Karl Ove Knausgaard

Thursday

Cockburn

A slobbering WIRED interview with Mayor Pete, DC’s most ‘voluminous mind’

Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg may just be the smartest man in DC, likely even a card-carrying Mensa member, according to a fawning WIRED interview published Thursday.  Virginia Heffernan, a contributor to the magazine, came to this dazzling conclusion when she sat down to speak with Mayor Pete “in his undernourished corner office one afternoon in early spring.”  “I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers,” she recalled. Cockburn, however, thinks the people of East Palestine would like it to take up slightly more mental headspace.  Heffernan is right, however. Buttigieg does hold much of his mind’s “functionality in reserves.

pete buttigieg wired

Thursday

John Phipps

Our Struggle is the worst idea ever for a podcast — and it’s great

Our hosts are Lauren and Drew and they want to talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or rather, they want to talk around Knausgaard. Or to talk through Knausgaard, towards the sense of what the Knausgaard phenomenon means. Or, it sometimes seems, they want to talk about everything but Knausgaard — cigarettes, Constance Garnett, the history of literary criticism, to what extent hotness is a function of tallness, Clarice Lispector, media hype, backlash, cancel culture, sneakers, Gen X, how Geoff Dyer got where he did — until the only territory left uncovered by the conversation is Knausgaard himself, described only through omission, in negative outline, raising yet another cigarette to his smoldering, craggy face.

knausgaard struggle