Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Spencer Klavan reviews “The Odyssey.” Joseph Epstein marks the 75th anniversary of “The Catcher in the Rye.” Joe Nocera sits down with magazine writer Rachel Aviv, who isn’t so sure her new book can break through our screen-addled minds. And more!
But first: Is everything we’re telling our young people wrong?
We live in an age obsessed with minimizing risk. Our institutions reward caution, young people delay commitment, and too many of our brightest college graduates are steered toward consulting, banking, and other well-worn careers where stability and security take precedence.
The problem is, nothing truly great is built that way.
In 1994, Canadian entrepreneur Ronnen Harary was 23, fresh out of college, and living with his mother in Toronto. He knew he wanted to start a business; he just wasn’t sure how. Then he came across a magazine ad for a quirky toy about the size of a softball, made from pantyhose, stuffed with sawdust and grass seed, and painted with a face. Soak it in water for a few days, and grass would sprout from the top like hair. It was called the Grass Head, and it was flying off the shelves in Israel.
“The spark hit me right there,” he writes in an exclusive excerpt from his new book, No Experience Necessary. “I was going to start a company to manufacture and sell Grass Heads in Canada.”
Three decades later, the company Harary co-founded, Spin Master, is worth about $2 billion and is behind some of the world’s most beloved children’s brands and toys, including PAW Patrol and Bakugan.
And the key to it all, he writes today, was starting the company when he was young.
“We didn’t have much money, and we had no real experience to speak of. What we did have was the promise of a road yet to be traveled, and the wide-eyed eagerness of three guys too young to be cynical about the world.”
“That turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to us.”
Read Harary’s case for betting on yourself in your 20s—and why every thriving civilization depends on young people willing to leap into the unknown.
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is packing in cinemas—and it’s no surprise, says Spencer Klavan. He’s already seen the movie twice, and in his review today, he argues that its best parts are those in which Nolan “simply tells the story of Homer’s original poem.” Critics were convinced it would be woke—that Nolan would infuse Odysseus’s journey with present-day obsessions about race and sex. He didn’t, says Spencer. Rather, the most striking thing about the movie is its faithful portrayal of the poem’s moral clarity. “Christopher Nolan was extremely smart—not to mention brave—to take Homer seriously.”
(For more on “The Odyssey,” read Daniel Mendelsohn’s masterful essay from last week about why the epic poem has endured and enchanted us for millenia.)
This week, J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” turns 75. Since its release, Holden Caulfield’s coming-of-age story has become a fixture of the American canon, its lines quoted and re-quoted by generations of young readers trying to understand themselves—or simply pass high school English. But according to Joseph Epstein, its usefulness ends there. “Many young readers will immediately recognize in themselves Holden’s internal confusion, frustration, and sense of alienation from the adult world,” he writes. In a blistering essay seven decades after his first encounter with the novel, however, he explains why the book is “far from rereadable.”
Is it possible to gush so much over the person you’re interviewing that you embarrass yourself? That’s the question Joe Nocera found himself asking this week, when he sat down to chat with renowned magazine writer Rachel Aviv. For years, Aviv has garnered national acclaim by telling messy stories with sharp psychological analysis and unparalleled clarity. In her new book, “You Won’t Get Free of It,” she explores the relationship between mothers and daughters with the same rigor. But can she still sell these stories to our screen-addled society? “I hope I can,” she tells Joe. “But I fear that it won’t happen because of the way that reading is changing.”
The digital revolution has made life easier in countless ways: Answers are a click away, and late-night cravings can arrive at your doorstep in minutes. But as we race toward a frictionless society, what are we losing along the way? For journalist Peter Coy, the answer is something he once treasured: the ability to wrestle with a hard text. As a young writer, “I read ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’ closely and patiently,” he says. “When I got stuck on a complicated passage, I powered through it; there was no other option.” More than 40 years later, that’s changed. In today’s Things Worth Remembering, Coy reflects on the 777-page masterpiece that explores what truly makes us human—and why we’d all benefit from hunkering down and reading it again.
Second Thought
This week on Second Thought, Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot sit down with writer Allie Rowbottom to dig into her new novel, Lovers XXX, set in the cocaine-fueled “golden age” of Los Angeles’s adult film industry. They discuss the evolution of pornography, from VHS tapes to OnlyFans—and why feminists remain deeply divided over whether porn liberates women or exploits them. Click below to watch the video, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And to keep up with all things Suzy, don’t miss her newsletter!
We’ve published a lot of stories worth catching up on this week, including Kat Rosenfield on what Olivia Wilde’s new movie says about polyamory, and Arthur Brooks on why artificial intelligence has no chance against the self-help industry. Plus, Nicholas Wyman tells the extraordinary story of how he discovered his grandfather was a hero of World War II . . .
How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our senior writer and editor Joe Nocera for his recommendations . . .
📺Watch: Star City, which just completed its first eight-episode season on Apple TV, is superb; it’s a dark imagining of life in a compound (Star City) that revolves not just around space flight and cosmonauts, but spies, backstabbing, and treachery. The show comes from the same producers behind For All Mankind, a series that has run for five seasons and takes as its premise that the Soviets have beaten the U.S. in the space race, and NASA is desperately trying to catch up. I would describe For All Mankind as “meh.” Yet when its producers decided to tell a similar story from the Soviet point of view, they caught fire. Here’s hoping Star City gets five seasons too.
📖Read: You will not read a more infuriating book this year than Catch the Devil, by the great criminal justice writer Pamela Colloff. It’s a shocking tale of a snitch named Paul Skalnik, whose vivid, and usually last-minute, testimony helped convict more than a dozen men who he claimed “confessed” to him before their trials began—despite their protestations that they had never met him. The book has a lot to say about what’s wrong with the criminal justice system, with one story in particular—about a man, likely innocent, who has been on death row for over three decades thanks to Skalnik—that is heartbreaking. Colloff’s confrontation with Skalnik as he nears death is itself worth the price of admission.
👂Listen: The finest audio storyteller in America is Dan Taberski. (Sorry, Serial.) Over the years, he has produced such classics as Missing Richard Simmons, The Line, and Hysterical. His latest, produced by Audible, is called Manifesto, and it’s about, well, manifestos. Long manifestos (the Unabomber’s), short manifestos (Luigi Mangione’s), political manifestos (Karl Marx’s), and angry manifestos (tons of them). Its guiding light is the famous phrase shouted by Howard Beale in the movie Network: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” How do you make a binge-worthy podcast about manifestos? That is Taberski’s gift.
Last but not least: As the World Cup comes to a close, feast your eyes on something beautiful: the Argentinian national team celebrating their second straight World Cup final.
That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.
