Nathan Heller

I'll just observe that the now-aging insight that people can't deal with traditional textual journalism, want "other platforms," etc., has always been wisdom flowing from the top down, not the ground up. (Can also report that public transportation continues to be full of people reading.)

It's happening here.

This proposition popped out at me as odd, in that—believe what you will about the wisdom involved—there's little "classic" about these settlements with, and enriching, an antagonistic federal government, no sense in which it's business as usual. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

What I find I want in this hard time is sumptuous works of art, patiently and beautifully made, filled with human contact and light—a reminder of what we had and could maybe have again.

One thing I've been around long enough to notice—a grounding, sane-making idea, somehow—is that ideas, strategies, successes that smell fishy generally are, although it might take a month or a decade for it to become obvious why and how.

Josh Rothman, I think.

Amazon’s New James Bond The secretary Miss Moneypenny will now be known as Miss Money One Hundred Billion Dollars Money Money Money. Or Alexa.

In this week's Shouts & Murmurs, an important report from me with details of the new James Bond. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

A happy #Bloomsday to all! Hear Joyce reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in two rare recordings from the 1920s: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/james-joyce-reading-his-work-1924-1929 #Bloomsday2023

NYC this evening is in dead-on San Francisco summer weather: the temperature, the moisture in the air, the fresh breezes, the way it carries fragrances. Heaven!

The Matter of Martin by Lora Kelley May 22, 2025 – “Salman Rushdie, who closed out the evening, recounted the cheeky word games they used to play; in one, they replaced the word Love in titles with the words Hysterical Sex, to get to ‘H...

A really lovely writeup of the Martin Amis event a bunch of us did onstage at 92Y a couple of weeks ago, from the Paris Review. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/05...

A Disillusioned Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington

Move fast, ask nothing, learn nothing, break things, go home. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/u...

An interesting about-face to the past century or so of educational objectives. (JFK: "One of our most serious manpower shortages is the lack of Ph.D.s in engineering, science and mathematics; only about one half of 1 percent of our school-age generation is achieving Ph. D. degrees in all fields.")

Google has become amazingly, terrifyingly poor for locating anything published online before about fifteen years ago, in case we didn't already know there's a big black hole at the center of the digital universe. (I've had better luck with the Wayback Machine.)

Americans have lost touch with the always-best answer, "Well, Bob, I just couldn't say."

This week's efforts to hang the current state of America on, of all people, Joe Biden are a little odd.

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’

Published #OnThisDay 100 years ago

A diminishing arts culture isn't a middle-of-the-list crisis for a country (or a city) but a top-priority emergency, because of everything else it supports.

This is this evening, and Salman Rushdie is joining us, too. Looking forward.

I wrote a post on @derekkrissoff.bsky.social ‘s substack about @maris.bsky.social ‘s new column for LitHub in response to the NEA cuts, with a menrion for a @nathanheller.bsky.social piece that has stayed in my mind! open.substack.com/pub/derekkri...

Where does American humor go from "the first Pope-U.S. President combination has many upsides"?

Despite seeing several people I totally trust say this was real I still felt I had to verify it with my own eyes. And having done so I still can't believe it's real.

Happy Independent Bookstore Day. I was going to call out the ones I love most in the cities I know best, but such a list wouldn't remotely fit here. A couple of decades after we were all told that no one needed these places anymore and they were all going to disappear, that's testimony in itself.

Many people consider this postwar period the great age of American industry and innovation.

A quick note that I'm due to join Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lorrie Moore, James Wood, and other bright lights onstage at 92NY next month for an evening of tribute to Martin Amis. Omnia omnibus; consider coming if you can. www.92ny.org/event/a-cele...

good luck, everyone

We are all now living that scene in "The Naked Gun" where George Kennedy finds a wedding ring inside his hot dog.

Dept. of Fascinating: The putative lead bidder on U.S. missile defense is Elon Musk's own company. And an idea apparently being tossed around is for the U.S. not to have its own defense system but to get it as a subscription from SpaceX. www.reuters.com/business/aer...

@npr.org, itself under threat, has been doing some remarkable reporting.

IRS making plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status | CNN Politics The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliat...

This is an extraordinarily aggressive move, and one that won't go without significant challenge. It basically threatens an entire institutional sector. www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/p...

This is a great report, and something that, I confess, hadn't occurred to me as one of the educational pitfalls of A.I.: bots enrolling in online education and submitting A.I. work. "Last year, the state chancellor’s office estimated 25 percent of community college applicants were bots."