“Nick took the cork out of the grasshopper bottle and a hopper clung to it. He picked him off, hooked him and tossed him out. He held the rod far out so that the hopper on the water moved into the current flowing into the hollow log. Nick lowered the rod and the hopper floated in. There was a heavy strike. . . .”

There are two types of people in the world: adrenaline junkies and the rest of us. But even among adrenaline junkies, a spectrum of risk tolerance (or rather, risk pursuit) exists. . . .

Sometimes at the end of a long day, you just want to turn off your brain, turn on the old idiot box, and veg out. Over the past few years (I’m sure I couldn’t say why) I’ve found myself, more and more, repelled by serious TV fare and drawn towards what I’ll call fluff. . . .

Since I did a playlist of Beatles deep cuts last week, I thought it was only fair to do one this week for the Stones. . . .

After watching some of the new Beatles documentary, I realized that I had never really familiarized myself with much of their work. . . . So I decided to give the later albums a listen. . . . [I]f it makes sense to say that the Beatles have deep cuts, I’m discovering those deep cuts in my 41st year – better late than never!

But for lovers of language, what does it say about America today, that one of our greatest novelists eschews beauty in language? And isn’t this the difference between literature and mere entertainment, or in 2022, has the distinction finally collapsed? It’s not just beauty in language that Franzen eschews in Crossroads, moreover; it’s contemporary life altogether, as if he is retreating to the past, where his identity was formed, and thus where only there things make sense to him. . . .