Making a living as a writer has always been an elusive pursuit. The competition is fierce. The measures of success are subjective. Even many people at the top of the profession can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney recalls in his evocative new memoir, “told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers.”

In spite of these red flags, countless people set out on this path. One lifeline, if you’re lucky enough to find it, is mentorship. Literary mentors offer the conventional benefits: perspective, direction, connections. But the partnerships that result are less transactional and more messy and serendipitous than those that tend to exist in other industries. While many people might think of such arrangements as altruistic or at least utilitarian, Pinckney’s book, which chronicles his tutelage under Hardwick, shows that artistic mentorships, especially literary ones, are far more fraught. Together, he and Hardwick weathered two intersecting careers, each with fallow periods and moments of success. This can be a challenge for creative, fragile egos—leading to a fair amount of projection, blame, and tension. And yet, the mentorships that endure allow for unpredictability and evolution.

[Read: My 150 writing mentors and me]

In his memoir, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan, the critic and novelist Pinckney writes about his coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s under the spell of two great lions of 20th-century American letters, Hardwick and Barbara Epstein. These “unrepeatable women” are best known as two of the co-founders of The New York Review of Books, but they had vibrant and influential careers beyond the magazine: Epstein as an editor and tastemaker (one of her earliest projects was editing The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank), and Hardwick as a critic, novelist, and professor.  

Other literary figures of the time (Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth) occupied the spotlight then and for decades to follow, but of late, Hardwick has enjoyed a posthumous revival, celebrated for her diligent and relentless work in a few recent books (Cathy Curtis’s dry but noteworthy 2021 biography, A Splendid Intelligence; Saskia Hamilton’s brilliant The Dolphin Letters, which collects Hardwick’s correspondence with her ex-husband, Robert Lowell; and two posthumous essay collections, one of which was edited by Pinckney). Epstein surfaces throughout these books as a trusted friend of Hardwick, and a superb editor to both Hardwick and Pinckney.

As an undergraduate at Columbia, with aspirations of becoming a poet, Pinckney took a creative-writing class with Hardwick. But it wasn’t long before Hardwick realized that her student’s talents rested not in poetry but in prose. Soon enough, she was inviting him for weekly dinners at her home. These gatherings became a thoroughly informal seminar of their own—many featuring visits from Hardwick’s friends and fellow writers. As formal academic boundaries dissolved between Hardwick and Pinckney, it became clear that the classroom was only one place to grow as a writer.

Hardwick’s role as Pinckney’s mentor was different from that as a teacher; nurturing talent was something more sacred and essential than instruction. “That writing could not be taught was clear from the way she shrugged her shoulder and lifted her beautiful eyes after this or that student effort … But a passion for reading could be shared, week after week. The only way to learn to write was to read,” Pinckney remembers. As a mentor, Hardwick helped fill the gaps in Pinckney’s education by offering book recommendations and fostering discussion, but her influence was also felt in deeper and subtler ways. By welcoming Pinckney, as an equal, into her home and among her friends, she helped him realize that there was a place for him in the world of letters. For a young man hungry to burst past the limits of his experience, there could be no better circle in which to insinuate himself. Hardwick benefited as well: The relationship was a means of reinvention and renewal, in which her ideas, too, could flourish.

But this wasn’t utopia. Throughout the memoir, Pinckney and his peers grapple with familial expectations and judgments, as well as with the threat of AIDS. New York had been an escape for these precocious undergraduates who kept their sexuality a secret from their families back home; mentors like Hardwick provided the answers and advice that they couldn’t get from their biological families. Hardwick says to Pinckney at one point: “You came to New York to be what you are … A mad black queen.” But these elders didn’t always fully grasp what young writers needed most.

Pinckney notes the friction that surfaced between Hardwick, an older white woman from the South, and himself, a young, Black, gay man from the Midwest, recalling instances when her language was insensitive or even offensive. Beyond these tensions, there was also Hardwick’s frustration at her own stalled ambitions, which seemed to manifest itself through admonishments of Pinckney: “Why are you writing ten pieces for seven hundred and fifty dollars when you could have had an advance of seventy-five hundred dollars for twenty pages?” she asks of Pinckney, who was making his living reviewing books instead of writing them. And yet, how much of that tough love was projection? Hardwick seemed to be directing her critical gaze inward, asking herself what she had to show for a life’s work.  

As their relationship progressed, Hardwick began to express insecurities—both in her role as a mentor, and in her career as a writer. “I think the worst thing that ever happened to you was meeting me,” she half-jokes to Pinckney, meanwhile encouraging him to “make your book salable” and not be “too literary all your life.” And when it came to writing another novel after her acclaimed Sleepless Nights, she confided her fears in him: “I’m so scared. What am I doing? Don’t be like me.” These episodes reveal the unique intimacy and fragility of the relationship. After the initial hierarchy of mentorship, clear authority fades as the partners trade off as teacher and student. The stronger of the two (years and experience being irrelevant in moments of self-doubt) can lead the other out of these rough patches. But too many instances of vulnerability can wear down a relationship.

Ultimately, about 390 pages into the memoir, Pinckney leaves New York City for Berlin on New Year’s Eve of 1987. The move doesn’t come out of nowhere. Throughout the book, Pinckney foreshadows the impact of AIDS on his community and the city at large, and describes how he and his circle lost countless friends in the 1980s. At this point, his window as a precocious young writer was closing as well, with no published book to show for it. It was time to push himself to a new level.

[Read: Black Deutschland: A melocomic novel of experience]

Rather than scrutinize his reasons for leaving New York, Pinckney simply marks his exit by abandoning his first-person narration for Hardwick’s and Epstein’s voices, presented in a selection of letters and interspersed with his own journal entries from around the same time. The letters are offered without context or analysis; they leave much unsaid of his departure, but reflect his mixed emotions about it.

Ultimately, this is not only a book about the drama of these deep, lifelong relationships. What Pinckney seems to want to elevate is their best elements: enthusiasm, forgiveness, support, continuity. Time trudges on, and from afar, Pinckney receives word of friends and colleagues who have passed away. With these losses, the memoir closes on a bittersweet note. Pinckney remembers Hardwick quoting the poet Marianne Moore: “After everything we have loved is lost, then we revive.” Literary mentorship offers the power of a phoenix. Even at a writer’s lowest point, the lifeline of conversation and intellectual exchange urges them forward.

“We all look like domestic terrorists now.”

Those are the words of Hope Hicks, one of Donald Trump’s most loyal aides, in a text she sent to Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff on January 6, 2021. They are a fitting epitaph for the Trump presidency.

Two years ago today, a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Seven people died as a result of that attempt. More than 140 police officers reported suffering injuries. One was pulled down the steps of the Capitol and then stomped on and beaten with a pole flying an American flag as the crowd chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” A makeshift gallows with a noose was built outside the Capitol, not as a generalized threat but to cow one man. “Hang Mike Pence!” the mob shouted. If the insurrectionists had had the opportunity, they would have. Most stunning of all, the president of the United States encouraged the bloodlust. According to one witness, Trump’s chief of staff said at the time that the president “thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think [the mob is] doing anything wrong.”

[Peter Wehner: The Trump abandonment has begun]

The many millions who watched the events unfold instantly knew that it would rank among the most anguished and horrifying days in American history: an effort to halt the peaceful transition of power. But it was worse and more wretched than we imagined.

We know this thanks to the extraordinary work of the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6 attacks. The bipartisan committee, which over the course of an 18-month inquiry held 10 public hearings, released a more-than-800-page report on December 22. It was the result of more than 1,200 witness interviews and a review of more than 1 million pages of documents that were obtained because of the issuance of more than 100 subpoenas. Americans learned the details of a deliberate, coordinated, violent, multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And the main actor was the nation’s president.

“The central cause of January 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report said. “None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him.”

Trump knew that his claims to have won the election were lies. That didn’t matter. He and his allies pressured state officials, high-ranking functionaries in the Department of Justice, and his own vice president to join him in his effort. They created a fake-elector plan. They invented legal theories to justify a coup. They tried to block certification of the election. But their endeavors didn’t stop there. Trump “lit the flame” that ignited the January 6 mob, in the words of former Representative Liz Cheney.

As the mayhem was ramping up on January 6, a colleague texted Hope Hicks, “Hey, I know you’re seeing this. But he really should tweet something about Being NON-violent.” To which Hicks replied, “I’m not there. I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.” The White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that, as aides and family were begging the president to take steps to stop the violence, she overheard Chief of Staff Mark Meadows telling White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, “He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat.” And in a text sent on the afternoon of January 6, when the violence was reaching an apex, Trump’s aide Robert Gabriel wrote, “Potus im sure is loving this.”

Frantic and deranged, Trump made every possible effort to upend American democracy. The violence, the bloodshed, was for him an added bonus.

The power of the Select Committee report—eight chapters, four appendices, thousands of footnotes—is not its eloquent language; it is its clarity and coherence; the firsthand testimonies, contemporaneous evidence, and stunning, intricate details; and its skill at narrating a story that, in the pre-Trump era, would have seemed not just improbable but surreal, even mad.

[Read: The biggest takeaway from the January 6 report]

One example: According to the report, on January 6, “when President Trump got to the rally site and could see the crowd for himself, ‘he was fucking furious,’ as Cassidy Hutchinson later texted [Anthony] Ornato. Hutchinson testified that just minutes before addressing the crowd, President Trump shouted to his advance team: ‘I don’t [fucking] care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the [fucking] mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Take the [fucking] mags away.’”

We learn from the report, too, about the rampant abuse of power, the Mafia-like ethos that defined the Trump presidency, the threats, harassment, and acts of intimidation aimed at those who stood firm and did their duty.

The Select Committee in a unanimous vote referred former President Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation and potential prosecution. The committee accused Trump of obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making knowingly and willfully materially false statements to the federal government, and inciting or assisting an insurrection.

The Select Committee’s report focuses on the protagonist in this malefic drama. That is understandable; Trump, after all, was the indispensable man in everything that unfolded. But not enough attention has been focused on the Republican Party, which was institutionally indispensable to what happened on January 6.

I say that not only because Trump was the leader of the Republican Party when he engineered the insurrection but because the GOP stood with Trump at every moment in his corrupt and corrupting presidency. Republicans defended him, supported him, empowered him, deflected attention away from him, and made excuses for him. For that reason, they are partly responsible for the insurrection.

But that wasn’t all. The weeks after the horror of January 6—when Trump was set to leave office defeated and disgraced—would have been the obvious time for the Republican Party to finally break with him. But it didn’t. (Even Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, understood what had happened. He texted on the evening of January 6 that the day’s events were the result of a “sitting president asking for civil war.”)

Only hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, 147 Republicans in the House and Senate voted to overturn the election results. Only seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump on the impeachment charge of inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; 17 were needed. (A conviction would have barred Trump from ever again seeking the presidency.) And on January 28—only 15 days after House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said that Trump “bears responsibility” for the violent assault on the Capitol—McCarthy visited the former president in Mar-a-Lago to genuflect before him. McCarthy believed that staying close to Trump was essential for him to become House speaker, a dream that remains in doubt.

But even that wasn’t the end of the offenses. Because the Republican Party maintained a cultlike devotion to Trump, at least until the disastrous results of this year’s midterm elections, it decided to criticize the Select Committee’s investigation and impede its work where possible, including ignoring subpoenas to testify. That was expected, I suppose, because during the Trump era, the GOP was a battering ram against truth and reality.

Republicans’ opposition to the January 6 committee wasn’t based on good-faith concerns; they wanted to keep shrouded all the ugliness that led up to and culminated in the insurrection. Republicans wanted a cover-up. What they got instead was one of the most effective and consequential congressional committees in history, one whose work will be known and studied generations from now.

At 6:01 p.m. on January 6, with the day’s carnage behind him, Trump issued his last tweet of that day.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he wrote. “Go home with love & in peace.” Trump ended with this admonition: “Remember this day forever!”

We will, just not in the way Trump and his party want us to.

“We all look like domestic terrorists now.”

Those are the words of Hope Hicks, one of Donald Trump’s most loyal aides, in a text she sent to Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff on January 6, 2021. They are a fitting epitaph for the Trump presidency.

Two years ago today, a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Seven people died as a result of that attempt. More than 140 police officers reported suffering injuries. One was pulled down the steps of the Capitol and then stomped on and beaten with a pole flying an American flag as the crowd chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” A makeshift gallows with a noose was built outside the Capitol, not as a generalized threat but to cow one man. “Hang Mike Pence!” the mob shouted. If the insurrectionists had had the opportunity, they would have. Most stunning of all, the president of the United States encouraged the bloodlust. According to one witness, Trump’s chief of staff said at the time that the president “thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think [the mob is] doing anything wrong.”

[Peter Wehner: The Trump abandonment has begun]

The many millions who watched the events unfold instantly knew that it would rank among the most anguished and horrifying days in American history: an effort to halt the peaceful transition of power. But it was worse and more wretched than we imagined.

We know this thanks to the extraordinary work of the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6 attacks. The bipartisan committee, which over the course of an 18-month inquiry held 10 public hearings, released a more-than-800-page report on December 22. It was the result of more than 1,200 witness interviews and a review of more than 1 million pages of documents that were obtained because of the issuance of more than 100 subpoenas. Americans learned the details of a deliberate, coordinated, violent, multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And the main actor was the nation’s president.

“The central cause of January 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report said. “None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him.”

Trump knew that his claims to have won the election were lies. That didn’t matter. He and his allies pressured state officials, high-ranking functionaries in the Department of Justice, and his own vice president to join him in his effort. They created a fake-elector plan. They invented legal theories to justify a coup. They tried to block certification of the election. But their endeavors didn’t stop there. Trump “lit the flame” that ignited the January 6 mob, in the words of former Representative Liz Cheney.

As the mayhem was ramping up on January 6, a colleague texted Hope Hicks, “Hey, I know you’re seeing this. But he really should tweet something about Being NON-violent.” To which Hicks replied, “I’m not there. I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.” The White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that, as aides and family were begging the president to take steps to stop the violence, she overheard Chief of Staff Mark Meadows telling White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, “He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat.” And in a text sent on the afternoon of January 6, when the violence was reaching an apex, Trump’s aide Robert Gabriel wrote, “Potus im sure is loving this.”

Frantic and deranged, Trump made every possible effort to upend American democracy. The violence, the bloodshed, was for him an added bonus.

The power of the Select Committee report—eight chapters, four appendices, thousands of footnotes—is not its eloquent language; it is its clarity and coherence; the firsthand testimonies, contemporaneous evidence, and stunning, intricate details; and its skill at narrating a story that, in the pre-Trump era, would have seemed not just improbable but surreal, even mad.

[Read: The biggest takeaway from the January 6 report]

One example: According to the report, on January 6, “when President Trump got to the rally site and could see the crowd for himself, ‘he was fucking furious,’ as Cassidy Hutchinson later texted [Anthony] Ornato. Hutchinson testified that just minutes before addressing the crowd, President Trump shouted to his advance team: ‘I don’t [fucking] care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the [fucking] mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Take the [fucking] mags away.’”

We learn from the report, too, about the rampant abuse of power, the Mafia-like ethos that defined the Trump presidency, the threats, harassment, and acts of intimidation aimed at those who stood firm and did their duty.

The Select Committee in a unanimous vote referred former President Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation and potential prosecution. The committee accused Trump of obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making knowingly and willfully materially false statements to the federal government, and inciting or assisting an insurrection.

The Select Committee’s report focuses on the protagonist in this malefic drama. That is understandable; Trump, after all, was the indispensable man in everything that unfolded. But not enough attention has been focused on the Republican Party, which was institutionally indispensable to what happened on January 6.

I say that not only because Trump was the leader of the Republican Party when he engineered the insurrection but because the GOP stood with Trump at every moment in his corrupt and corrupting presidency. Republicans defended him, supported him, empowered him, deflected attention away from him, and made excuses for him. For that reason, they are partly responsible for the insurrection.

But that wasn’t all. The weeks after the horror of January 6—when Trump was set to leave office defeated and disgraced—would have been the obvious time for the Republican Party to finally break with him. But it didn’t. (Even Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, understood what had happened. He texted on the evening of January 6 that the day’s events were the result of a “sitting president asking for civil war.”)

Only hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, 147 Republicans in the House and Senate voted to overturn the election results. Only seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump on the impeachment charge of inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; 17 were needed. (A conviction would have barred Trump from ever again seeking the presidency.) And on January 28—only 15 days after House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said that Trump “bears responsibility” for the violent assault on the Capitol—McCarthy visited the former president in Mar-a-Lago to genuflect before him. McCarthy believed that staying close to Trump was essential for him to become House speaker, a dream that remains in doubt.

But even that wasn’t the end of the offenses. Because the Republican Party maintained a cultlike devotion to Trump, at least until the disastrous results of this year’s midterm elections, it decided to criticize the Select Committee’s investigation and impede its work where possible, including ignoring subpoenas to testify. That was expected, I suppose, because during the Trump era, the GOP was a battering ram against truth and reality.

Republicans’ opposition to the January 6 committee wasn’t based on good-faith concerns; they wanted to keep shrouded all the ugliness that led up to and culminated in the insurrection. Republicans wanted a cover-up. What they got instead was one of the most effective and consequential congressional committees in history, one whose work will be known and studied generations from now.

At 6:01 p.m. on January 6, with the day’s carnage behind him, Trump issued his last tweet of that day.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he wrote. “Go home with love & in peace.” Trump ended with this admonition: “Remember this day forever!”

We will, just not in the way Trump and his party want us to.

The experience in the 1990s of trying to introduce “Sesame Street” to Russia offers valuable insights into the Russian mind.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Congressman Kevin McCarthy’s failure this week to win the vote to succeed Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House has only driven home the immense sway she held in the position. As our staff writer Franklin Foer writes, her stepping down from the role marks the twilight of the Democrats’ “ruling troika” of elders, which also includes Senator Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden. Although critics deride this so-called gerontocracy in government, Frank predicts we’ll soon miss it. I called him to find out more.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

No tears for Kevin McCarthy The inflated risk of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest How worried should we be about the XBB.1.5 variant? Greed for Legacy

Kelli Korducki: Why did Nancy Pelosi’s leadership handoff get you thinking about the merits of age in political office?

Frank Foer: As a politician who I’ve watched over an extended period of time, she’s the person that best knew how to wield power; I haven’t, in my lifetime, known a politician who’s better at getting stuff done than Nancy Pelosi. And I think that she kept getting better at it as she went. A lot of the time, when people seem to be hanging on to a job—and for a good chunk, I also thought that she was hanging on to her job—she just kept becoming effective in new and different ways.

Kelli: Do you think that’s a function of time and experience more than Nancy Pelosi being a really sharp and gifted politician?

Frank: She’s gifted, no doubt. But, you know, we had this brief moment in time that has just ended where there were three senior-citizen politicians [Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden], all of whom had or are having the best moments of their career at their very end. And I think that they did much better than anybody expected or than they had any right to do, given the circumstances that they were in. And I started thinking about patience as a leadership virtue but also, in the corollary to that, how to play a long legislative game. I felt like the lesson of the past two years is that the Democrats could have easily crumbled into despair and ruin, but that trio figured out how to pull off major wins, kind of at the last minute.

Kelli: And then, on the flip side, you have this week’s spectacle with Kevin McCarthy, who’s now lost nine consecutive votes to take over as House speaker.

Frank: McCarthy has been in leadership a long time. He has plenty of experience. But even a leader with the skills of Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t be able to manage a caucus filled with so many vile figures and ill-intentioned mischief makers.

Kelli: You write that aging politicians either become NIMBYs beholden to lobbyists or shrewd in getting stuff done. In your view, what informs the direction they’ll take?

Frank: Politicians can be greedy in different ways. Some are greedy for their careers as they experience it. And those are the people who become power-mad or venal. And then there are politicians who become greedy for their legacies, who I think worry more about how they’ll be perceived when it’s all said and done.

This may be a simplistic bifurcation, but I think that there’s almost a divide in the way that people ponder the meaning of their own lives and what they hope to extract from it. And I think it’s something that probably translates into the world outside of politics.

Kelli: You note in your essay that the last Congress passed a lot of forward-thinking legislation, and that this contradicts the idea that older legislators might not be so interested in risking political capital to secure a future they won’t be around to experience.

Frank: Yeah. And to me, the measure of that is what they did on climate. Our recently departed [from The Atlantic] colleague Robinson Meyer wrote a great piece about how the Inflation Reduction Act is one of the more underrated pieces of recent policy, that it’s this sweeping set of measures that are meant to bring the American economy into the age of sustainability. That’s the thing that I judged this Congress on most; I was worried that if they didn't act on climate now, that nothing would happen for a decade, and the planet would’ve lost this huge opportunity. But by seizing the moment on climate with this bill, they created the chance for the United States to be an incredibly active leader in climate diplomacy, so we now have the moral authority to lead on climate.

Kelli: You close your essay on Pelosi’s Democratic heir apparent, Hakeem Jeffries, who signals “the thrilling possibility of the nation’s first Black speaker.” What do you anticipate for Jeffries and the new generation of leaders?

Frank: I think Congress is a very specific institution. What’s interesting about Pelosi and Schumer is that I don’t think anybody would regard them as especially good public communicators—and that’s really, I think, the fundamental way in which politicians are conventionally judged. It’s like, how do they do on television, or how do they do when delivering big speeches? And they would both get very bad marks on that score. But what they were good at, or what they are good at, is understanding the interests and careers and psychology of all of the members in their caucuses. And I think that that’s a power structure that doesn’t really ever change. There are always new complexities that enter into that sort of people management, because you always have fresh sets of people coming into the Congress.

But, you know, my guess is also that Hakeem Jeffries has been part of Pelosi’s leadership crew for a bit now, and I think that he’s probably studied her as he’s prepared to take on this job, which people knew for a while that he was going to assume. So it’s my hope that he gets good at all the things that she was good at, and that it’ll just take a bit of hard-won experience for him to get there.

Related:

The Nancy Pelosi problem (2018) Why do such elderly people run America? (2020) Today’s News Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to observe a 36-hour cease-fire in Ukraine for Orthodox Christmas. A senior Ukrainian official dismissed the move as a “propaganda gesture.”   Pope Francis presided over the funeral of former Pope Benedict XVI. The man accused of killing four University of Idaho students was booked on four counts of murder and one count of burglary last night. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for January 12. Evening Read (Jan Buchczik)

How We Learned to Be Lonely

By Arthur C. Brooks

Communities can be amazingly resilient after traumas. Londoners banded together during the German Blitz bombings of World War II, and rebuilt the city afterward. When I visited the Thai island of Phuket six months after the 2004 tsunami killed thousands in the region and displaced even more, I found a miraculous recovery in progress, and in many places, little remaining evidence of the tragedy. It was inspirational.

Going from surviving to thriving is crucial for healing and growth after a disaster, and scholars have shown that it can be a common experience. Often, the worst conditions bring out the best in people as they work together for their own recovery and that of their neighbors.

COVID-19 appears to be resistant to this phenomenon, unfortunately. The most salient social feature of the pandemic was how it forced people into isolation; for those fortunate enough not to lose a loved one, the major trauma it created was loneliness. Instead of coming together, emerging evidence suggests that we are in the midst of a long-term crisis of habitual loneliness, in which relationships were severed and never reestablished. Many people—perhaps including you—are still wandering alone, without the company of friends and loved ones to help rebuild their life.

Read the full article.

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Read. “Jacob and Esau,” a poem by Carl Dennis.

“If this was the kind of fairness available / Inside the family, what could he hope for / From the world outside?”

Watch. Work through our list of 13 feel-good TV shows to watch this winter.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Frank recommends two recent pieces of media about Christopher Lasch, an “intellectual historian/social preacher who was a gigantic figure in the ’70s and ’80s and continues to be revered by both the Trump right and the socialist left.” The first is an essay in Jacobin by the critic Christian Lorentzen, which Frank says does a good job of explaining the origins and endurance of Lasch’s strange fandom. The second, Frank explains, is “a great recent episode of my favorite podcast, Know Your Enemy, about Lasch’s masterpiece The True and Only Heaven. That’s one of my favorite books about American politics. If you want to understand the deeper origins of populism and the deeper problems with liberalism, it’s the place to begin.”

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

There have been 11 votes in three days and still no Speaker of the House elected, an unprecedented scenario in modern-era American politics.