The partnership of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is beautifully anachronistic. As writer and editor, respectively, they have together produced 4,888 pages over the course of 50 years, including the multivolume, still unfinished saga that is Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. A lasting collaboration of this sort is impossible to imagine in today’s publishing world of constant churn. Then there’s their method: Caro puts on a dark suit every day, writes his drafts out in longhand, and copies them onto carbon paper using his Smith Corona typewriter, after which Gottlieb marks them up with a pencil—like a couple of cobblers still making shoes with an awl. Whatever deal Caro got from Gottlieb and Knopf in the 1970s, it has allowed him to work monastically on this biography project seemingly without any other source of income. As Caro’s longtime agent, Lynn Nesbit, says of the arrangement in Turn Every Page, a new documentary about Caro and Gottlieb, “I doubt that it could ever happen again.”

But there’s something else about the relationship that gives a glimpse into another era: The two don’t seem to like each other all that much.

They bicker all the time, about every comma, period, and semicolon. Actually, don’t even get them started on semicolons. Gottlieb refers to a “civil war” that took place over the punctuation mark’s usage. The flintiness about every little thing is part of their shtick. “He does the work. I do the cleanup. Then we fight,” Gottlieb says in the film.

[Robert A. Caro: The years of Lyndon Johnson]

The documentary is the creation of Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie, who was always curious about this “mysterious relationship.” Although she grew up in a house full of writers, she didn’t meet Caro until her father’s 80th birthday—he and Caro don’t hang out. Caro was reluctant at first about taking part in the movie and did so only on the condition that he never be interviewed in the same room as Gottlieb. Told this, Gottlieb wolfishly smiles, saying, “Who could blame him?” Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon have nothing on these guys.

Most of the film is propelled by the actuarial problem of whether Caro, 87, and Gottlieb, 91, will live long enough to finish the fifth and final volume of the Johnson biography. Their curmudgeonly attitude toward each other is presented as a quirk of character. Two old men, perfectionists, set in their ways.

But the intense friction also defines their relationship. One of their first jobs, back in the 1970s, was cutting The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, from an insane 1,050,000 words to a still pretty insane 700,000. They both describe the process as a grueling yearlong combat with lots of stalking out of rooms. “Looking back at my life, I don’t think anything was harder than that,” Caro says. There would be other battles, like the one over a long section on the history of grass in Texas Hill Country, in the first volume of the Johnson biography, that Gottlieb wanted to cut—“a tremendous battle, an angry, angry battle” is how Caro, who ended up on the losing side, describes it. Gottlieb just thought there were too many words about grass: “It was not that I was trying to tear his bleeding heart out of his chest or out of his book.” Other skirmishes have taken place over the use of specific words; the verb looms is a sore point.

Many of these fights seem to boil down to a question of how much to trust the reader. The insecure writer—a.k.a. every writer—worries that their ideas won’t come across clearly, so they overcompensate. The editor’s job is to push back. As Gottlieb puts it, “Bob always wants to make sure that the reader has really got it. And I have maybe more faith in the reader, because that’s what I am, a reader. I got it.”

Gottlieb is a legend, an editor who has worked with, among others, Toni Morrison and Joseph Heller (if not for Gottlieb’s intervention, he tells us, Catch-22 would have been Catch-18). Where Caro is all crystallized focus, sitting down to a day in the sterile Johnson archive with a big smile on his face, Gottlieb is rangy and eccentric, showing off his enormous collection of plastic women’s handbags. The editor is also the more voluble and philosophical of the two. His work, Gottlieb says, is fundamentally “a service job,” but that doesn’t mean he is “ego-less.” On the contrary: “You need a strong ego, because there has to be an equivalence of strength.”

[Read: How to make a bestselling book]

What feels most unique about seeing these two circle each other like aging boxers is the idea that a book can be born from a power struggle. We don’t really think about culture like this anymore. Maybe a combative collaboration of this sort simply can’t exist in the same way it once did, in the age of super-editors such as Gordon Lish—and in most cases, maybe that’s for the best. But the Gottlieb-Caro dynamic feeling like such an artifact doesn’t just have to do with everyone being nicer now. The publishing industry has changed in fundamental ways, becoming more corporate and much less willing to take risks on difficult writers and difficult books. For many editors (though not all), the job of competitively acquiring new titles takes up more and more attention, leaving less room for actual editing. Some of this work happens before a book is even sold—by agents fine-tuning a manuscript as they prepare to put it on the market, or by independent editors whom authors themselves have to hire. It’s safe to say that the days of an editor taking a year to haggle over every comma with a writer so they can cut a book down by 350,000 words are over.

The fighting is not the point, of course. Underneath the simmering antagonism, what comes across is how much Gottlieb and Caro care. Behind the incessant back-and-forth is an obsessiveness about getting it right. Here is Gottlieb on Caro, though it could be vice versa: “The great thing about Bob is also the maddening thing about Bob. Everything is of total importance—the first chapter of the book and a semicolon. They’re of equal importance, and he can be equally firm, strong, emotional, irrational about any of them. I’m like that too; it takes one to know one.”

My only problem with Turn Every Page is its ending. Lizzie Gottlieb finally gets her shot: The Bobs agree to let her into the room to film them as they sit over the manuscript pages together, each with a pencil in hand (though only after a hilarious, telling few moments when they can’t find an actual pencil in the Knopf offices). The scene is captured without audio—because it’s “private,” insists Caro—and is meant to be sweet, two pairs of liver-spotted hands working together to the strains of Chet Baker’s “Do It the Hard Way.” But it doesn’t feel right. I would have preferred to watch them arm wrestling.

Police in El Paso, Texas, announced Wednesday they detained a 27-year-old man who allegedly harassed migrants and pointed a gun at them on New Year's Eve, but the man has not been formally charged yet nor have police released his name.

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If you think the crisis of American democracy is over, the circus in the House should remind you that a significant portion of the Republican Party has no interest in governing, policy, or democracy itself. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The economy is improving in three major ways. Electric vehicles are bringing out the worst in us. The dark pageant of the NFL A Fatuous Rebellion

Watching the messy filleting of Representative Kevin McCarthy’s career (and ego) over the past 24 hours has been undeniably entertaining, not least because the representative from California deserves it. McCarthy, a dull creature of the Beltway, tried to pander his way to power. Much like his lieutenant, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, he sold his soul to Donald Trump’s movement and expected loyalty in return. (Trump endorsed him for the job, but for a moment seemed to have second thoughts about backing a loser.) Ambition and opportunism are common among politicians, but McCarthy took it to new levels. He even sorted Trump’s favorite Starburst candies so that the “Toddler in Chief” could avoid the icky yellows and oranges. (I am not making this up.)

Maybe Stefanik and other grovelers deserve such a comeuppance even more, but McCarthy has built up a serious karmic debt. He once preened as one of the self-appointed GOP “Young Guns,” the trio of conservative up-and-comers who were going to lead a practical and policy-oriented Republican Party to a governing majority. Reality quickly intervened: Cantor was turfed in a 2014 primary by a Tea Party flash in the pan named Dave Brat, who was defeated in 2018 by an actual centrist Democrat, Abigail Spanberger. Ryan suffered through two terms as speaker before boarding the John Boehner Emergency-Exit Pod and bailing out of politics. McCarthy stayed and made the compromises he thought he had to make, which is how he ended up sorting candy with his staff.

As I said to my friend Charlie Sykes yesterday, if there is such a thing as Narcan for schadenfreude, I’ll need to keep it handy if McCarthy is actually defeated once and for all in his quest for the House’s top job. But McCarthy’s misery is secondary to the real story behind the hijinks of the Republican defectors tormenting their own leader. McCarthy and others have asked what the rebels want—but they do not understand that the rebels have no tangible goals. A significant part of the Republican Party, and especially its base, now lives in a post-policy world. Governing is nothing. The show is everything.

As I was writing this, Representative Chip Roy of Texas proved that the play’s the thing by nominating Byron Donalds for the speakership. Who? Donalds is a 44-year-old Republican first elected to the House in 2020. I’m guessing Roy nominated him simply to counter the nomination of Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic caucus, with that of another Black legislator. Roy even made a cringe-inducing speech, complete with a Martin Luther King Jr. quote, about the wondrousness of two young Black men vying for the speakership. It’s great television, right?

Unfortunately for McCarthy, it’s also great television to see the GOP leader lose his fourth vote for speaker, which he did in short order, with the same 20 votes for Jordan moving over to Donalds. The fifth and sixth defeats followed in quick succession.

The inane Kabuki taking place around McCarthy’s job isn’t really about debt ceilings or abortion or Ukraine—or anything else. If you think Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz or Andy Biggs are possessed of deep thoughts about any of these issues, you have already made the same mistake that brought McCarthy to this impasse. Gaetz’s big idea in politics is that—according to a Trump aide’s testimony to the House Select Committee on January 6—he should be given a blanket pardon for things he swears he didn’t do. (Gaetz has denied asking for the pardon.) Biggs is the high-minded Cincinnatus who suggested that the January 6 riots could be blamed on the FBI; Boebert ran a gun-themed restaurant back in Colorado and often says things that lead to debates not over policy, but over whether she is the most ignorant person currently sitting in Congress.

What all of these GOP members do seem to have in common is a shared belief that they should be in Congress in order to make other people miserable. Usually, those “other people” are Democrats and various people on the generic right-wing enemies list, but lately, the targets include the few remaining Republicans who think their job in Washington is to legislate and pass bills and other boring twaddle that has nothing to do with keeping the hometown folks in a lather, getting on television, and getting reelected.

Note, by the way, that the conspiracy-minded Marjorie Taylor Greene—herself a perennial nominee for, shall we say, the least intellectually incisive member of Congress—is backing McCarthy. Indeed, Greene and Boebert are now in a political slap fight with each other. Both women are playing to the same base, but Boebert’s district is far less safe than Greene’s, and so, as Ed Kilgore wrote recently, “it makes sense for her to pick a fight with Greene, or with one of Greene’s famously batshit bits of commentary.” Greene, meanwhile, can aim for more power by backing McCarthy. This would also explain McCarthy’s support from Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who slyly went to the floor to argue for electing McCarthy and then watched as McCarthy failed yet again because 19 votes were cast for—wait for it—Jim Jordan.

This is the best of all worlds for someone like Jordan, one of the most irresponsible members of Congress, who thinks his job as a legislator is to show up at hearings and Gish gallop the proceedings into chaos. He gets to support McCarthy and look like a team player, and then, no matter what happens, get the job he wants: chair of the House Judiciary Committee, where he likely intends to investigate Hunter Biden and impeach the president.

The Republican rebellion is rooted in a giant inferiority complex: We know we’re not popular, we know a lot of people think we’re jerks, but we’ll show everyone that we can paralyze this country and its institutions using the machinery of government. Democracy, process, lawmaking, and governing? All of that is for saps; doing it is how you end up becoming Eric Cantor or Paul Ryan. The GOP rebels have every intention of staying in Washington and staying in power—even if “power” amounts to little more than sitting in the wreckage of the Capitol and keeping warm by burning the furniture. Win or lose, McCarthy never had a chance at being a true master of the House.

Related:

The humiliation of Kevin McCarthy What if the House can’t elect a new speaker? Today’s News A “bomb cyclone” storm system is hitting California; flooding, mudslides, and damaging winds are forecasted for the state’s northern and central regions. The Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin remains in critical condition after experiencing cardiac arrest during a Monday-night football game. Rick Singer, the man behind the 2019 “Varsity Blues” college-admissions bribery scandal, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks whether sports are worth the physical risks.

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Evening Read (Getty)

How Children Conjure a Snow Day

By Kate Cray

Snow days felt magical when I was a child—and not just because of the wonder of waking up to a world transformed or the gift of a day without school. They felt magical because I believed that I had helped to conjure them.

As soon as the forecast hinted at snow, my brothers and I would get to work. First came the ice cubes, upended from their trays and flushed down the toilet, one for each inch of snow. Then our pajamas, put on early (for good measure) and inside out (no matter how itchy the seams). Finally, three spoons, selected with care, stowed under each of our pillows. We knew our classmates had also followed these steps, because we’d all game-planned together at recess the day before. And, chances were, so had other students in schools across the district—maybe even the state, depending on the reach of the storm. We were joining an army of children who for generations, armed with nothing but household supplies, have believed they could change the weather.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

We have long been living in an age of remarkable choices in television. Although it’s customary to follow that observation by name-checking the classics—The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Wire, among others—let me draw your attention to the strange gem that is Slow Horses, now streaming on Apple TV+. Based on the novels by Mick Herron, Slow Horses follows the adventures of a group of people in British intelligence who are most decidedly not James Bond. They’re losers, including the boss, a chain-smoking, slovenly drunk played with such shabby authenticity by Gary Oldman that you can almost smell him through the screen. They all work at Slough House, a kind of purgatory for MI5 agents who have somehow screwed up. (Bond worked for the more glamorous MI6, which is like the CIA; MI5 is domestic intelligence, something like the American FBI.)

What I like best about Slow Horses is that it portrays intelligence work far more realistically than a show like the much-beloved The Americans, which was, I admit, fun, but mostly silly. The intelligence business, as people who have done it can tell you, is a grind, involving, as someone once said of police work, hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Think of the difference between The Americans and Slow Horses as something like the difference between The Godfather and Goodfellas. The former makes you want to be a gangster; the latter reminds you that in reality, life in the mob is misery. Slow Horses is a challenging show with intricate plots, and be warned: It cuts no slack for Americans who might have trouble with mumbly British accents or espionage slang. (Helpful hint: A “Joe” is an agent, not someone named Joe.)

— Tom

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Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.