Hello Smarty, These Reads Are Too Hot for Annapolis!

BookWag Unleashes What the Naval Academy Can’t Handle: Didion, Dystopia, and Dangerous Ideas

Indie of the Week: Word in Greenpoint is the best little literary search engine in Brooklyn—plus, there’s a satellite in Jersey City. Photo: Word Bookstores.

Dear Wags,

Sometimes Substack feels like a damp and draughty Irish monastery, quietly sheltering the Book of Kells until the last Viking horde rampages through. There are so many interesting volumes tucked away here—our only problem is having less time than ever to read them.

Should we read Yascha Mounk’s interview with Francis Fukuyama about how history never ends? Or listen to Meghan Daum dissect our attachment to material things in the wake of the L.A. fires? Should we sit down with Jessica Yellin for a sober dissection of current events? Do we need The Ankler's take on the box office, or David Coggins on why you'll never go wrong with a navy blue wool tie? We love Virginia Heffernan for progressive indignation delivered with wit, and Andrew Sullivan for its spicy opposite. Our books team loves Publishing Confidential, among other stacks. The foreign desk zooms in on Tim Mak and Anne Applebaum. We could go on—and feel nearly compelled to, by the terror of leaving too many worthies out. If we haven’t name-checked you, we’ll hit you next time.

What distinguishes us in this zesty cioppino? We like to think it’s our Wodehousian faith in words—the perverse belief that writing itself still matters. That most people are not narrowly locked in on a single issue, but are delightfully curious about everything. We’re pleased to serve as your curators in the sprawling Museum of Life, and we approach the task with generosity, even if the algorithm wants something darker.

We will not tell you that fluoride in the water turns you into a zombie, that Churchill was the real bad guy, or that all the world’s woes can be explained by a neo-Marxist flowchart. When someone rails at us about “the system,” “the deep state,” “imperialism,” or “patriarchy,” our eyes tend to roll—not because these aren’t yeasty topics, but because jargon is a poxy substitute for truth. We’ve read the thesaurus, we’ve binged the podcast, we sat through the panel—and we still struggle to divine things as they really are. Orthodoxy, of any flavor, has a terrible way of steamrolling actual human beings.

If you’ve stuck with us this long, you know we’re committed to the individual—as the most marginalized interest group of all. People, powerful and powerless, are endlessly fascinating. They don’t just generate traffic-driving mayhem; they bring cello concertos, trashy reality shows, libraries, screwball comedies, and unmotivated acts of grace into the world. Yes, they commit horrendous crimes—but also moving gestures of dignity and resilience. It’s too easy to give up on them.

But we can’t. Other people are all we have. We still share a gorgeous planet with this confounding, cohabiting species. Our intricate civilizations, however compromised, offer more than another round of provocations. If we’re still here, even just for now—why not take a moment to marvel at it all?

With all due respect to Hamish McKenzie, Substack remains, for us, a writer’s medium. Yes, it’s growing into a vivid multimedia platform. And sure, almost everyone would rather watch or listen than read. We are all the TL;DR crowd now, slogging through history so momentous it scrambles our ability to comprehend it. But for those who come after us, there will be this vast digital archive. Some future historian will find us here—feisty, high-minded, low-humored, generous, vicious, prescient, deluded, confused. Pungently, poignantly human.

That, in the end, is what makes us marvelous. We still ask why. We still reach for meaning. We still read and write about all sorts of things. We take cheap shots and enormous risks. And whatever happens, there will be a beguiling, confounding record of it all.

Yours Ever,

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Notes to John by Joan Didion and We Tell Ourselves Stories: The Life and Essential Works of Joan Didion by Alissa Wilkinson

There will probably come a time when Joan Didion falls out of fashion, like Henry James. Eventually, the world she dominated will feel too distant for her mordant takes on the neurotic obsessions of 20th-century America—California, Hollywood, stardom, criminality, death—to fully resonate. And yet this tense American moment is uncannily Didionesque—politics and celebrity collide, and everything spins madly out of control. We’re going crazy—and occasionally waxing elegiac about it. Didion, who died in 2021, had a way of ferreting out the truth about us. As a country, America has never been as sunny as advertised. We’re wedged between slack reality and strenuous ambition, wrestling with aching loss.