Caitlin Flanagan

There’s a saying—or maybe a truism—that the test of any new technology lies in its ability to reproduce pornography. Long ago, pornography was the stuff of private collections: crude figurines and drawings that spread their influence only as far as they could be carried. But man could not live in this wilderness forever. He had opposable thumbs and pressing needs, and thus were born woodblock printing, engraving, movable type, daguerreotype, halftone printing, photography, the moving image.

Not since Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut has a female movie star offered such an awkward portrayal of sex as Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. The movie is meant to be daring, a Last Tango in Paris for our time, but its essential premise would work in a Douglas Sirk production: A sexually frustrated, long-married woman accepts her fate until a stranger comes to town and puts everything at risk.

At long last, the rigid and outdated dress code in Congress has been sent down the river of bad ideas, along with the Segway and natural childbirth.Americans have been going through a sea change regarding work, with many of us experiencing not less but more productivity when we started working from home during the pandemic. Among the young, the change is even deeper.

I was a child soldier in the California grape strikes, my labors conducted outside the Shattuck Avenue co-op in Berkeley. There I was, maybe 7 or 8 years old, shaking a Folgers coffee can full of coins at the United Farm Workers’ table where my mother was garrisoned two to three afternoons a week. I did most of my work alongside her, but several times an hour I would do what child soldiers have always done: served in a capacity that only a very small person could.

At the end of the first episode of Harry & Meghan—the five-and-a-half-hour exploration into the tender center of everlasting love; rat-bastard English people and the nasty things they get up to; heady, “Goodbye to You” defection from the British Royal Family; and the reality-show-within-a-reality-show miniseries Fifteen Million Dollar Listing—I informed my husband that henceforth he should call me “C” and I would call him “R.

A difficult labor—30 hours!—and someone has to make the terrible decision. Right there in a Buckingham Palace bedroom, with mother and child etherized upon the table, deft hands make the cut, the unwilling baby is tugged out—and it’s done.A boy! Clever girl.To sleep, to sleep, to sleep.Posted on the gates of the palace, a handwritten announcement:Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth Duchess of Edinburgh was safely delivered of a Prince at 9.

The old saying is “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.” But that’s not quite true. Democrats wait for a dream candidate to come along—a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama—and they go out of their minds with excitement and ardor. But when they don’t find one, they kiss a frog and wait to see what happens.

Top Gun came out in the spring of 1986, a movie so big, so wall-to-wall, so resistance-is-futile that you just had to coexist with the damn thing until it finally went away. Now—like one of those flowers that comes into bloom only once every 40 years—it’s back.Apparently Paramount had been after Tom Cruise to make a sequel before the original even opened, which is no surprise.

In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year.

Whatever your views on “cancel culture,” one thing is certain: Search-and-rescue missions on behalf of the disappeared can take strange forms. Witness a 2020 New Yorker essay that was published online under the title “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” The question suggested the possibility that something as vile as racism might be calibrated—and that O’Connor’s case had moved from the verdict to the sentencing phase.

I turn 60 today, and I feel vaguely embarrassed about it, like I’ve somehow let myself go, like I’ve been bingeing on decades and wound up in this unappealing condition.Chances are, most of you haven’t crossed this border station yet, so you’d better listen up. Because if you play your cards right, it’s going to happen to you too.  Here’s what it feels like to turn 60: weird. On the one hand, you’re still going to the gym and to dinner parties.

I was 16, living for a year with my family in Ireland, and I was viciously homesick. I was an American teenager, and I wanted Coca-Cola with cracked ice, Lip Smackers, Sticky Fingers jeans. Ireland in the 1970s was still under the provisional rule of the Irish Taliban—even condoms were illegal, not that I needed any—and there was one television channel.

I’m almost 60, and in these many decades I’ve seen people—some of them good friends—taken down by all kinds of things. Alcohol and drugs, mostly. A few years ago, I lost someone to heroin, and hundreds of us sat at his funeral in wordless communion. I know a couple of people who couldn’t shake gambling, and many plagued by food and sex and all the other great distractions.

Getty/ Johanna GoodmanHere they were, a coalition of the willing: deadbeat dads, YouPorn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans. They had heard the rebel yell, packed up their Confederate flags and Trump banners, and GPS-ed their way to Washington. After a few wrong turns, they had pulled into the swamp with bellies full of beer and Sausage McMuffins, maybe a little high on Adderall, ready to get it done.