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☆ Alice Munro, a Literary Alchemist Who Made Great Fiction From Humble Lives
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-14 | by ( Gregory Cowles | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The last story in her last book evoked her mother’s death. Does it seem reductive or limiting to derive a kind of artist’s statement from the title of that early book? Munro was hardly a doctrinaire feminist, but with implacable authority and command she demonstrated throughout her career that the lives of girls and women were as rich, as tumultuous, as dramatic and as important as the lives of men and boys. For a writer whose book titles gestured repeatedly at love (“The Progress of Love,” “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”), her narratives recoiled from sentimentality. You got the feeling that, if the GPS ever offered her a shorter route, she would decline.

Persons: Alice Munro, Munro, “, ”, Rose, Del Jordan, —, gestured Organizations: “ Boys, Yorker, GPS Locations: Ontario, Lake Huron

☆ What Amazon, the F.T.C. and C.I.A. Won’t Say When You’ve Been Scammed
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-16 | by ( Ron Lieber | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When New York magazine’s finance advice columnist dropped an article that went viral on Thursday about falling victim to a $50,000 scam, my heart skipped a beat. My own financial planner had gone to jail years ago, which I’d chronicled in a few columns. What would I have done if someone called and insisted that my children, in particular, were in grave danger? But what would any of those entities do if they thought that any one of us was actually a victim of some kind of identity fraud? What would they say, request and tell us to do?

Persons: I’d, Charlotte Cowles, ” Organizations: New York Times, Federal Trade Commission, Central Intelligence Agency Locations: York

☆ You have to read this story about a woman who was scammed out of $50,000
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-16 | by ( Katie Notopoulos | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

New York Magazine's personal finance writer just published a personal essay about how she was scammed. Believing she was talking to the FBI, she handed a shoebox with her $50,000 in savings in cash to a stranger. New York Magazine published an astonishing personal essay from one of their writers (a personal finance writer, no less!) Charlotte Cowles says she was scammed out of $50,000. Just read it: The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger

Persons: —, Charlotte Cowles, Dia Dipasupil, they'd Organizations: FBI, Service, New York Magazine

☆ José Saramago’s Childhood Memoir Inspires Companion Picture Books
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-18 | by ( Gregory Cowles | More About Gregory Cowles | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Early in José Saramago’s 2006 memoir, “Small Memories,” he tells readers that he briefly considered calling it “The Book of Temptations” instead. His reasons were characteristically elliptical and charming: something about Bosch, and sainthood, and the fat prostitute who “in a weary, indifferent voice” invited a 12-year-old Saramago up to her room. (He doesn’t report his answer, but given how candid the book is elsewhere, it’s safe to assume he declined.) In the end, though, he decided that the title “Small Memories” better suited the book’s contents: “nothing of great note,” in Saramago’s estimation; simply “the small memories of when I was small.”But for a great writer, of course, there are no small moments, and Saramago (1922-2010) was one of the best. Saramago’s memoir, which appeared in English translation the year before he died, is a winsome look back at his coming-of-age in the small village of Azinhaga and later in Lisbon.

Persons: “, ”, Bosch, Yolanda Mosquera, Margaret Jull Costa, Armando Fonseca, Costa Locations: José, Azinhaga, Lisbon

☆ A Life of Milton Friedman Seeks the Nuance in His Free-Market Gospel
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-15 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

MILTON FRIEDMAN: The Last Conservative, by Jennifer BurnsIn writing her new biography of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, known throughout his long life for his cheerful endorsement of deregulation and free markets, Jennifer Burns certainly had her work cut out for her. “As he increasingly came to symbolize a political movement,” she writes, “the nuance and complexity of his ideas was lost.”But even Burns has to admit that this attention to “nuance and complexity” was something that Friedman did a lot to discourage. The principles underlying such intricate cooperation were “really very simple,” he said. At the University of Chicago, where Friedman spent most of his teaching life, he edged out the leftist scholars clustered in the Cowles Commission for Economic Research, shrewdly getting the Rockefeller Foundation to pull its funding from the commission and finance Friedman’s workshop instead. Charismatic in the classroom, Friedman didn’t just teach students; he created converts.

Persons: MILTON FRIEDMAN, Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman, Friedman, ”, Burns, fashioning, baldheaded Friedman, Burns —, Ayn Rand —, shrewdly, Friedman didn’t, “, ” Friedman Organizations: Conservative, Newsweek, Productivity, Stanford, University of Chicago, Commission, Economic Research, Rockefeller Foundation

☆ 9 New Books We Recommend This Week
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-17 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Officially, there’s still a month of summer left — but who are we kidding? Happy reading. —Gregory CowlesCOUNTERWEIGHTDjunaThis novel by a pseudonymous Korean science fiction writer (and translated by Anton Hur.) envisions a space elevator built on a fictional Asian island by a multinational corporation. Corporate dominance and environmental havoc inspire protest and armed resistance, in a fast-paced cyberpunk story where agency and identity are always in doubt.

Persons: slouches, longue, noirish, — Gregory Cowles, Anton Hur Organizations: Corporate Locations: Korean

☆ Revisiting ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ Plus the Art of Literary Translation
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-07 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks to Juliana Barbassa and Gregory Cowles about the Book Review’s special translation issue, and to Tina Jordan and Elisabeth Egan about the novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” which was published in the U.S. 25 years ago this summer. What makes translation an art? Why do we see so many translations from some countries and almost none from others? Before coming to the Book Review, she spent years reporting and editing international news, and says, “I would often find myself turning to the fiction produced in that place” to really get a sense of it. Also on this week’s episode, Elisabeth Egan and Tina Jordan discuss “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” published in the U.S. 25 years ago this summer.

Persons: Gilbert Cruz, Juliana Barbassa, Gregory Cowles, Tina Jordan, Elisabeth Egan, Bridget Jones’s, Cowles, “, ”, Egan, Bridget Jones Locations: U.S

☆ Daddy, Are You an Influencer?
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-13 | by ( Charlotte Cowles | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“With Instagram, a lot of men were uncomfortable with putting up these edited, staged pictures and captions,” said James Nord, a founder of Fohr, an influencer marketing firm in New York City. And all of a sudden, here’s someone people trust and relate to, talking about new pants that they love. Dads also said they spent about 10 hours a week on household chores in 2016, an increase from four hours in 1965. (Alas, while dads are doing more, a major gender gap persists: Mothers spent about 14 hours a week on child care and 18 hours a week on housework in 2016.) “I think a big reason that what I was doing resonated was that I was honest and genuine about what I was experiencing.”

Persons: dadfluencers, ”, James Nord, TikTok, influencers, Dad influencers, Nord, “, Thomas Piccirilli Organizations: Pew Research Locations: New York City, United States, Monmouthshire, England

☆ 500 Miles of Father-Son Bonding
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Gregory Cowles | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

It’s a good setup for a travel memoir, ripe with opportunities to revisit the past and measure his own faded youth against the full flourishing of his son’s young adulthood. And McCarthy — who wrote about his Brat Pack years in a previous memoir and has established a respectable second career as a travel writer — makes the most of them. He muses about his failed marriage to Sam’s mother, and his current marriage to the mother of his two younger children. Raised Catholic, he duly notes the pilgrimage’s churchly roots but evinces little religious impulse himself. But it makes Sam a singularly frustrating travel companion at times, for his father as much as the reader.

☆ Spring training roundup: Nats score 8 in ninth to beat Astros
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-18 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

Blake Rutherford hit an RBI single, Cody Wilson -- who pinch-ran for Arcia -- hit a two-run double and Vargas singled home Wilson. The Yankees had 15 hits, led by Wilmer Difo (2-for-4, home run), Benjamin Cowles (homer) and Estevan Florial (2-for-4, three RBIs). Cardinals 16, Marlins 2Masyn Winn went 3-for-4 with four RBIs and Willson Contreras doubled and went 2-for-3 with three RBIs as St. Louis throttled Miami in Sarasota, Fla. The Cardinals collected 17 hits, with Dylan Carlson contributing two hits, two RBIs and two runs. The Marlins' Jerar Encarnacion went 2-for-3 with one RBI.

☆ This Isn't What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed to Look Like - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +25 min

Things have been difficult for her family, she says, but one thing she isn’t worried about: a midlife crisis, looming just over the horizon. One of our questions was about whether they had experienced a midlife crisis and how they would define the term. Many people said they felt they couldn’t be having a midlife crisis, because there was no bourgeois numbness to rebel against. “Who has midlife crisis money?”The traditional midlife crisis, as presented in popular culture, at least, unfolds amid suburban ennui. We just increase our Lexapro.”Was the midlife crisis ever even real?

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