In her new book Primal Screams, Mary Eberstadt manages the nearly impossible: finding something new—and worthwhile—to say about identity politics. It'd be fair to wonder whether we really needed one more take on the topic. Plenty already exist, many of them either to virtue signal or take swings at the easy punching bag that millennials are. But for all that's already been said about identity politics, there's one big question nobody's answered: Why do young people find it so appealing?
Here's an odd, interesting, and mostly useless fact: The word canopy, meaning an awning or covering, derives from kónops, an Ancient Greek word for mosquito. And here's another odd fact: The word canapé—the bite-sized bit of cocktail-party food—derives from the same root. It's mosquitoes, all the way down.
Beneath layers of playful, irreverent humor, Mat Best’s memoir Thank You For My Service is a serious book about a former U.S. Army Ranger navigating his way back into civilian life, overcoming an addiction to war, and trying to support his fellow veterans.
For Ruth Reichl, one memoir is not enough. Her early years were covered in Tender at the Bone. Then came her career as an L.A. Times food critic in Comfort Me with Apples (where she also confesses to infidelity). In Garlic and Sapphires she chronicles her stint as the New York Times's often incognito restaurant reviewer. For You Mom, Finally grapples with Reichl's relationship with her mentally unstable mother. And now there's Save Me the Plums, which covers Reichl's tenure at Gourmet—right up to its untimely demise.
It was three or four years ago that the word GOAT finally gnawed through the fence of minor sports blogs and started gamboling in the greener fields of television and newspaper commentary—GOAT, that is, as an acronym for "Greatest of All Time."
We're now a good 40 years into the computer revolution, and maybe the best way to understand what's happened would be to construct a scatter plot of the results. We need to graph everything onto a Cartesian plane, in other words, with a vertical axis for the personal effects computers have had and a horizontal axis for the social effects.
Julien Gorbach's The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is the second book to come out this year on the reporter, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, novelist, polemicist, and pioneer of the gangster movie and the screwball comedy. Hecht is a more remarkable character than any he created in his hugely successful Hollywood career. (Gorbach's book has received far less attention than the first biography, Adina Hoffman's Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, largely because she beat him to market.)
All right, let's get the bad news out of the way, right off the bat: This is a disaster of a book, by a man who was a disaster at his job. Oh, no doubt, Bud Selig truly loved the sport he would head from 1992 to 2015. He loved it to pieces. If you want proof of baseball's resilience, it can be found in the fact that the game somehow survived the butterfingered adoration of the hamfisted car dealer from Milwaukee.
Kevin Williamson is having fun. "You want to do this? Okay, let's f—ing do this," you can almost hear him muttering. In the resultant extended, hilarious, quixotic rant, he takes the gloves off in the fight to get everyone to put their gloves back on and think, damnit! He's going to war in defense of David Frenchism.
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In her new book Primal Screams, Mary Eberstadt manages the nearly impossible: finding something new—and worthwhile—to say about identity politics. It'd be fair to wonder whether we really needed one more take on the topic. Plenty already exist, many of them either to virtue signal or take swings at the easy punching bag that millennials are. But for all that's already been said about identity politics, there's one big question nobody's answered: Why do young people find it so appealing? 
