance gerontocracy”—which, of course, had helped to make him very rich—Thiel derided legendary investor Warren Buffett as the “sociopathic grandpa from Omaha.” (Tell us about your childhood, Peter). Also on the dais were luminaries like Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who found his true, and truly lucrative, calling as an alt-right provocateur who encouraged young men to clean their rooms.
In the hall backstage, we passed Tucker Carlson, deep in expository discourse to some trailing microphones and cameras. On the conference floor, picking up on the trend, Bitcoin influencer Max Keiser, a vocal supporter of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, tore up some dollar bills with another attendee—caught on smartphone video, of course. They immediately posted the video, cackling at their own daring, their ultimate, performative disregard for real money.
All these histrionics felt choreographed and banal. For me, the conference was less about experiencing loud, overwrought paeans to the glory of Bitcoin than studying some of the industry’s leading personalities in their seemingly candid moments (which admittedly could be rare). It was also about retail investors, the average folks who had committed their lives to this stuff. I wanted to understand what attracted people to the Bitcoin story.
But first, I wanted some merch. Across the sprawling Miami Beach Convention Center, the product and sales pitches ranged from free NFTs to getting in on the ground floor of the next ICO (“initial coin offering”) that seemed a lot like the last ICOs. A DAO (“decentralized autonomous organization”) promised an investment scheme to “democratize yachting.” Crypto mining machines sold for thousands of dollars each. There was a surprising amount of art, loosely defined. One painter was selling a knockoff of a Jeff Koons-style balloon Bitcoin dog fucking—doggystyle, naturally—another dog representing the US dollar. We passed Panties for Bitcoin, a father-son undergarments business that was mostly an exercise in enthusiastic branding. Bars sold overpriced drinks matched by concession stands that sold overpriced stadium food. A mechanical bull, booth babes, endless giveaways, all of it filmed and tweeted and Instagrammed from every angle. In front of a small crowd, I did some push-ups for the Lord and received a “Jesus for Bitcoin” T-shirt.
If you ignored the formal hysterics and instead talked to regular folks milling about the conference, Bitcoin Miami sometimes felt like just another trade show. Big and energetic, full of boozy salesmen talking about how Bitcoin had changed their lives, with sponsorships adorning every surface, it was a Potemkin village of American consumerism and gambling addiction masquerading, in typically humble crypto fashion, as the future of the entire financial system. Eight-dollar Budweisers were offered for sale underneath the fifty-foot-tall Bitcoin volcano that burped out steam with all the grandeur of a high school science fair project. The volcano was meant to celebrate the issuance of El Salvador’s Bitcoin Bonds and tee up President Nayib Bukele’s keynote address. Sadly for the attendees, on the first day of the conference, Bukele canceled his trip to the United States to deal with the growing unrest in his country.
At the conference, the featured speaker was in the wind, but the featured volcano still spewed smoke and the bar remained well-stocked. I ordered a Budweiser and asked if I could pay in Bitcoin. Unfortunately, their Bitcoin-into-real-money machine was down, but they accepted my American dollars that conference notables seemed eager to rip up in protest. Maybe TradFi still has its uses.
Outside the convention center, all eyes were drawn to an imposing sculpture of a swaggering creature known as the Bitcoin Bull, an homage to the Wall Street original. Fashioned from thick glossy plates of material that seemed like an unholy amalgam of metal and plastic, this creature was no joke. Replete with laser eyes and a fierce stare, the bull was slick: a gleaming, furious testament to capitalist America’s macho brand of innovation. “In Miami we have big balls,” said Francis Suarez, Miami’s Bitcoin bro mayor, who has toyed with the idea of abolishing taxes and funding the city through a nearly worthless token known as MiamiCoin.
There was just one problem: Contra Suarez, the bull did not have big balls. Yes, the ferocious Bitcoin Bull was apparently of the castrated variety. I gently asked a few folks posing for pictures beside him if they had ever heard of incels. The confused responses were reassuring.
The local faithful, while zealous, were peaceful. No one yelled at me at the Bitcoin Conference or denounced me as a nonbeliever. Some people overflowed with solicitous generosity—there was at least one strip club invitation that I believe wasn’t a covert marketing stunt. The lack of open conflict was almost a letdown—and an indicator of my own latent narcissism, perhaps. Everyone was just excited to talk to some guy from TV that had cameras following him around.
Over a year after first teasing it on his radio show, Drake has released his debut book of poetry. Titles Ruin Everything: A Stream of Consciousness is out now via Phaidon. He co-wrote the collection with Kenza Samir, a longtime friend and songwriting collaborator who contributed to albums like Views and If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late. The publisher’s website describes Titles Ruin Everything as a 168-page collection of never-before-published poems about “fame, romance, and relationships.”
In newspaper ads promoting Titles Ruin Everything, Drake included a QR code that leads to a website with the following message: “I made an album to go with the book. They say they miss the old Drake girl don’t tempt me. FOR ALL THE DOGS.” No release date is mentioned.
It’s All a Blur Tour with 21 Savage is about to begin later this week on June 29. Drake recently added additional dates to the tour, including stops in new cities like Toronto, Austin, Milwaukee, and Denver as well as extra nights at some of the sold-out locations. In March, Drake fans filed a class-action lawsuit again Ticketmaster, alleging that seat prices for the original run of shows were artificially inflated.
Earlier this month, British rapper J Hus tapped Drake for his new song “Who Told You.” As for his own material, Drake released both Honestly, Nevermind and Her Loss, his collaborative LP with 21 Savage, last year.
LOS ANGELES, May 22, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Crewest Studio, an independent publisher with a focus on the arts, and Katie Love, critically-acclaimed author and comedian, today announced the launch of Love’s new audiobook, “Two Tickets to Paradise – From Cult To Comedy.” This unique and powerful memoir is a testament to the power of humor as a healing force for trauma and cult survivors. The audiobook, a heartfelt exploration of Love’s life journey from childhood trauma to redemption through humor, is now available on Audible and Amazon via https://fromculttocomedy.com.
With an engaging narrative style, “Two Tickets to Paradise” shares the tale of nine-year-old Katie discovering her mother’s suicide, only to be taken in by her older sister and shown a path of hope by entering a controlling religious group. Katie’s initial pursuit of perfection and entrance into “Paradise” unfolds with both heartbreak and humor, perfectly capturing the dichotomy of the human experience. As her devoutness to the religion evolves into a nightmare, she ultimately finds a way to escape, allowing humor and self-discovery to guide her toward healing.
Striving to foster a sense of connection, empathy, and healing among listeners, this powerful memoir is certain to resonate with survivors of trauma and control-based groups. The honest account and universal themes ensure that the audiobook will appeal to a broad spectrum of audiences, transcending any particular religious or cultural background.
Kirkus Reviews commends Love’s talent as a storyteller, stating, “a bighearted personal story about the creation of an artist,” and recognizes her ability to evoke emotions and authenticity in her compelling memoir. The engaging narration invites the reader into Love’s world, delivering a story that is poignant, hilarious, and ultimately, inspiring.
Katie Love, herself a talented writer, comedian, writing coach, and producer, takes the reader on the journey from the trials of her troubled past to her emergence as an accomplished humorist. Through her unflinching examination of her childhood experiences, she discovers the transformative power of laughter and forges a connection with those who have walked a similar path.
The audiobook adds a new dimension to the already powerful written word, allowing listeners to hear Love’s compelling story directly from her own voice. This immersive experience promotes an even deeper connection, as Katie narrates the events that shaped her life and her journey towards healing.
The launch of the “Two Tickets to Paradise – From Cult To Comedy” audiobook, released by Crewest Studio, provides a beacon of hope and encouragement to those who have endured trauma or control by emphasizing the power of humor, personal growth and resilience, and the possibility of positive change. It is certain to leave a lasting impact on listeners from all walks of life.
Just in time for summer reading, “Two Tickets to Paradise – From Cult To Comedy” is also available in paperback and Kindle formats, offering readers multiple ways to enjoy Katie Love’s inspiring story. To find the most convenient option and enjoy this unforgettable memoir, visit https://fromculttocomedy.com.
About Crewest Studio
Crewest Studio is a Los Angeles-based production company specializing in arts and culture programming across film, television, podcasting, publishing and events.
Apple founder Steve Jobs has continued to inspire even after his death in 2011. Just this week, in fact, Tim Cook — Apple’s AAPL current CEO and chief operating officer for a decade-plus under Jobs — mused in a GQ interview on life lessons imparted by his predecessor.
And now anyone who wants to get an intimate glimpse into Jobs’s wisdom and reflections on his life, which was cut short at just 56, can download a curated collection of personal correspondence, speeches and interviews — for free.
A martini dirtied with the last of the caper juice. Egg salad sizzled into fried rice. Sauce for noodles born inside a scraped-out nut-butter jar. Sad greens sorted with a “bullish, unwavering practicality.” The encyclopedic array that Tamar Adler presents in The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A–Z, a follow-up to her poetically instructive 2012 book, spells an off-roading adventure in the kitchen. (“Or, or, or” is a common sentence-ender, signaling untold paths forward.) “Listen to your inner voice and follow its lead,” she writes, a mystical voice on a rather prosaic matter: what to do about moldy jam.
“I do feel like, to some degree, how you cook and serve people is a little bit how you live,” Adler says by phone, taking the proverbial saying—You are what you eat—a step further. There is bottomless creativity in her thrift; obvious deliciousness too. (The author and Vogue contributor, now based in Hudson, New York, previously ran a restaurant in Georgia, alongside stints with the literary-minded chefs Alice Waters and Gabrielle Hamilton.) Adler, whose husband works in the climate sector around carbon sequestration, acknowledges that rescuing forlorn produce from the trash heap could seem to be a thimble-size effort. But as the New York Times recently pointed out, food waste—more than a third of it coming from households—contributes twice as many greenhouse gas emissions as commercial air travel. In other words, the odds and ends add up. Adler, who is loath to toss out a perfectly mendable sweater and saves vegetable scraps for broth, paraphrases Wendell Berry: “His statement was something like, ‘God is a materialist, God made things.’ It’s not that I am a particularly religious person, but the idea that to love things and treasure things, like material things—it’s not bad. It’s just that you have to actually love and treasure them.”
An Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A–Z, by Tamar Adler
Adler isn’t dogmatic, though. She appreciates the wave of self-forgiveness that accompanied the COVID quarantine era. “So many people were publicly saying, ‘Wow, this is hard. I’m not great at this. I thought I was going to run a school out of my house and now we’re just watching movies.’ Or, ‘My family has been living on peanut butter for three days straight and that’s just going to be okay,’” she says. That spirit weaves into The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, as with her instructions for frying: “You’re not doing anything wrong even if it’s a little painful and a little messy. The way you’re doing it is the one you’ll learn from.” Straightforward directives double as gentle counsel. “I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I was writing culinary self-help,” says Adler, who logs a Zoom session with her own therapist in this three-day wellness diary. “I’m practicing what I preach. I’m being as kind to myself as I’m counseling other people to be themselves, which is nice to know.”
The contents of Adler’s double-decker freezer reflect her commitment to the cause. Waffles made with leftover sourdough starter sit next to bagels (gifts from city visitors), croutons, and eight different kinds of sliced bread. Mashed potatoes and sofrito and cheese-less pesto fill a series of ice cube–style trays by Anyday, a brand she learned about while recipe-testing. A blend of chopped ginger, scallion, and Chinese celery—prepped on a particularly industrious afternoon—is earmarked for dumplings. “That’s a reassuring drawer,” she says. “In the past I was looking out for me now, and I think that’s a very self-respectful thing.” Such grace for one’s future self is, in a way, another exercise in sustainability. A line from the book comes to mind: “When leeks look old and tired,” Adler writes, “they remain lively within.”
Wednesday, March 1
6:50 a.m.: My son wakes me up every morning. This is the only way I’ll get up. I’m against alarms unless I have a train or plane to catch. (My husband sets his alarm for 6 then spends like 30 minutes in the shower, but he’s quiet and I usually doze through. He’s away for work this week, though.) Our son is officially allowed in at 7. But he comes in at 6:50 every day, tells me it’s 10 to 7, then spends 10 minutes taking my covers, taking my pillows, and talking loudly about Pokemon cards.
At 7 I get up.
Sometimes I feel like my life is a series of tricks I play with myself. The first of the day is waking up and getting dressed in exercise clothes because it’s actually harder to remove exercise clothes than it is to just exercise at some point before the school bus returns at the end of the day. It usually works. I put on exercise clothes.
I make my son breakfast and lunch—these tasks are usually handed off between me and Pete, but this week it’s me. I sit down with Louis but don’t eat breakfast with him because it’s too early. I drink a mason jar full of half coffee, half whole milk, and maple syrup. I don’t think it’s particularly healthy. But I also don’t think it’s particularly unhealthy. It has what I need for the first few hours of the day—caffeine, fat, and maple syrup.
The book comprises interviews with everyone who has ever played in or worked with the band over the course of their career. It includes more than 200 photographs and images, as well as essays by writers Michael Hann, Rob Sheffield, Laura Barton, and Isaac Fitzgerald. A limited-edition preorder package includes a signed copy of the book and a signed copy of the chapbook TJK on THS, a behind-the-scenes photo journal by guitarist Tad J. Kubler with an introduction by frontman Craig Finn.
The band’s forthcoming ninth studio album The Price of Progress is due out this Friday (March 31) on their own Positive Jams label. Last year Finn released the solo album A Legacy of Rentals.
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Michael Hann & The Hold Steady: The Gospel of the Hold Steady: How a Resurrection Really Feels
Thursday’s Geoff Rickly is releasing his first fiction novel later this year. It’s titled Someone Who Isn’t Me and it’s out July 25 via Rose Books. The story follows a man seeking psychedelic ibogaine treatment for heroin addiction at a clinic in Mexico, and Rickly based it on his own experience doing the same.
Last year, Rickly took up with his Thursday bandmates for a string of shows opening for the reunited My Chemical Romance. The group also marked the 20th anniversary of the 2001 LP Full Collapse with an expansive box set reissue. Thursday last released a new album in 2011 with No Devolución. In the decade since, Rickly has made music with No Devotion and United Nations.
Paul McCartney is releasing a photography book compiling 275 of his snapshots taken between the end of 1963 and the beginning of 1964—when Beatlemania was becoming a global phenomenon. 1964: Eyes of the Storm will be published June 13 by Liveright/W. W. Norton. The 35mm images are McCartney’s personal record of the time, and capture the Beatles’ travels through Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Watch a trailer for the book below.
1964: Eyes of the Storm includes several never-before-seen portraits of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, as well as a foreword by McCartney, an introduction by Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist Jill Lepore, a Preface by Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and an essay by Senior Curator Rosie Broadley. The process of creating the book began in 2020, when a trove of nearly 1,000 of McCartney’s photographs were re-discovered in his archive.
“Anyone who rediscovers a personal relic or family treasure is instantly flooded with memories and emotions, which then trigger associations buried in the haze of time,” McCartney wrote in press materials. “This was exactly my experience in seeing these photos, all taken over an intense three-month period of travel, culminating in February 1964.” He continued:
It was a wonderful sensation to be plunged right back. Here was my own record of our first huge trip, a photographic journal of The Beatles in six cities, beginning in Liverpool and London, followed by Paris (where John and I had been ordinary hitchhikers three years before), and then what we regarded as the big time, our first visit as a group to America.
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Touring and Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual, an in-depth guide edited by London-based psychotherapist and former booker Tamsin Embleton, has gotten an official release date. The 600-plus-page book collects insights from therapists, artists, performance coaches, psychologists, and other specialized health and wellness experts. It arrives on March 23 via Omnibus Press.
In addition to her work as a therapist and writer, Embleton co-founded the Music Industry Therapist Collective. She was inspired to start pursuing psychotherapy from her own experience working in the music industry. Nile Rodgers, Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, and Radiohead’s Philip Selway are all among those interviewed in Touring and Mental Health.
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Tamsin Embleton: Touring and Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual
(MANDATORY CREDIT Ebet Roberts/Getty Images) UNITED STATES – JANUARY 01: Photo of CULTURE CLUB … [+] (Photo by Ebet Roberts/Redferns)
Redferns
By 1984, the two most popular British bands in America were Culture Club and Duran Duran. Although quite different from each other musically, the two rival acts had several things in common: they were extremely photogenic with their distinct looks and fashions; they consistenly scored hit singles and made eye-catching videos; and they attracted predominantly young female fan bases. Both Culture Club and Duran Duran were the two leading acts of New Pop—a term coined by journalist Paul Morley to describe the music of ambitious, style-minded British artists who made shiny and accessible pop music in the first half of the 1980s. Along with Duran Duran and Culture Club, those New Pop acts—such as the Human League, Soft Cell, Eurythmics, Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ABC— achieved popularity first in the U.K. and later in the U.S.
The British music journalist Dave Rimmer documented this lively and colorful U.K. pop music explosion as it was happening with his 1985 book Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop. A writer for the British music weekly Smash Hits, Rimmer captured the zeitgeist of the movement through his fly-on-the-wall reporting on Culture Club—whose members consisted of Boy George, Mikey Craig, Jon Moss and Roy Hay—for about a three-year period. With his observations of Culture Club during their period of sell-out tours, intense media coverage and fan hysteria, Rimmer painted a portrait of a group at their absolute peak in his book.
Having been mostly out of print for decades, Like Punk Never Happened (whose title refers to the fact that most of the New Pop artists first emerged from the late 1970s punk rock era) has now been republished and expanded with a foreword by Neil Tennant (who was once a music journalist before he found fame as half of Pet Shop Boys) and the inclusion of Rimmer’s profile of Duran Duran from 1985 that originally appeared in the British culture magazine The Face.
Cover of ‘Like Punk Never Happened’ by Dave Rimmer.
credit: Faber and Faber
“It was Neil Tennant that put it in Faber’s head,” Rimmer, who is based in Berlin, explains about the book’s republication. “He was doing a book of his lyrics for Faber, and while he was talking to them, he said: ‘You should republish Like Punk Never Happened.’ The book had been kind of forgotten about at Faber a little bit—this made everybody read it again and they decided, ‘Hey, this is a good book. We should republish it again.’ I suggested that I write a new afterword and that they include the Duran Duran piece that’s in there. Although it’s not directly thematically linked to the book, it’s certainly part of the same period of work, so it seemed to fit really.”
Both working for Smash Hits in the early 1980s, Rimmer and Tennant decided that the story of New Pop should be told through the lens of a particular act—in this case, Culture Club. “It was never meant to be any kind of straightforward pop biography,” says Rimmer. “I found that idea rather boring. The idea was always to write the book about the whole phenomenon using one band as an example of what we were talking about—a combination of music journalist memoir, pop biography, and description of the cultural ecosystem all wrapped up in an episodic and chronological narrative with a generous sprinkling of mischief on top.”
The first time Rimmer met Culture Club occurred in December 1982 when he traveled with them to New York City on their first visit to U.S.; the band members were coming off the smash success of their hit single “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” Of his initial impressions of Culture Club, Rimmer recalls: “George is quite a surprising character when you meet him. I always liked him, but he wasn’t the easiest person to get on with. Real temper, and he’d flip from one side of his persona to another quite easily. But it was clear that George was kind of like a force of nature, and then the people around him were trying to shape that, temper it a bit. It was Jon Moss who gave him focus on pop music. George’s initial impulse was to try and shock people, and he was sort of dissuaded from that by the other members of the band. In a way, that was an incredibly intelligent position to have a guy that looks vaguely shocking to a lot of people and then you do sweet pop music.
“I got to know them a lot better over the next couple of years and traveled with them to different places. Traveling with bands was always the best way to get to know them. You got more time with them, and then it also had the function of instead of being an outsider like coming in to interview them in some location they’ve been in England, you’d be traveling with them from England. So you become part of their entourage. You become part of the ‘us’ as opposed to the ‘them.’ It was definitely the best way to get to know people.”
As described in the book, between 1983 and 1985, Culture Club was one of the hottest pop groups in the world with such hits as “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” “Time (Clock of the Heart),” “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” and “Karma Chameleon.” With his off-the-cuff yet accessible personality and charming charisma—not to mention his unique look of dreadlocks, androgynous makeup and patchwork baggy clothes—George was the most ubiquitous media celebrity outside of Princess Diana.
(Original Caption) 12/1/1983-Hollywood, California: Joan Rivers interviews pop musician Boy George, … [+] of Culture Club, on “The Joan Rivers Show.” Rivers, appears to be making a point as she firmly places one finger on her desk as the colorful Boy George smiles.
Bettmann Archive
“It seemed to be kind of logical that they were successful,” Rimmer says of the band’s rise. “[George] was definitely a star. I may be surprised by how much America took to him. You got the impression a lot of American artists looked down on Britain as being too into clothes and the look and not enough into authentic rock and roll. So it was kind of a surprise that George went over so well in America. I guess part of that was because he was very good at doing interviews, coming over as an interesting character. Although that’s a fragile thing as well: if you build your career entirely on being a media personality, that can kind of turn against you quite quickly as well, which is what eventually happened to George.”
Heavily embedded with Culture Club during that period, Rimmer was a witness to the fan hysteria surrounding the group. “It was fascinating,” Rimmer recalls. “I was enjoying the excitement around it…I can remember at one point in Japan, there were loads of loads of Japanese fans who’d all come and did their own version of the Boy George look. I have to say that one very intelligent thing George did was that he made his look into something that people could do their version of. It wasn’t that difficult to kind of find some hair extensions and look a bit like Boy George.”
(MANDATORY CREDIT Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images) Culture Club Fans, London, United Kingdom, … [+] 1983. (Photo by Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images)
Getty Images
With Culture Club and Duran Duran leading the way, the New Pop phenomenon reached its high point during the week of July 16, 1983, when seven acts of British origin had hits in the Billboard Top 10. Outside of Michael Jackson during his imperial Thriller reign, British artists were dominating the pop music scene. “A lot of it was down to MTV,” Rimmer explains. “American bands weren’t equipped to deal with this visual media in the same way that the British ones were. The British ones spent a lot of time looking at their look and how that worked and so forth. American bands would be wearing jeans and ‘this-that-and-the-other.’ They just didn’t have the same kind of visual panache that George or Duran Duran had at that time. Also, British bands weren’t ashamed of being pop bands. It wasn’t trying to be rock music, it wasn’t trying to be authentic. It was supremely well-crafted pop music.”
The original edition of Like Punk Never Happened concluded in 1985, the same year as the massive Live Aid event that unofficially marked a turning point for the New Pop acts. By the end of 1986, the music scene had shifted from British New Pop to the emergence of dance music in the U.K., and the return of American music on the Billboard charts via such acts as Madonna, Prince and Bruce Springsteen. Meanwhile, Culture Club’s fortunes significantly changed following Boy George’s publicized drug issues and the group broke up soon afterward.
“It was always clear that George was holding himself back—that he didn’t want to kind of completely reveal himself or go wild for the sake of the band, for the sake of pop music,” says Rimmer. “On another level, before that, he had been very anti-drug and had a puritan side that Jon Moss very much reinforced. I think George having held himself back in order to be this kind of interesting but essentially harmless pop star… there was some part of him that was wound up really tight and about ready to let go.
“It surprised me more in a way that [Culture Club’s] songwriting tailed off so dramatically because their songs had been really good up to that point. Colour by Numbers [from 1983] is a great pop album. And then the one that follows it [1984’s Waking Up With the House on Fire] has like one good song on it or maybe one-and-a-half good songs. That in a way was more surprising to me than the fact that George’s public persona blew up and fractured.”
Much has changed in the decades after the New Pop phenomenon, especially with the advent of the internet and social media that have replaced the British music weeklies (nearly all of them now defunct) and MTV as the gatekeepers and influencers when it came to promoting acts. But the legacy of the New Pop artists continues to endure as Culture Club (who remain active following a late 1990s reunion), Duran Duran (who will be inducted into this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), and their contemporaries are still performing and making new music. “Culture Club had gone and come back again,” says Rimmer. “Duran Duran on the other hand have stayed together and are carried on performing all the time. Their tenacity is quite admirable.
AUSTIN, TEXAS – OCTOBER 15: (L-R) Roy Hay, Boy George, and Mikey Craig of Culture Club perform … [+] onstage during weekend two, day two of Austin City Limits Music Festival at Zilker Park on October 15, 2022 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Rick Kern/WireImage)
WireImage
“I’ve read the theory that you always like best the music that was popular when you were a teenager. I’m sure the people who were teenagers when this was going on and were into George, etc., at the time will naturally retain some kind of affection for [those artists] and that music because it meant so much to them.”
Rimmer acknowledges that New Pop might arguably be the last golden age of pop music. “I don’t know if it was the best one,” he says. “You have to compare it with the mid-’60s, really. It was certainly a completely lively era for that kind of stuff. I don’t know how you can directly compare [New Pop’s] impact with earlier or later generations. But certainly, there’s been nothing really like it since then.” As for what new readers should come away from Like Punk Never Happened, the author says: “I’d like them to take away a sense that there is much more to pop music than typically meets the eye, and that the much-maligned 1980s was way more complex and interesting than is commonly supposed.”
The new edition of Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop by Dave Rimmer, published by Faber & Faber, is out now.
On a sandy plot overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in northeastern Brazil, this house is composed of … [+] sections beneath a rustic pergola.
fernando guerra / studio mk27
Knowing what we do about the healing properties of trees makes many of us search for a woodland home. Forests are the ultimate antidote to the stressed pace of modern life. They clean the air while boosting our immune systems. The Japanese believe in shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. Henry David Thoreau, too, believed that nature is a tonic. Where better to live than surrounded by trees?
That is the subject of a handsome new volume from Phaidon. Living In The Forest showcases homes designed by 50 different architects in 21 countries. Organized into three chapters, the book demonstrates the pioneering and conscientious ways these homes frame, harmonize with and become part of the forest. From tiny off-grid tree houses to experimental passive architecture, the designs offer a number of ways to respect and connect with nature. As built environments steadily encroach on natural ones, it is clear that such respect is not the norm and that to live in harmony with the land is a goal escaping many of us.
But here are 50 examples of biophilic architecture, organized into looking at, becoming part of and surviving in the forest. The first chapter is all about the view; it showcases 17 examples of homes designed to showcase the lush exterior via windows, terraces, rooftops, decks and vast glazed walls. There are surprises: a contemporary house in Denmark has a very traditional Scandinavian sod roof and a new house high above New York’s Hudson River is constructed of rough-cut granite and wood timbers, much like its grand neighboring manor houses. A white block urban house in Bangkok is home to over 120 trees representing 20 indigenous species, creating a forest in the city.
A tree house villa in India makes way for an old tree’s wide branches.
In the second chapter, 16 houses explore the concept of harmony with nature. Some, like a prefabricated home on a rented plot in a Dutch forest, are designed to leave no trace once dismantled. Others, like a Norwegian tree house that’s fastened to a living tree trunk, barely impact the environment at all. Locally sourced materials and a limited, naturalistic color palette helps these structures to blend into their environments. A round house on stilts in a Chinese pine forest looks, with its peaked roof, like a giant mushroom. A Balinese villa composed of stacked concrete cubes is softened with cascading greenery.
The third chapter shows ambitious projects built in remote sites and on inhospitable terrain. A sense of immersion in nature prevails; these houses were designed in response to the owners’ desire for a home that disappears into the landscape and that provides equal opportunities to find shelter to animals, plants and humans. We see a sunken, underground structure concealed beneath a hillside in Mexico, and a tiny Finnish cabin placed on a single slender steel column, surrounded by towering pines. An off-grid house in South Africa hovers in a deep canopy of leaves. The owners specified that, to build the house, not a single tree be cut.
In each case pictured in the book, trees take center stage and determine the building program. Looking at the gorgeous photographs, we can almost smell the tang of an ancient pine forest.
Hey you! Do you want to read more Japanese books but don’t fancy paying international shipping fees? Or maybe you don’t want to wait for them to come in the mail, or would simply rather not acquire tons of dead trees you’ll have to lug around next time you move. Lucky for you, we have technology, which means you can get your hands on all that literature in a less ancient manner.
E-books give you immediate access to Japanese reading material, are often cheaper, and sometimes even offer handy tools like highlighting and built-in dictionaries — pretty convenient for Japanese learners! The best e-reader and service for you will depend on your preferences, device, and Japanese learning needs — not to mention how hard you want to work to acquire your electronic tomes. So we tried to save you some precious time by doing the research for you.
In this article, writers at Tofugu looked into multiple e-book marketplaces, apps, and readers and picked ones that work well for Japanese learners, including those who live outside Japan.
You’ll also learn tips for how to choose an e-book retailer/reader, and how to take advantage of their features to improve your Japanese. Hopefully, after reading, you’ll feel good about downloading some Japanese words into your eyeballs through one of these services!
How to Choose an E-book Retailer
Okay, you’re hooked on digital phonics and ready to dive into the tantalizing world of Japanese e-books. But where to begin?
Well, first you’ll have to decide where you want to get your e-books. There’s no shortage of 電子書籍ストア (denshishoseki sutoa) — literally “e-book stores,” or services that sell Japanese e-books. There’s nothing wrong with dipping your toes into multiple services, but you’ll probably want to stick with one or two to start. Having all your e-books in one place tends to make the reading experience smoother anyway.
So, how should you choose your e-book platform/reader? Here are some criteria we used to puzzle out whether a service was any good or not:
1. Can you buy books from outside Japan?
Buying e-books sounds like a great idea, especially if you aren’t living in Japan, right? Not so fast. E-books could be as hard to get a hold of as physical books depending on the e-book retailer — some require a Japanese VPN , a Japan-issued credit card, and so on. And even if you are located in Japan, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have access to all these resources. So make sure you choose a store that is foreign-resident friendly.
Check to see if they require:
a Japanese address,
a Japanese VPN,
and/or a Japanese credit card.
Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a Japanese credit card, but what if you don’t?
We’ve included several e-book retailers that don’t require a Japanese address, VPN, method of payment, etc. so you can join in the fun no matter what!
2. Do they have books you want to read?
Available selections and genres can vary depending on the retailer. You can check to see if the service offers:
manga (漫画),
novels (小説),
light novels (ライトノベル or ラノベ),
literature (文学),
lifestyle/practical use (暮らし・実用), etc.
Some stores focus on certain genres, so if you have a specific preference, that’s something to consider. You certainly don’t have to limit yourself to just one store, but using multiple platforms means you’ll have your books in different places, which could be a nuisance.
3. What usability features does the service have?
Reading in your non-native language can be tough, so for Japanese learners, having certain e-book tools and features might be a priority. Does the service have:
a built-in dictionary,
bookmarks,
a highlighting tool,
zoom in/zoom out,
a way to leave notes,
search capabilities,
or text settings (font, size, vertical/horizontal display)?
For Japanese learners, a built-in dictionary feature can be a game changer. Simply by selecting text on your e-reader, you’ll get the option to look up words using your device’s built-in dictionaries. For example, with iOS devices, you can download and use any of the built-in dictionaries, so you can use a Japanese-Japanese dictionary (like スーパー大辞林) and a Japanese-English dictionary (like ウィズダム和英・英和辞典) to conveniently look up Japanese words and see the definitions in both Japanese and English. If your native language is not English, you can add other languages as well. On top of that, many e-reader apps come with features to look up selected text on Google or Wikipedia, too.
Unfortunately, manga (and some other forms of visual-based content) generally don’t work with features such as highlighting or dictionary search. This won’t be a problem if you’ll be reading novels or other text-centric content, but it’s just something to keep in mind if you’re going to be reading manga, primarily.
4. Is your device compatible?
You don’t want to go to all the trouble of buying books through a service just to have your spit out an error message. Popular Japanese e-book stores usually offer dedicated apps for reading their books on mobile devices and specific e-readers. However, make sure to check whether these apps work with your particular device. Also, be aware that those apps are usually only available in Japanese app stores, so you may need to create a new account and/or change the region settings in order to download them. (You should be able to find tips to work around this online!)
Some retailers also offer a ブラウザビューア, or “browser viewer,” which allows you to read in a web browser without needing to download an app. Not all books have this feature available though, so look for the 🌐 icon or browser ブラウザ, which means that the content is compatible with a browser viewer. However, the features you can use in the browser viewer are pretty limited compared to the app versions in general. So if you want to use features like a built-in dictionary, it’ll be worth downloading the app.
Many e-book retailers also list free titles, or 試し読み tameshiyomi (previews), available. This is a great option, not only for sampling a book before you buy it, but also for device compatibility test purposes before handing over your money!
5. Is the service reliable?
In the unfortunate event that the service ends, will your books be gone forever? There’s a lower chance of literary tragedies like this happening if you use a more reliable, stable service. Major e-book retailers tend to be owned by big publishers, printing companies, or physical bookstore chains, which are still thriving businesses in Japan compared to overseas. This stability might be a good sign in terms of reliability, so hopefully you won’t be losing your books any time soon.
Recommended Japanese E-book Retailers / 電子書籍ストア
With all those questions swimming in our minds and keeping us up at night, we writers at Tofugu tried out multiple Japanese e-book services so you don’t have to. We used websites with browser-based readers/apps, like BookLive, BookWalker, and Honto, as well as e-book devices that support Japanese text, such as the Amazon Kindle and Kobo. There’s even a special mention at the end for all-you-can-read subscription services, if you’re so inclined.
So without further ado, here are the literary fruits of our labor!
Book☆Walker
BookWalker is an online e-book retailer featuring a wide range of manga, novels, and magazines. It’s run by the Kadokawa corporation, which started as a bookstore and is now one of the leading publishing companies in Japan. While it’s not quite as straightforward as some websites, BookWalker does a pretty good job of being easy to understand, even for Japanese learners. There’s also a subscription service, which gives readers access to a large library of either novels and light novels, or manga and magazines, with both subscriptions costing ¥836 or around $6 per month.
Compared to other comparable Japanese e-book services, BookWalker is more accessible to English speakers.
You can access the BookWalker online store to browse and purchase Japanese books without the hassle of connecting to a VPN, or entering a Japanese address. Additionally, a number of payment methods are accepted, from Paypal to Amazon Pay, making it even easier to purchase books abroad. Finally, BookWalker offers a large selection of free titles, particularly the first volumes in a series (presumably, to keep you coming back for more). This is a great way to get a lot of varied reading practice in, without paying a dime…or yen!
Although the site is not fully supported in English, compared to other comparable Japanese e-book services, BookWalker is more accessible to English speakers. For example, once you’ve found a book you want to purchase, the checkout process features an English language setting. BookWalker also provides a short English guide on how to purchase Japanese books through their FAQ page.
In addition to these features, there is also a “Global” version of the service which offers only English versions of Japanese manga and light novels. So if you are looking to purchase both the original and the translated versions, BookWalker might be the right choice for you.
If you want to read on a computer or your phone, it’s hard to beat BookWalker.
When it comes to the actual reading experience, BookWalker’s app is smooth, too, allowing you to look up selected words using your device’s built-in dictionaries, or on Wikipedia or Google. Like we said before, this feature isn’t available for manga, but that’s normal for an e-reader app like this. Additionally, you can purchase new books directly through the e-reader app, without having to visit the website first.
If you want to read on a computer or your phone, it’s hard to beat BookWalker. With its friendliness for international customers, large library, ease of use, and helpful subscription services, BookWalker is a great option for Japanese learners to practice reading.
Ian’s Review8/10
BookWalker is definitely the most convenient option I found for Japanese learners to purchase and read e-books. Since you don’t need a VPN, Japanese address, or payment method, it’s by far the quickest way to dive in. I wish the highlighter option was a bit more robust for learning new words, but with the large free library, and the incredible value offered by the subscription services, Japanese learners who don’t mind reading on their phones or computers can’t go wrong here.
Easy to use outside Japan?
✅ Japanese VPN: Not Required ✅ Japanese home address: Not Required ✅ Japanese payment method: Not Required ✅ Website partially supported in English
Title Selection
Over a million books.
BookWalker primarily focuses on novels and light novels, manga and magazines. There are separate subscription services for these two groups, as well.
Compatible Devices/OS
iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, 🌐Browser Viewer
Reader App Features
ToC
Bookmark
Highlighter
Built-in dictionary
Google search
Wikipedia search
Text setting (font and size)
White space setting (between lines, etc.)
Background color setting (white, black, sepia, and cream)
BookLive is an online e-book retailer affiliated with Culture Convenience Club Co., Ltd, the corporation that runs a popular Japanese video/bookstore chain called Tsutaya. It offers a huge variety of published materials, from manga to novels and business books. There’s even a library of over 10,000 free books on BookLive, and they usually have some kind of discount campaign running for certain titles.
The website is streamlined and easy to use, as long as you can read Japanese.
Good news for those who live outside Japan — you don’t need to jump through any hoops to use BookLive. No Japanese VPN or credit card/home address are required to use the service. On top of that, the website is streamlined and easy to use, as long as you can read Japanese. There’s currently no English version of the site, but a browser extension like Rikai-kun should be able to assist you.
BookLive also has the added bonus of offering multiple discount coupons to use toward your first purchase when you sign up for a free account. Beyond this, they also run regular coupon campaigns discounting titles from a designated genre, or genres, which you can find on the homepage. Some coupons remain valid for a few months, or until you use them, but BookLive also offers a daily gacha that dispenses one small discount coupon a day valid only until midnight of the same day. They’re linked to your account, so they’re not shareable, but the coupon system is still a neat feature of BookLive that might put it ahead of other e-book services if you fancy a good discount.
BookLive is also known for providing previews you can flip through for virtually all of the books they sell.
BookLive is also known for providing previews you can flip through, called 試し読み (tameshiyomi), for virtually all of the books they sell. This can help you decide whether you want to buy a book or keep browsing for something else. And if you want to receive notifications when certain titles go on sale, there’s a handy フォローする (“follow”) button that will give you those updates.
The BookLive app also offers all kinds of useful features. You can look up words using your device’s built-in dictionaries, Google, Wikipedia, and the web-based goo dictionary. Again, these text-based features generally aren’t available for use with manga, but they come in pretty handy for other titles.
Overall, BookLive is an enticing option for those looking for a wide range of e-books and a pared-down, straightforward way to read them — not to mention, a bunch of nifty coupons.
Emily’s Review8/10
I’ve been reading a manga series called ひだまりが聴こえる on BookLive, and the experience has been simple and problem-free. I initially started using it for the sweet, sweet discounts they give you upon creating an account. But I’ve stayed because everything I personally need for reading in Japanese is easily available here without a VPN or Japanese address/credit card.
Easy to use outside Japan?
✅ Japanese VPN: Not Required ✅ Japanese home address: Not Required ✅ Japanese payment method: Not Required
Title Selection
About 1.4 million books.
Although BookLive is best known for its manga selection, a wide variety of genres are available. They also offer over 10,000 titles for free.
Honto is a popular multi-platform book reader and seller run by Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd., one of the biggest printing companies in Japan. What makes Honto unique is that it is a “hybrid” of e-book and physical bookstores. You can also shop for both print and e-books on the same website, making the shopping experience seamless.
They also have a page called ブックツリー “Book Tree” where professional book curators pick a theme like 心が落ち着く (calming) or イマジネーションが刺激される (inspiring) — and share a list of their recommendations accordingly. Going through these curated lists is reminiscent of exploring the “staff picks” at a physical bookstore, reading the handwritten commentary and posters full of book-related punchlines.
Honto’s selection is truly well-rounded, with titles organized into a number of different categories.
Generally, Japanese e-book retailers have a specific focus in terms of genres, such as manga or light novels, but Honto’s selection is truly well-rounded. Titles are organized into a number of different categories including but not limited to: men’s comics, women’s comics, economics/business books, light novels, literature, and lifestyle.
Like many other digital providers out there, Honto offers free trial reading. There are also daily sales that make finding cheap selections a breeze. Additionally, if you favorite certain titles, Honto will send you an email if they get discounted.
If you find the design of other Japanese e-book platforms “too busy” (often with too many eye-catching ads) — try Honto. It has a relatively clean, simple interface and the overall user-friendliness of the website and partner apps is very intuitive. One thing you should be aware of is that Honto is only operable in Japanese. If you are not confident in your Japanese abilities, then it might be an intimidating experience. On the other hand, it can serve as an excellent challenge to hone your Japanese skills!
Honto has a relatively clean, simple interface but it is only operable in Japanese.
The Honto app comes with features that are very useful for language learners as well. In addition to highlighting and commenting, it allows you to look up selected text through built-in dictionaries, web browsers, and Wikipedia. You can also search the selected text to see where the same word or expression appears in other parts of the book. Note that these nifty features generally aren’t available for manga, but if you’re reading novels or other text-based books, you’ll definitely want to take advantage of them.
One downside of the service is that you can’t browse and shop for books directly from the app. You always need to go to the website and download your purchases (or free titles) on the app.
David’s Review9/10
I have used Honto both in the U.S. and in Japan to read manga. It is fairly intuitive, has a great selection, and I can use my 図書カード (tosho cards) — gift cards for books — to get new selections! I also love using their desktop app on my Mac. Its simple design and seamless synchronization with my Honto account allow me to easily read books right on my laptop. The only minus for me is the lack of English support that may scare beginner learners away from using their platforms.
Kanae’s Review9/10
I’ve been using Honto in the U.S. and Japan for the last few years. What I like about it is the simple user interface (Japanese sites can be visually overwhelming) and its wide range of content (I can usually find books that I want to read on Honto, though my interests can be random, ranging from recipes to books about Buddhist statues). If you decide to use Honto, make sure to take advantage of the “favorite” (ほしい本に追加) feature. You’ll get a notification email whenever there’s a price reduction for one of the titles on your list. Some e-books get huge discounts like 80+% off, so I recommend browsing the Honto selections once in a while to favorite whatever books pique your interest. That way, you won’t miss these awesome deals.
Easy to use outside Japan?
✅ Japanese VPN: Not Required ✅ Japanese home address: Not Required ✅ Japanese payment method: Not Required
Title Selection
Over 700k books.
Honto offers a truly wide variety of titles not limited to manga or light novels.
You probably know that Amazon launched its empire selling books, and since making one of the most popular e-reader devices, the Kindle, they’ve been a major player in the e-book market as well. Of course, Amazon is international, so it makes sense that they also have a large and thriving e-book store for Japanese-language books. The Japanese Amazon Kindle store has a huge selection of titles, including novels, light novels, manga, magazines, and more.
For learners outside Japan, purchasing these e-books is a little more complicated than simply ordering something from amazon.co.jp.
Amazon hosts frequent sales, offers a selection of free titles, and there’s also a Japanese version of the Kindle Unlimited subscription service, for ¥980/month. Unfortunately, for Japanese learners living outside of Japan, purchasing these e-books is a little more complicated than simply ordering something from amazon.co.jp. However, it can be done!
First, to avoid any issues, it’s best to create a new email account for Japanese purchases, even if you’ve ordered something from Amazon.co.jp before.
Next, you’ll need to connect your VPN to a server in Japan to purchase e-books from Amazon Japan.
Even with that, there’s still one final piece of information they ask for before you can purchase: a Japanese address. Consider looking up and entering the address of a hostel, hotel, or museum. With all three of these pieces in place (email address, VPN, and physical address), you’re finally ready to purchase.
Now, why might you want to go through all that hassle?
For one, the selection of books on the Japanese Amazon Kindle Store is huge, really huge — over seven million books to be exact, including 700k Japanese books. And they’re not confined to one medium or genre like some retailers which might only offer manga, for example. Additionally, getting the books you purchased onto a Kindle device or into a Kindle app — either iOS, Android, Desktop, or Web app — is really convenient. You can also set the Amazon Kindle Store JP to English, making it among the most user-friendly options for English-speaking Japanese learners to browse.
The selection of books on the Japanese Amazon Kindle Store is huge, really huge.
It’s hard to beat Amazon’s library, but if you’re already a Kindle user who has purchased e-books on Amazon.com, you should know there’s a big flaw; you can’t log into two Amazon accounts at once. For example, if you want to use a Kindle device, you have to log into the Kindle with your Amazon JP account, which won’t load any of the books you’ve purchased on Amazon.com; until you sign back in with your Amazon.com account, which removes all your books from Amazon JP. It’s a bit of a hassle, and disappointing that Amazon still doesn’t allow you to consolidate two accounts.
Ian’s Review7/10
It’s definitely a bit of a process to purchase e-books from Amazon Japan, but once you’ve got that sorted out, it all basically works as expected. I’ve been ordering physical books from Amazon Japan for years but finding a way to save on shipping costs by downloading e-books has really been a life-saver.
Kanae’s Review1/10
If you’re hoping to have your English books (from Amazon.com) and Japanese books (from Amazon.co.jp) all in one place on Kindle, you’ll be disappointed to know that it’ll come with a lot of pain. I decided to keep everything separate and use my Kindle app only for reading English books, and Honto for my Japanese e-books.
Easy to use outside Japan?
❌ Japanese VPN: Required ❌ Japanese home address: Required ✅ Japanese payment method: Not Required
Title Selection
7 million books, including 700k Japanese titles. Amazon.co.jp has a bit of everything, comparable to what you can find on Amazon.com.
Compatible Devices/OS
iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, 🌐Browser Viewer, and Kindle
Can’t Get Enough? Consider Subscribing to a Yomihōdai (読み放題) Service
But what if you just want to read all the Japanese words your heart desires? Well, you could look into something called yomihōdai (読み放題), or an “all-you-can-read” subscription. Some places offer different kinds of subscriptions, like a manga-and-magazine yomihōdai, light novel/assorted yomihōdai, etc. For example, BookWalker has a service like this for ¥836/month. And some websites we didn’t review in this article, like Cmoa (シーモア) and Manga Oukoku (まんが王国), also have yomihōdai subscriptions that would be perfect for reading a wide variety of materials to learn Japanese.
And remember all those mentions of free books offered by many of these services? Places like BookLive, BookWalker, the Kindle store, Rakuten, and Manga Oukoku actually let you download books and/or manga from their “free” (無料) libraries without paying a single yen. You’re limited to what each retailer wants to give away for free, of course. But still, the freebies are similar enough to yomihōdai to deserve an honorable mention within the honorable mention. So if you’re looking to wolf down as much content as possible, sidling up to the yomihōdai buffet might be a good move.
How to Take Advantage of E-books to Learn Japanese
Alright, now we’ve hopefully gotten a Japanese e-book or two in your digital cyborg hands. But how do you use them to learn Japanese?
Don’t beat yourself up for however long it takes you to get through one chapter, page, or even sentence.
Well, first off, you’ve got to read them. Yea, it’s a big ask. Reading in a language you’re learning can be a rough time, as it’s usually slower and more pain-staking than reading in your native language. Our advice? Accept this fact early on and don’t beat yourself up for however long it takes you to get through one chapter, page, or even sentence. Treat yourself like a little kid learning to read for the first time. You wouldn’t beat up a kid, would you? (I hope not!)
Take note of any words you don’t know as you read.
Secondly, take note of any words you don’t know as you read. If your e-book service has a highlighter tool, this is its time to shine. You can look up any unfamiliar vocabulary in a dictionary immediately if you want. But if you’re not a total beginner and can grasp the gist of the book without it, another option is to just make note of them, bulldoze past them, and look them up later, focusing on enjoying the story for now without having your flow interrupted too often. It just depends on your level and style of studying. Either way, you can stick those new words in a flashcard service like Anki later to burn them into your brain forever!
Once you’ve mined for vocabulary, you might want to read over some sections again and take note of how your understanding of the book has improved. Fully feel that improvement, and pat yourself on the back — you deserve it, and it’s good motivation to keep going.
On the other hand, be aware that if the book you picked is too hard for you (right now), you’ll probably give up, and that’s no good. An angry reader is a soon-to-be non-reader. Don’t be afraid to take a step back and pick something easier, or more challenging, if you need it.
That brings us to the next question: how much should you read at a time?
A little reading every day goes a long way, so do your best to set yourself up to succeed without burning out.
Depending on how suitable the material is for your current Japanese level, you might want to set the bar low, like five pages a day, if that feels doable to you. A little every day goes a long way, so do your best to set yourself up to succeed without burning out. Luckily, e-books are easier to carry on the go and whip out whenever you have some free time. It probably won’t even look like you’re doing anything out of the ordinary, especially if you’re just using your phone.
But most of all, try to actually enjoy what you’re reading! If you don’t find it interesting you might just chuck your device out the nearest window, and that’s the opposite of learning. A bit of frustration is totally normal (and good — it means you’re on the right track!), but once you find the right book, it should also feel like a rewarding growth opportunity.
Welcome to the World of Japanese E-books!
Now that you’ve read our expert-ish impressions of these Japanese e-book services, which one will you try out first? Will you read manga, light novels, cookbooks, fiction, or self-help books? The world is your literary oyster now that you’ve got these tools at your disposal.
Reading regularly is a super effective way to practice Japanese, so hopefully the relative affordability and convenience of e-books will help you avoid shipping fees and get e-reading more often. So glue your eyes to those pixels and enjoy the robo-literature!
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Emily Suvannasankha, David Honeycutt, Kanae Nakamine, and Ian J. Battaglia
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