Marksonalia

“I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.” Go and check out this fascinating profile of Ben Rhodes, the “Boy Wonder of the Obama Whitehouse,” who dropped out of his second year at NYU’s M.F.A. program after witnessing the attacks on September 11th to take up a life of international affairs and foreign policy. When asked about whom he would choose write the story of his work life, Rhodes picked novelist Don DeLillo: “He is the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.”

“Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat – and won. I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now.” Masha Gessen for The New York Review of Books.

What’s more staggering: the fact that After, a 25-year-old Texan’s “erotic One Direction fan fiction,” has been “read” online more than 800 million times, or the fact that Simon & Schuster has decided to pay “a six figure advance” for its publication rights? Oh, and there’s more. Billboard reports that United Talent Agency is “shopping the film rights as well.”