At a recent event, the novelist Marlon James was asked to name a book by another author that he wished he'd written. He picked Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn's 1990 novel about the Philippines. Although it is set in Manila during the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, James couldn't help thinking of Jamaica, the country he grew up in, as he read it. 'I thought: She knows Kingston,' he said. What he meant was that her book helped him better see the beauty, thrum, and chaos of the Jamaican capital, which would become the setting for his Booker Prize'winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Gary Shteyngart made a similar discovery about the slipperiness of literary inspiration when he traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, for The Atlantic, seeking traces of the Nobel Prize'winning author J. M. Coetzee. He was hunting for clues to decipher the author's parable-like novels in the homes Coetzee had lived in and the streets he had walked'but Shteyngart learned more from discovering what the author chose to leave out....
And by the way, did you know that among the many types of inlets'firth, ria, bayou, bight'stands the mighty seapoose' A seapoose is, very specifically, a shallow inlet along the shore of Long Island'you know, as in that old Southampton idiom 'Any seapoose in a storm.'...
Readers' faith in publications and writers relies on a belief that the information provided is true and accurate to the best of the writer's knowledge. When I get something wrong, I owe it to you to correct myself. Today, I have that unpleasant task. For years, I have argued that the idea of balancing the budget by eliminating government 'waste, fraud, and abuse' was a canard. In 2020, I wrote that 'there really isn't that much waste, fraud, and abuse in the system.' In 2024, when President-Elect Trump announced the creation of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, I said that the phrase was a meme with no real substance to it'Trump claimed DOGE would save money in part by weeding out fraudulent uses of social services, an unrealistic strategy based on an exaggerated problem. Politicians invoked the phrase waste, fraud, and abuse because no one could possibly be against those things, but for the same reason, those things would have been eliminated long ago if they were common and easy to spot....
Just in time to create a new Super Bowl ad, Crypto.com founder Kris Marszalek has made the priciest domain purchase in history, buying AI.com for $70 million, according to the Financial Times. The deal, paid entirely in cryptocurrency to an unknown seller, shatters previous records. (Broker Larry Fischer, who facilitated the sale, is presumably celebrating his good fortune.) Marszalek plans to debut the site during Sunday's big game, offering consumers a personal AI agent for messaging, app usage, and stock trading. 'If you take a long-term view ' 10 to 20 years ' [AI] is going to be one of the greatest technological waves of our lifetime,' he told the FT. The purchase rewrites the domain record books ' not that crypto industry itself is known for its restraint when it comes to spending. Previously, CarInsurance.com held the crown at $49.7 million (2010), followed by VacationRentals.com ($35 million in 2007) and Voice.com ($30 million in 2019). Other eye-popping sales include PrivateJet.com ($30 million), 360.com ($17 million), and Sex.com, which has sold twice for over $13 million each time, though its second owner went bankrupt trying to monetize it....
