#jdheyman

I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour, but heaven knows I’m miserable now!

Dear Wags,

The other day, a stranger tossed off something that clung to the hem of our coat. “Being a victim,” said she, “has a certain attraction that’s difficult to resist.” What a pithy way to sum up the last decade or so of history! We have traded healthy individualism for narcissism, a most unsavory exaltation of the Self. There’s a primal vein of selfishness in all of us, but affluence, technology, and boredom have conspired to make it an irresistible force. We seem willing to trade almost anything — institutions, values, family, community, even sanity— for atomized egoism.

Dear Wags,

It’s Tim Walz Tuesday, so prepare be pummeled with trivia. Did you know Mankato’s silver fox makes a mean tater tot hot dish and collects specialty coins? Did you know he once staffed the Minnesota State Fair’s all-you-can-drink milk booth, which is an actual attraction and not a threat? He’s country enough to get under the hood of an International Harvester Scout, but cosmopolitan enough to explain it in Mandarin. His favorite drink is Diet Mountain Dew—buckle up for more Mountain Dew pandering! Best of all, the army vet is a reader—of geeky sci-fi novels and Eric Schlosser’s chilling nuclear history, Command and Control.

Self-Serving Political Memoirs are not Brat. Plus: Anne Applebaum, Dinaw Mengestu, Shalom Auslander, Siân Hughes, and More ...

Dear Wags,

July 2024 will go down in history as an epic month. In a handful of days, there’s been both an assassination attempt on the GOP presidential nominee and a shuffle at the top of the Democratic ticket. Somewhere in the middle of that mayhem, 39-year-old MAGA wunderkind J.D. Vance became Donald Trump’s running mate.

That was no surprise, but it got me thinking about political memoirs. We’re used to politicians promoting themselves through biographies. Kamala Harris published The Truths We Hold in 2019. Joe Biden produced two in recent years —Promises to Keep (2021) and Promise Me, Dad (2017). Barack Obama established himself as a generational leader with Dreams from My Father (1995). Trump, a reality star, not a reader, has passed on this publishing ritual—unless you count The Art of the Deal (1987) as his manifesto.