What Adults Lose When They Put Down Children’s Books
Please don’t judge me, but in March 2020, when I moved across the country, I got rid of six boxes of books, including many classic works of literature and nonfiction. Gone were titles by Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey—I’d rather reread Pride and Prejudice) and Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities—plain old disinterest). Moby-Dick went (I’d tried for years, and failed). So did Joan Didion’s Political Fictions and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (just never got around to them). What I did not—and never would—get rid of: The Snowy Day, Miss Rumphius, The Little House, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, Blueberries for Sal, and about 50 other children’s books. My copies have been with me since the 1970s and ’80s. They sit, always, in a place of honor, alongside artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. In 1991, when I left home for college, they moved with me from Davis, California, to New York City. From the East Village they traveled to Brooklyn, then Queens, then Brooklyn again, following me on a professional trajectory (half a dozen jobs) and a personal one (one marriage, one divorce). During my most recent move, purging my adult library created more physical space for my kid one—Caro’s books are roughly 20 times the width of an average Dr. Seuss title—but more important, the sifting represented a setting of priorities. The picture books took precedence. Again, I’m inclined to ask readers not to judge me. It’s a defensive crouch that comes from experience: I have heard numerous people suggest that in no way is “kid lit” on par with words written for grown-ups. (At least one of Margaret Wise Brown’s contemporaries dismissively referred to her genius works—Goodnight Moon, Little Fur Family—as “baby books.”) This kind of snobbery is what Mac Barnett, the author o
The Most Awkward Cameo in The Devil Wears Prada 2
Picture, if you will, a gathering at Milan Fashion Week, hosted by one of the world’s glossiest magazines and attended by planetary VIPs. The event: a post-show dinner. The mood: celebratory. The setting: a rectory in a state of photo-friendly disrepair. Candles cast flickering light on the age-worn walls. Champagne flows. Every detail has been considered. Every invite has been curated. Every element of the evening, from the decor to the passed hors d’oeuvres, hews to the mandates of quiet luxury—save for the guests themselves, many of them clad in sequins and satin, all of them serving as reminders that luxury, even the quiet kind, has a way of making itself loud. The event might have been hosted by Vogue; this version was put on by Runway, the fictional publication in The Devil Wears Prada 2. In the film, it is a climactic scene: What goes down will decide the fate of the magazine and the people who produce it, including Miranda Priestly, the imperious and embattled editor in chief, and Andy Sachs, the newly installed features editor. The evening’s import is conveyed by the fact that the dinner is set not in a standard-issue rectory but in the one that belongs to Milan’s Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie—the same room where, in the final years of the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci transformed a wall into the mural that would come to be known as The Last Supper.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Four years ago, President Vladimir Putin offered Moscow and its business elite a de facto deal: Support my war in Ukraine, and in exchange you won’t have to think about it. In the past week, that deal was broken. Not that Moscow was ever fully immune: As long ago as May 3, 2023, the first two Ukrainian drones to reach Moscow exploded over the Kremlin, doing no damage but revealing that the capital’s air defenses weren’t as stellar as advertised—and that the war wasn’t as far away as Muscovites assumed. Eventually, the Ukrainians shifted their efforts toward Moscow’s airports, using drones dozens of times to buzz the runways or circle the airports, deliberately creating travel chaos and expense. Last week, the whining noise of unmanned flying objects could be heard in the city of Moscow once again. On the morning of May 7, the mayor of Moscow announced that the Russian air force had shot down hundreds of Ukrainian drones aimed at the city. Two days later, Moscow was due to host Russia’s annual May 9 military parade, a celebration linked very intimately with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who had revived this Soviet-era celebration of Stalin’s victory over Nazi Germany and his conquest of Europe.
In the late 1980s public-television stations aired a talking-heads series called Ethics in America. For each show more than a dozen prominent citizens sat around a horseshoe-shaped table and tried to answer troubling ethical questions posed by a moderator. The series might have seemed a good bet to be paralyzingly dull, but at least one show was riveting in its drama and tension. The episode was taped in the fall of 1987. Its title was “Under Orders, Under Fire,” and most of the panelists were former soldiers talking about the ethical dilemmas of their work. The moderator was Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, who moved from panelist to panelist asking increasingly difficult questions in the law school’s famous Socratic style. During the first half of the show Ogletree made the soldiers squirm about ethical tangles on the battlefield. The man getting the roughest treatment was Frederick Downs, a writer who as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam had lost his left arm in a mine explosion. Ogletree asked Downs to imagine that he was a young lieutenant again. He and his platoon were in the nation of “South Kosan,” advising South Kosanese troops in their struggle against invaders from “North Kosan.” (This scenario was apparently a hybrid of the U.S. roles in the Korean and Vietnam wars.) A North Kosanese unit had captured several of Downs’s men alive—but Downs had also captured several of the North Kosanese. Downs did not know where his men were being held, but he thought his prisoners did. Never miss a story. Start your free trial.
Putin’s War Comes Home to Moscow
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Four years ago, President Vladimir Putin offered Moscow and its business elite a de facto deal: Support my war in Ukraine, and in exchange you won’t have to think about it. In the past week, that deal was broken. Not that Moscow was ever fully immune: As long ago as May 3, 2023, the first two Ukrainian drones to reach Moscow exploded over the Kremlin, doing no damage but revealing that the capital’s air defenses weren’t as stellar as advertised—and that the war wasn’t as far away as Muscovites assumed. Eventually, the Ukrainians shifted their efforts toward Moscow’s airports, using drones dozens of times to buzz the runways or circle the airports, deliberately creating travel chaos and expense. Last week, the whining noise of unmanned flying objects could be heard in the city of Moscow once again. On the morning of May 7, the mayor of Moscow announced that the Russian air force had shot down hundreds of Ukrainian drones aimed at the city. Two days later, Moscow was due to host Russia’s annual May 9 military parade, a celebration linked very intimately with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who had revived this Soviet-era celebration of Stalin’s victory over Nazi Germany and his conquest of Europe.
Trump Isn’t Setting Vance or Rubio Up for the Future
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Donald Trump loves to pit his advisers and staffers against one another—many aspects of Trump’s persona on The Apprentice may have been manufactured, but not this one. Lately, The New York Times noted this weekend, this has played out as Trump informally polling friends and advisers on who would be a better Republican presidential nominee in the next election: J. D. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Making predictions about how voters will feel by the 2028 election is futile, but for a long time, the front-runner seemed to have been decided within the administration. “If J. D. Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair last year. Prominent outside activists such as Erika Kirk have also thrown their lot in with Vance. Now Rubio appears to be gaining some momentum. The secretary of state (who is also Trump’s national security adviser) is suddenly everywhere, whether ringside with Trump at UFC fights, deskside in the pope’s Vatican office, or perched behind the lectern in the White House briefing room. As my colleague Matt Viser wrote last week, Rubio—who often seemed glum early in the administration—now looks to be having the time of his life. Pollster Sarah Longwell also reported in The Atlantic last month that MAGA voters in the focus groups she runs are expressing new interest in Rubio.
The DOGE-ing of the Humanities Is Being Reversed
Winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities can take months of preparation and can require multiple attempts. So last year, when DOGE officials with no humanities experience yanked the funds of hundreds of grantees using little more than a chatbot and a haphazard search for terms such as BIPOC and gay, it stung. “The NEH, NEA, Guggenheim, and maybe one or two other grants are considered just the gold standard for your prestige in the academy,” Elizabeth Kadetsky, an English professor at Penn State, told us. Her grant to research stolen Indian antiquities for a nonfiction-writing project was canceled last year. “Can you imagine if you win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel and they’re like, Oh, I’m sorry, never mind, you don’t have it?” A federal court on Thursday ruled that the grant cancellations were unconstitutional, potentially reversing, for now, one of the many moves made by the Trump administration to influence how experts uncover—and then tell—the country’s story. Despite Trump officials’ efforts to impose their values and version of American history on knowledge-making institutions, doing so may not be as simple as they thought, particularly given their slapdash methods that have now been called out by a federal judge.
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