In The Times, Lindsay Zoladz reviewed “The Great Divide,” a new album by Noah Kahan: “Of the most prominent American dude singer-songwriters currently walking in the shadow of Bruce Springsteen, Kahan sounds more convincingly tortured than Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff but less likely than Zach Bryan to get in a fistfight.” (Tracy Hayes, Dallas)
Also in The Times, Melissa Kirsch happened upon the northern lights: “Against a canvas of total darkness, something like an acid cityscape sprang up around our car, electric green towers and skyscrapers, spanning the space between the road and heaven.” (Katie Enos, Andover, Mass.)
Callie Holtermann profiled Jamie Ding, a New Jersey man who recently triumphed on “Jeopardy!” to the tune of more than $880,000: “When he won a game, he looked pleasantly surprised, as if he had been given an unusually good free sample at Trader Joe’s.” (David R. Wohl, Tucson, Ariz.)
And Dwight Garner counted the surviving full-time American book critics — and they fit on one hand. “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches,” he wrote. He expressed envy of England, which has many more newspapers that routinely publish book reviews: “The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.” Still, America has its scrappy freelancers and part-timers. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.” (Nadine Granoff, Washington, D.C., and Carolyn Villemez, Gaithersburg, Md., among others)
In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Deborah Aarts recognized how lucrative for bookstores lust is. “You could snicker at the heaving bosoms or thrusting buttocks of it all,” she wrote. “Or you could pay attention to an economic juggernaut that’s carrying the publishing industry on its (tautly rippled) back.” (Kathy Martin, Spring Valley, Ill.)
