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- Dominic Cummings: A Biography
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- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
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* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
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Category Archives: Tom Wolfe
‘An Unsentimental Education’: Merve Emre introduces ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’
Merv Emre writes for the April 24, 2025 New York Review of Books about the Tom Wolfe novel I am Charlotte Simmons. The introduction reads: “This essay appears, in somewhat different form, as the introduction to a new edition of … Continue reading
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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Tom Wolfe’s Status Authority
Characters in Tom Wolfe’s America do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as possession of the Right Stuff, mastery of invisible status codes, or responsibility for upholding … Continue reading
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The Tom Wolfe Trajectory
ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory reads Tom Wolfe as a man who mastered elite access, then watched the elite he chronicled harden and close ranks. Early Wolfe thrived by flattering no one while serving everyone. New Journalism worked because it gave … Continue reading
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Where’s The Definitive Tom Wolfe Biography?
ChatGPT says: A few people have tried to circle Tom Wolfe, but nobody has produced the definitive biography, and there are several clean reasons why. It’s not a mystery once you look at the forces involved. I. Wolfe controlled his … Continue reading
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Where’s The Tom Wolfe Biography?
Every few months, I Google for information about a forthcoming Tom Wolfe biography and nothing ever comes up. Joe Mysak explains in the Washington Post: The agent got back to me within a week, emailing the various responses. Nonfiction editors … Continue reading
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Tom Wolfe’s Favorite Russian Writers
Gemini says: Tom Wolfe cited several Russian writers as influences and inspirations, particularly those associated with the Brothers Serapion group, including Boris Pilnyak, and especially Eugene Zamiatin. He also expressed admiration for other Russian authors like Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, … Continue reading
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Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel
Grok says: Tom Wolfe’s essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1989, is a passionate and provocative call to arms for American writers to reclaim the realistic novel … Continue reading
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What Would Tom Wolfe See?
I ask Grok: “What would Tom Wolfe, born in 1930, at the height of his powers, observe about status markers and status striving in America today?” Grok says: Tom Wolfe, the sharp-eyed chronicler of American social hierarchies, would likely find … Continue reading
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NYRB: ‘The Illusion of the First Person’
In Merve Emre’s essay in the Nov. 3, 2022 edition of the New York Review of Books, she claims that the individual is a fiction. I grant that the individual is never only an individual. They have other identities. But … Continue reading
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Tom Wolfe and the Rise of Donald Trump: A Review of Wolfe’s Writings
Wight Martindale Jr. writes in 2018: * I believe that intellectually and, in some personal habits as well, Wolfe and Trump are similar. But they lived in separate worlds. Perhaps someday a doctoral student will show us that all along … Continue reading
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