Oops, You CC’d Us—Now It’s a Newsletter!

BookWag on Signalgate. Plus: Sarah Wynn-Williams, Colum McCann, Nell Zink, and More...

And in Brendan Behan’s footsteps, I danced up and down the street. That’s a Pogues lyric, class! Our Lit Magnet of the Week is the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI!), which celebrates Éire’s contribution to the English language.

Dear Wags,

How tangy for Washington, D.C. to have a good old-fashioned scandal—one that anybody, regardless of team jersey, can sink their teeth into. Who can’t relate to accidentally including exactly the wrong person on your text chain? A kajillion years ago, while deploying reporters to cover yet another celebrity meltdown, we oopsied and included that celebrity’s publicist. We can’t remember the “news” of that particular hour or even the benighted personality being covered, but we do remember the email we got from the rep! The good news was we hadn’t been snarky in our correspondence—which we have been known to be. The only thing to do was acknowledge the error—and add that we were merely doing our jobs, as best we could.

Is that so very hard? Granted, a Hollywood divorce isn’t quite the same as bombing Yemen. Then again, national security officials are supposed to deploy super-duper security measures when they discuss bombing Yemen—not use a group chat on a private messaging app that millions of nobodies, KGB operatives, and a few terrorists have access to. But really, if you’ve thrown caution to the wind and are discussing obliterating the Houthis (and bitching about the Europeans) on an unsecured text chain, and you realize you accidentally looped in the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, the only policy move is to declare: My bad.

That’s not happening, of course! Instead, we have National Security Advisor Mike Waltz rather preposterously insisting he never met Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, and that somehow the lightly grizzled journo hacked into his phone. Goldberg helpfully released the texts, which read like an Armando Iannucci script. Half of the Trump administration seems to have been on the chain—diplomatic envoy Steve Witcoff happened to be traipsing around Moscow. Where was the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard? She’ll get back to you.

Why didn’t they just use the skiff? Because none of us remember that sort of thing anymore—no matter how important we are, we all just blurt whatever we have to say on our omnipresent, brain-sucking phones. Also: these people trust some random app more than they do suffocating government safeguards. Which might make sense, if they weren’t… The Government.

In BookWag news, we are delighted to see that Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, wants to turn his august company into a super-hip-groovy-now kind of content creator. We do like that Mr. Manning, with all that pre-Raphaelite hair, looks like a nerdier Allman Brother. And he’s right, you know! Publishers should be doing more to lead the conversation around their books—promoting their authors as (ick, sorry) influencers, and not relying on a handful of out-of-work movie stars, zealots, and weirdos on the sidelines to give them the stamp of approval or sink their work.

But if publishers are serious, they’ll have to spend real money—not just do a couple of hostage videos with writers that will sink to the bottom of algorithmic gruel. We cringed a little when Manning’s ambitions were described as making Simon & Schuster the A24 of books. Ask yourself: who, outside the pretentious wedge of America that goes to the Angelika Film Center, even knows what the Bejesus A24 is? If the future of publishing is becoming like the independent studio that backed The Brutalist, Queer, and A Different Man, we may have more fine books very few people want to read.

Why not try for great books everybody reads and talks about? Our memo to Rapunzel over at Simon & Schuster—and everybody else—is: Go big or go home.

Yours ever,

Claude Laventure

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Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Buckle up, Silicon Valley! You almost certainly know about Wynn-Williams’s memoir and the attempts to squelch it. But here it is anyway—making all kinds of mischief. How canny to riff on The Great Gatsby with the title: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The author means to skewer not Tom and Daisy, but Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the rest of Meta’s move-fast-and-break-things crowd. Fillet them she does, though learning that Mark is a manchild surrounded by sycophants and that Sheryl may not be the lean-in avatar of the airport bookstore is hardly a shocker. The crappiness of toadying to big egos at Facebook is, in most ways, just the crappiness of working for a living. Still, it’s always fun to pierce the mythology that tech companies were somehow here for a higher purpose than maximizing shareholder value. The H.R. dirty laundry here is far less incendiary than Wynn-Williams’s contention that Meta made grotty compromises to ingratiate itself with China as it tries to win the A.I. race—perhaps misleading Congress in the process.

And we thought we were here for the friends! —Mae Holland

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Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Do not run away to a remote island; it never works out. McConaghy’s atmospheric thriller is set on a lonely rock between New Zealand and Antarctica, where widower Dominic Salt serves as wildlife steward, raising his three children in what appears to be a wilderness idyll. But rising sea levels are nibbling away at his paradise, and Dominic is also guarding a seed vault meant to ensure humanity’s survival in the face of climate catastrophe.