Sublime

the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

America had once been an archipelago of small towns in which hierarchy commanded deference and local opinion bounded behavior. But the country’s extraordinary social and geographic mobility was creating a horizontal society. When every man or woman is free to constantly recreate himself or herself, one never knows who one should be or, just as frig

Comment ne l’aurait-il pas fait ? L’Empire l’avait construit. Lui l’a influencé. Sinatra disait et faisait, apparemment, ce qu’il voulait. Libre et blanc et mâle, il pouvait être dissolu et drôle, contradictoire par moments, sans détour et joueur, parfois matamore, ou bien perdu ou hanté, séduisant, querelleur et même franchement bizarre – un homme

In any case, seven days after his filing, Flagler’s engagement to Mary Lily was announced in newspapers throughout the South. Flagler was seventy-one, Mary Lily Kenan was thirty-four, and the public and press reacted accordingly.

Y compris les bookmakers et les gangsters. L’un des plus célèbres d’entre eux, Meyer Lansky, surnommé « Mastermind of the Mob », l’un des fondateurs de Las Vegas et qui fut ensuite à la tête d’un véritable empire criminel, venait régulièrement manger cheese-cake et pastrami, seul, tranquillement, la nuit venue. Mais le fait de gloire de Wolfie’s, p

The message of many things in America is “Like this or die.”

— George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context, 1980

For a surprisingly long time, Sam’s spending on American elections had flown under the radar. Back in 2020, he’d sent $5.2 million to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign without anyone asking or even thanking him for it. He was Biden’s second- or third-biggest donor, and yet the campaign had never even bothered to call him. Since then, Sam had tossed

Who built palaces for his personal pleasure while schools decayed and his country’s health care system collapsed. Who maintained one of the world’s most expensive armies while he allowed his nation’s infrastructure to crumble. Who channeled resources to his cronies and political allies, allowing them to siphon off much of the country’s wealth for t