Let's write about how oligarchs are consuming publishing companies just because they can

 Opinion Guest Essay published in The New York Times

French Literature Is in an Uproar May 6, 2026

By Olivier Guez, a French writer who published five books at Grasset. His most recent book in translation is “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele.”

If you have never picked up a book in French, you might not ever have even heard of Grasset, and what it might mean to have its longtime chief executive Olivier Nora effectively guillotined by the rapacious right-wing industrialist Vincent Bolloré. 

And yet, in France, the news of Mr. Nora’s sudden departure from his post quickly flew beyond the borders of Parisian publishing and cultural elite circles. In the aftermath, over 200 writers — myself included — walked away from Grasset❗

This is not just a story about the French publishing industry. The evident struggle between Mr. Bolloré and Mr. Nora is a microcosm of the battle for cultural control that is taking place globally between the wealthy new right and the cultural old guard. Think Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. The abrupt change in leadership at Grasset, too, is a case study in the way members of the increasingly powerful ultra wealthy treat those who don’t think or see the world as they do.

A publishing house is not meant to be a propaganda machine. It is a place where conflict, doubt and nuance can, and should, coexist. Publishing houses are a hallmark of free and open societies: the nurturing and production of literature that explores the follies and the potential of the human condition.

Under the leadership of Mr. Nora, Grasset was the best of this ideal. The works of unapologetic feminist writers were placed on the shelf next to old-guard chauvinists, pro-Palestinian authors next to Zionists, male priests next to women rabbis, up-and-comers next to baby boomers, powerful people next to anti-establishment protesters. Grasset’s authors rarely agreed on much, but as the letter of protest we signed said, we have had — and still have — a common enemy: authoritarianism.

Grasset was just a tiny corner of the Bolloré financial empire. Nevertheless, losing Mr. Nora’s leadership is a sign of disdain among the powerful for a world of the recent past, one in which the public still accepted and cultivated contradictions, political complications, even conflict. It was not necessarily an enormously profitable world, but one where political opposites respected those who did not think alike, where knowledge itself garnered respect.

Mr. Nora, like the institution he led, was open and attentive to other people’s ideas. His weakness, if there was one, was immutable: his pedigree, which made him an easy target for the far right. 

Indeed, Mr. Nora is almost a caricature of the Parisian intellectual elite — his father was a political adviser to several major figures in French politics, and his uncle, Pierre Nora, was a longtime editor at another publishing house, Gallimard. Under Mr. Nora, Grasset maintained a pluralistic editorial policy.

Mr. Bolloré, by contrast, is the owner of a vast industrial conglomerate that has interests ranging from oil pipelines and energy storage to electric buses. 

Over the past several years, Mr. Bolloré has also been building a cultural empire, buying newspapers, radio stations, television channels and publishing houses. He acquired Grasset three years ago. 

As he picked up these levers of cultural power, he became editor, producer and distributor all at once. He is also, not incidentally, an extremely conservative Catholic. He has not only repeatedly brought outlets he has bought to heel by pushing the departure of people in important positions, replacing them with leaders apparently more loyal to him and his values. He has also leveraged his outlets to propagate fear and disseminate conspiracy theories about a decayed and decadent West, a Europe under threat from foreigners and egocentric old elites.

But Mr. Bolloré is, above all, a businessman: His cultural crusade is a very efficient moneymaker. His 24-hour news channel CNews — a kind of French Fox News — is the most popular news channel in France. Over the last two years, Mr. Bolloré also transformed Fayard, another historic French publishing house, into a largely far-right propaganda machine. 

Some of the most prominent figures of the French far right are now published by Fayard, including Jordan Bardella, the leader of the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National. The party is leading the polls for next year’s presidential elections.

We are opening our eyes rather late in France to the efforts of the right to assume cultural control, to determine the words we consume, the discourse in which we partake. The message of authoritarians everywhere is the same: Whoever isn’t with me is against me, and whoever won’t follow me will get the boot. The boss is always right, so he steamrolls his way through and imposes his worldview. He exerts his power. He demands absolute loyalty from his subordinates. The plutocrats have become oligarchs.

We are opening our eyes rather late in France to the efforts of the right to assume cultural control, to determine the words we consume, the discourse in which we partake. The message of authoritarians everywhere is the same: Whoever isn’t with me is against me, and whoever won’t follow me will get the boot. The boss is always right, so he steamrolls his way through and imposes his worldview. He exerts his power. He demands absolute loyalty from his subordinates. The plutocrats have become oligarchs.

Mr. Nora’s departure was not enough. Mr. Bolloré also went on to smear the authors of Grasset who signed the letter. To do so he wrote an essay in his own newspaper — Le Journal du Dimanche — where he disdainfully referred to them as the “small caste that believes itself above everything and everyone, and that co-opts and supports itself.” He claimed to differ on the publication schedule for a book by the French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal set by Mr. Nora, and on the scale of the longtime C.E.O.’s salary. And then he fashioned himself, a billionaire, as the defender of the millions of French who struggle to make ends meet.

Most writers in France are barely eking out a living; people here spend less and less time reading, same as everywhere else. Few authors live off their writing income and, apart from rare exceptions, they do not belong to the global elite.

Not so very long ago, men like Mr. Bolloré paid to achieve a veneer of culture and cultivated a certain notion of beauty: The barons of the Gilded Age endowed America with incredible cultural institutions. Recently, business tycoons François Pinault and Bernard Arnault built in Paris magnificent art collections now open to the public.

Now these pretenses are all but obsolete: The wolf no longer has to disguise himself as the grandmother to get his way. Oligarchs are no longer staying hidden. They are flaunting their power, destroying, exploiting, intimidating and getting richer than any group of people in human history. They show utter disregard for the world, and complete impunity. They believe they are invincible.

The Grasset affair is a French story, and Mr. Nora is just one man. But it is a warning to us all, to the democratic peoples of every country. It shows the threats that are in motion in our societies. 

Although our democracies are still open, for now. But for how much longer❓🔹

Let's write about Donald Trump's obsession with Catholic popes

Peace on Earth Department. published in the New Yorker magazine by Jane Bua:  Other pople who Donald Trump might have liked better than His Holiness Pope 

Donald Trump thinks Pope Leo XIV is "soft on crime". Meet some real tough-guy Pontiffs who might have fit the bill.

The other day, Donald Trump took to his Truth (Fake ❗)Social to complain that Pope Leo XIV, the new Supreme Pontiff from Chicago, has been “weak on crime.” The Pope preaches peace too much, Donald Trump said, which “does not sit well with me.” There have been two hundred and sixty-seven Popes in the history of Popedom; would any of them have measured up to the Trumpian's evil standards❓

Pope Urban VI, who Poped from 1378 to 1389, was as tough as they come. He was so tough that he arrested half a dozen cardinals, confined them in an old cistern, and tortured them, after hearing a rumor that they were plotting to get rid of him. (As Trump once said, “When somebody challenges you unfairly, fight back.”) Only one cardinal survived—smells like a snitch—and Urban was apparently disappointed by how little the other captive cardinals had screamed.

(Yikes❗😰) As far as tough guys go, Pope Stephen VI (896-97) is up there, too. Like many strong leaders, he hated his predecessor, Formosus. In the mid-890s, Formosus supported King Arnulf, the leader of the Franks, in his invasion of Italy, then crowned Arnulf Roman Emperor—despite there already being a Roman Emperor. Even after Formosus died, Stephen VI, his replacement, thought that the dead Pope hadn’t been sufficiently punished for this betrayal, so he exhumed Formosus’ body, dressed it up “Weekend at Bernie’s” style, and put it on trial. Formosus’ corpse was found guilty of violating papal law. It was also accused of perjury, as many men—dead, or President—have been. Perhaps Formosus was just the victim of a witch hunt.

Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) is another Pontiff who might have passed muster with Trump. Much like Donald Trump, he was a family man and a nepo baby. His uncle had been Pope and had personally made Alexander a cardinal. Then, when Alexander ascended to the papacy, he made at least nine relatives cardinals. He knew how to keep his family close—to God, of course. Even more up Trump’s alley, Alexander VI was a businessman. During his papal candidacy, he supposedly promised a rival cardinal multiple mules laden with bags of silver in exchange for supporting his bid. (“Leverage,” Trump has remarked. “Don’t make deals without it.”) It is said that, in 1501, Pope Alexander’s son Cesare, born of his chief mistress, Vannozza (“I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names,” Trump once wrote, of his romantic partners), threw a party that became known as the Banquet of Chestnuts. Fifty young courtesans attended, according to a journal entry from the time, “at first in their garments, then naked.” Then “chestnuts were strewn around, which the naked courtesans picked up, creeping on hands and knees between the chandeliers.” Trump loves a nice chandelier. His new four-hundred-million-dollar East Wing ballroom was supposed to have several gold ones, but a very weak judge has blocked construction.

Pope Benedict IX might have caught Donald Trump's evil fancy. At one point, he accepted a pretty sum to abdicate the papacy—the art of the deal. Benedict is also the only Pope in history to hold the office three times, so there’s a good chance he’s already on the President’s radar.

We also shouldn’t forget about Chief Pope, the L.A.P.D. (Los Angeles Police Department)  officer from “The Closer,” who’s not technically a Pope (or a real person) but is definitely tough. As is Olivia Pope, the D.C. fixer from “Scandal,” whom the show describes as a “gladiator in a suit.” It would have been better if she were an actual gladiator Pope, but you can’t have everything.

Or perhaps Donald Trump would have been satisfied enough with Peter, one of Jesus’ original twelve apostles, whom many consider to be the first Pope.  Saint Peter is famous for denying ever knowing Jesus. Trump, too, has denied association with people whose names start with “J.” There’s nothing tougher than that. Then again, the Bible says that as soon as Peter denied Christ, he “wept bitterly” in remorse, which is decidedly weak. Everyone knows real Popes don’t cry. ♦

Let's write about ethical dilemmas caused by legalizing physician assisted suicide and Medical Aid in Dying

The alternative to  Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) and Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) is hospice care.

Echo report by Chadwick Moore, senior reporter, for the New York Post interviewed disability advocate Heather Hancock who said, "Keep your ears and eyes open, especially if you have a disability or mental illness, or are in any way considered a disadvantaged or non-contributing member of society. Those are the people that are targeted. [Assisted suicide] is an effective way to get rid of those they deem draining the healthcare system. It’s not compassionate."❗😒😞😩😧😟😢

“'I was terrified. I couldn’t believe what was happening. They talked to me like I was putting a dog down', Fisher, 71, told The Post from her home in Ontario, Canada"

Echo report published by the New York Post and the Patients Rights

Debbie Fisher is advising New Yorkers to prepare their elderly relatives ahead of the state legalizing Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) this summer.

The Canadian’s elderly mother, Rita Busby, came dangerously close to being euthanized over a single sentence.

Her mom, who was active and independent in spite of her 93 years, ended up in the hospital after accidentally overdosing on a drug she was prescribed. Drowsy and not thinking straight, Busby had made an offhand comment to one of the nurses that she “wanted to die.” Hospital workers took her at her word.

Next, a Canadian government psychologist pulled Fisher aside to let her know they were preparing to euthanize her mother, a devout Catholic and lifelong Blue Jays fan.

Fortunately,  Fisher and her mom were prepared, as Busby had signed over Power of Attorney to her daughter. Now she and others in Canada — which legalized PAS a decade ago — are warning the Empire State of the “slippery slope” into a culture of coercive death which may be headed their way.

“My mom wanted to die, she didn’t want to be killed!” Fisher said. “If I hadn’t been there, and she hadn’t signed over Power of Attorney, who knows what would have happened”

It was a narrow escape and Rita lived for six more months — during that time she went bowling and to baseball games, attended a family reunion and mended strained relationships before dying naturally at home in 2019. 💙🦋

“People don’t understand there’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes [in hospitals] when there’s no one there to protect them,” said Fisher.

In the last ten years, an estimated 100,000 Canadians have been euthanized by their government 😟— about one in 20 deaths in the country in 2024, alone. (Maine Writer, it is statistically impossible for this number of assisted suicide to have been 100 percent legitimate. My strong suspicion is that a small percentage were motivated by personal ambitions related to the challenges caused by caring for a family member or for inheritance.)

“You just opened Pandora’s Box and the slippery slope will get very steep very fast,” Heather Hancock, 58, of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and who suffers from cerebral palsy, told The Post.

She now carries a laminated “do not euthanize” card wherever she goes.

“This is eugenics and this is genocide against the [disadvantaged],” she claimed.

Hancock is no stranger to death-pushers. She’s lost count of the number of times Canadian doctors have tried to coerce her into killing herself, she claimed, through Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD —the title given to their PAS program.

During one hospital visit, “the nurse on my ward looked at me and said, ‘You really should consider MAiD. You’re not living. You’re just existing,” she recalled to The Post.

She now carries a laminated “do not euthanize” card wherever she goes.

Hancock warned certain classes of New Yorkers may have to be vigilant going into heath care facilities. “Keep your ears and eyes open, especially if you have a disability or mental illness or are in any way considered a disadvantaged or non-contributing member of society. Those are the people that are targeted,” she said.
“[PAS] is an effective way to get rid of those they deem draining the healthcare system. It’s not compassionate.”
Major US medical groups strongly condemn PAS, including the American Medical Association, which warns in its code of ethics, “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.”
Fourteen additional states are considering legalizing PAS this year.

So far, no state has legalized euthanasia — the form of assisted suicide where a medical professional administers the lethal agent rather than being prescribed a deadly drug the patient takes on their own.

Between 30 and 50 percent of patients prescribed the killing concoction don’t end up taking it, studies show, whereas booking a euthanasia appointment has a much higher kill rate. 

Virtually all assisted suicides in Canada are now carried out by euthanasia.

“It makes it feel more like a medical act. People feel more obligated to it because, of course, the doctor has to schedule it,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Network, an advocacy group, told The Post.

Canada, which has a socialized medical system, will formal

ly legalize euthanasia for mental health as the sole underlying condition in 2027, if legal challenges against the expansion are unsuccessful.

“It could be really touchy for someone in New York if they don’t have the gold standard in health insurance and they develop some kind of disability,” said Schadenberg.

“In Canada we have serious funding problems in our healthcare system, hospitals are running deficits. They would never say it to you, but clearly dead people don’t cost money.”

“You’ve had cases of people who are homeless asking to be approved for euthanasia,” he added, which was reported on in 2024.

Health Canada told The Post: “Canada’s medical assistance in dying law seeks to respect personal autonomy for those seeking access to MAID, while at the same time protecting vulnerable people and the equality rights of all Canadians. MAID is a complex and deeply personal issue. “The Government of Canada is committed to ensuring our laws reflect Canadians’ needs, protect those who may be vulnerable, and support autonomy and freedom of choice.”
Studies show overall suicide rates increase when PAS becomes legalized, going up by 10.5 percent in Canada since PAS was broadened in 2021. In Europe the numbers are more staggering: suicides increased by 18.5 percent — and raised by nearly 40 percent in women — among nine countries where PAS is permitted, according to a 2022 study.
One case in Spain caught the attention of the White House this month, which has demanded a probe into the euthanization of 25-year-old gang rape victim Noelia Castillo, who had been confined to a wheelchair since 2022, when she attempted suicide by jumping from a fifth-floor building.

“[PAS] demystifies the issue of suicide. It takes away the whole concept that suicide is not the right way to go,” said Schadenberg.

New York’s law, set to take effect on August 4, requires patients must be a New York resident, at least 18 years old, mentally capable of making health decisions, and diagnosed with a terminal illness with six months or less to live. (Maine Writer: Many people who are diagnosed with a terminal illness will outlive their 6 months prognosis.)

There is a mandatory five-day waiting period between the time a suicide drug is prescribed and when it can be filled. The program is overseen by the Department of Health. (Maine Writer: There should be a subsidiary Department of Death in this organizational chart.)In 2021, Canada removed its mandatory ten-day waiting period and now desperate Canadians can get same-day suicides.

Such was the case when an 80-year-old Ontario woman recovering from heart surgery (known as “Mrs. B” in an official report) requested palliative care and initially declined MAiD due to her religious beliefs. Nevertheless, her husband — experiencing caregiver burnout —contacted a MAiD referral service the same day; after two quick assessments, a third provider approved her, and she was euthanized later that evening, according to the report. (See my Maine Writer note above....)
States tend to follow Canada’s trend of loosening restrictions over time — but, so far, not to the same extremes.

Each state where PAS is legal reports increasing usage over time. Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Hawaii and Colorado have also removed residency requirements, resulting in grisly “death tourism,” while California was the first to shorten mandatory waiting times.
Liberal state California has overseen the most PAS deaths in the US with 4,287 between 2016 and 2023, with Oregon a close second.

“It changes medicine,” said Schadenberg. “People have to recognize the importance of being there with their loved ones in the hospital. In our culture, there are too many people going through difficult health conditions alone and that actually breeds the death idea.”

PAS also transforms the death industry. Entrepreneurial New Yorkers could soon follow the lead of Canadian funeral homes offering one-stop MAiD services.

In London, Ontario, A. Millard George Funeral Home converted a former casket showroom into a “Compassion Suite” where patients can die surrounded by family.
Quebec’s Complexe Funéraire du Haut-Richelieu similarly provides a dedicated space for the procedure, allowing loved ones to hand off the body immediately afterward.
Advocates for PAS argue it’s about bodily autonomy, dignity and independence.

“For New Yorkers nearing the end of life, what matters most is having access to the full spectrum of end‑of‑life care,” Francesca Triest, New York-New Jersey Campaign Manager for Compassion & Choices, which lobbied strongly for New York’s law, told The Post.

“The Medical Aid in Dying Act reinforces a fundamental principle: every individual deserves compassion and the autonomy to make personal decisions about their own body and their care at life’s end.”

But Fisher said that sends the wrong message to everyone else. “If it’s legal, it must be OK. That’s the mindset they’re in,” she said.
Adding: “My body, my choice and I’m just going to go to sleep and all my problems go away. But the families are left behind".
(Maine Writer: Families, elderly and disabled will be coerced into believing they have a duty to die. This "my body, my choice" slogan is propaganda. Frankly, is complete hypocrisy to use such a euphemism to gloss over the brutal finality of death by suicide.)
“It’s like a holocaust. It serves no purpose.”

Let's write about immersion immigrant dining experiences in a creative restaurant review

 Low didn't originally set out to become a restaurateur- he's a filmmaker by training....."

This Tables for Two review published in The New Yorker magazine, by Helen Rosner, and at this social media link here. (This review describes an immersion into creative immigrant ethnic dining...wish we could visit....I suppose a diner could enjoy a different experience every day for a month.)

(Love this descriptive excerpt:  "Kelang’s paratha isn’t a pizza, but it’s not not a pizza; it’s chewy, wheaty, savory, creamy, and fresh, with a bit of heat in the dal and a brightening zing of green from a tangle of herbs on top." -Haha, hmmm, so what's not not a pizza, anyway❓)

Kelang, is a Malaysian restaurant located in Greenpoint, part of a new crop of restaurants that celebrate the cultural synthesis of many immigrant groups that coexist in tight proximity to one another. This intermingling isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but Kelang’s approach feels specific to this moment. The restaurant’s owner, Christopher Low, is an American-born son of Malaysian parents. He grew up in Brooklyn, eating his parents’ cooking in addition to the Haitian and Jamaican food of his neighbors and friends. Low brings this background into his cooking. “Call it the second-generation turn: the cooking of children whose palates belong not to their parents’ homelands but to the cities that they were raised in; cooks making food that doesn’t attempt to re-create someplace distant, in space or in memory, so much as to reflect their actual lives, which are hybrid and hyphenated, deeply rooted yet widely branching,” 

Helen Rosner writes: The best thing on the menu at Kelang, a Malaysian restaurant in Greenpoint that opened in December, is a puffy paratha on a bed of spiced red-lentil dal, topped with creamy Italian stracciatella cheese. Depending on who you are, where you’re from, and how rigid you are in your notions of gastronomic interpolation, this will strike you as either an absurd concept or a brilliant one.

Kelang is part of a new crop of restaurants that celebrate the cultural synthesis of many immigrant groups that coexist in tight proximity to one another, from the Southeast Asian-kissed Italian American joint JR & Son to the Southern-meets-Sichuan fried-chicken spot Pecking House.

What these places are doing isn’t “fusion” in the cynical sense, wherein a chef from one culture raids another for decorative elements. It’s something more personal, less calculated. Kelang’s paratha isn’t a pizza, but it’s not not a pizza (❓); it’s chewy, wheaty, savory, creamy, and fresh, with a bit of heat in the dal and a brightening zing of green from a tangle of herbs on top.
This intermingling isn’t exactly a new phenomenon (birria ramen❗ Pastrami burritos❗❓ Gumbo❗), but Kelang’s approach feels specific to this moment.

Call it the second-generation turn: the cooking of children whose palates belong not to their parents’ homelands but to the cities that they were raised in; cooks making food that doesn’t attempt to re-create someplace distant, in space or in memory, so much as to reflect their actual lives, which are hybrid and hyphenated, deeply rooted yet widely branching. Kelang’s owner, Christopher Low, is an American-born son of Malaysian parents. He grew up in Brooklyn, eating his parents’ cooking in addition to the Haitian and Jamaican food of his neighbors and friends.

In 2022, he, his parents, and his sister opened a restaurant, Hainan Chicken House, in Sunset Park, a counter-service spot named in celebration of a regional culinary export that’s hugely popular in Malaysia: poached chicken, fragrant with scallions and ginger, served with chicken-infused rice and sauces.
The restaurant became a minor sensation—the titular dish is terrific, silken and subtle and rich, but what most stood out was a rotating lineup of specials, mostly hawker-style Malaysian fare, particularly the food of Klang, his parents’ home town, on Malaysia’s western coast.

At Kelang (the restaurant is named for an archaic spelling of the city’s name), those dishes are brought to the fore and woven with flavors from Low’s life in Brooklyn. There’s the paratha, of course, with its playful Neapolitan flourishes, but also a rendang, a Malaysian style of curry in which the sauce simmers down to almost a rich glaze, here made with tender shreds of oxtail—smoked first, Caribbean style. It’s served alongside rice cooked with mushrooms and herbs, a clever mashup of Malaysian nasi ulam and Haitian djon djon (small black edible mushrooms).

Oxtail rendang, a mix of Malaysian and Caribbean staples.

Low isn’t the first to do a curry-chicken potpie, (❓- hmmm, interesting....😉😋) but his version is rich and warm, with airy, shattery pastry reminiscent of roti, flaky and slick with butter. (Note:  I suppose butter improves nearly all unfamiliar flavors....)

Not all dishes on the menu make you play a game of spot-the-references; some dishes are just terrific for terrific’s sake. Take, for instance, the clay-pot bak kut teh, featuring big hunks of pork (belly, trotter, rib) bobbling around in an intense, herbal broth in which they’ve braised for ages, or the “moonlight kway teow,” a stir-fried dish of wide rice noodles that are near-black with dark soy sauce, with a yellow orb of egg yolk in the center; its flavor is sultry and craggy from smoked clams and wok hei. Rojak, a spicy-savory fruit salad that’s a signature Malaysian dish, is made with seasonal fruit (guava and pineapple, among others, on my visits), plus crunchy cucumbers tossed in a gorgeous dressing tangy with fermented shrimp paste. Hainanese chicken—the dish that started it all—is available at dinner, and is impeccable: a steamy, silky half bird, foot coquettishly still attached, alongside a cluster of bowls containing sauces, rice, and a broth that strikes the ideal midpoint between fussy from-scratch freshness and bouillon nostalgia. I especially loved a dish of abacus seeds—chewy little dumplings made from taro, which the menu cheekily identifies as “gnocchi,” sauteed with smoked mushrooms and fiery chiles.

Low didn’t originally set out to become a restaurateur—he’s a filmmaker by training, and he’s cited the works of Wong Kar Wai as a primary influence on the interior design of Kelang. The space, previously a medical office, is boxy, with a certain high-ceilinged sterility, but Low has staged it like a movie set to conjure a lush, melancholy romanticism, with deep-red banquettes, tropical vines, gilt-edged mirrors, and, at the U-shaped bar, bent-bamboo chairs, with a boudoir-pink fringe. If the low, blushing lighting doesn’t get you in the mood for love, maybe a drink will help: a Martini dirtied up with a splash of fish sauce, a Negroni with notes of cherry blossom and lemongrass, or a Longsan Lahhh, a note-perfect non-alcoholic cocktail with smoky tea, fruit juice, and a bit of chile-pepper heat. 

Service, on my visits, was a bit spacey, but it’s been tightening up; the tone of the place seems to be in progress, too, oscillating between that of a neighborhood joint, an amorous date-night nook, and a sceney hot spot. But that sort of multiplicity plays well here: Kelang is a little bit of many things, all wrapped up together, in a way that totally works. ♦

P.S. from Maine Writer, I don't think spell check can keep pace with the variety of words in this Tables for Two article.  

Let's write about the fun of reading children's books again!

I have read "Charlotte's Web" by .E.B. White at least three times. 

I read it aloud to my two sons when we were in transit living in my sister's apartment in Winnetka, Illinois, and they had not yet been enrolled in the elementary school. One time, I read an excerpt when it was my turn to give an inspirational moment at our weekly Rotary meeting. I started to cry when I read Charlotte's goodbye to Wilber.

Why adults should read more children’s books an essay published in the Boston Globe by Zach Przystup.

You’re never too old to believe in magic. Zach Przystup is the author of the Substack newsletter "Ask Your Father", where he writes about parenting, family life, sports, and technology.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “Someday you’ll be old enough to read fairy tales again.” It looks like I’ve reached that day.

I just turned 40, and over the past couple of years I’ve read some 20 children’s novels by the likes of Daniel Nayeri, Roald Dahl, Dave Eggers, Katherine Rundell, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Louis Sachar.

The binge wasn’t intentional. It started with introducing my old favorites to my first- and third-grade boys.

I got curious about what’s out there for kids today, and then I was enjoying myself so much that I got around to some of the classics I had never read, like “The Hobbit” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Some of these books were among the best I had read in recent memory, or ever, really. 

And it sure is nice to be able to finish something in a few days.

That’s rarely the case with adult fiction. With its penchant for weighty drama — murder, betrayals, affairs — it all can get, well, a little depressing.

The thing is, children’s literature also ponders the big questions — how to deal with unfairness, what makes a good life, and what happens after we die — but usually in a way that’s inspiring and less long-winded. As my favorite writing professor would charge: “Get to the pith!” (IOW, get inside the issues.)

Children’s novels excel at getting to the pith. Just consider: You’re wrongly thrown into a juvenile detention center and ordered to dig holes in the scorching sun alongside a ragtag group of youth vandals. What’s your next move? — “Holes,” Louis Sachar. A strange girl parachutes in from a magical portal and says she needs your help to save her world. Do you go? — “Impossible Creatures,” Katherine Rundell. You’re a valued member of an island’s animal community (you’re a wild dog), but one day that community changes forever. Do you stick it out or leave behind everything you’ve ever known? — “The Eyes and the Impossible,” Dave Eggers.

Children’s books also remind us of an essential truth: The magic, adventure, and boundless possibilities that we naturally grasped as kids are all still out there.

We badly need this reminder because as we get jobs, start paying mortgages, and get bulldozed by domestic responsibilities, the magic tends to die.

That’s why we need “James and the Giant Peach.” A good children’s yarn chips away at our jaded exteriors by helping us to look at the world the way we used to as kids, with a sense of wonder, awe, discovery, and playfulness that are all worthy of the life we’ve been given. They remind us of who we were and ask whether we still believe in the things we used to.

We’re a grown and grizzled Peter Pan; these books take us back to Neverland.

After reading “Holes,” I visited my parents at my childhood home. As I sat playing with my boys in the front yard, I suddenly thought to show them the dirt patch under the great oak tree where I used to dig for gems as a little boy. They eagerly fetched a spade, started digging, and found all kinds of treasure. It was a full-circle moment of play and discovery inspired by an excellent children’s novel — an excellent novel, period.

The morning commute, the endless dishes and laundry and schedule shuffling — they aren’t going anywhere. But, if we remember how to look, we can recognize that our daily lives are still shot through with plenty of magic. Can anyone who has visited a national park deny that fantastical realms exist❓ 

Can anyone who has a child deny that wondrous creatures exist❓ 

I think that’s what C.S. Lewis was getting at.

Here’s some parting advice from Roald Dahl: “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” Children’s books invite us to read and believe again. Who knows what we’ll find❓

Let's write about the provenance of "One The Road": Manuscript "the scroll" sold at record breaking auction price

On the Auction Block: Jack Kerouac’s Record-Breaking Manuscripts
Published in Literary Hub:

Jean-Christophe Cloutier Considers the History of Kerouac’s Posthumous Sales

Kerouac scroll

Just a few weeks ago, on March 12, 2026, which would have been Jack Kerouac’s 104th birthday, the On the Road scroll sold at auction at Christie’s in New York for a whopping $12,135,000. This marks a new and historic record: the artifact is now the most expensive literary manuscript to sell at auction regardless of period or origin.

Twenty-five years ago, this same scroll had already sold for what was then a record price: in 2001, Jim Irsay, erstwhile owner of the Indianapolis Colts, had purchased it for $2.43 million, then the highest paid price for a literary manuscript from the 20th century.

In 2020, the Mills College copy of a Shakespeare first folio (or, F1) sold for $10 million, the previous record holder. If we take inflation into account, when the Huntington Library in Pasadena purchased most of the Duke of Devonshire’s book collection for $750,000 in 1908—including the first quarto of Hamlet, still only one of two surviving copies—the adjusted price tag might fall upwards of $30 million. But that was for a collection, not a single artifact.

Unlike Shakespeare, Kerouac has never really had much backing from the academic establishment. But in our capitalistic world, where market value always trumps research value, interest in Kerouac has always been high—a lesson many academics prefer to unlearn or deny.

Despite years of sneering from US critics—or perhaps because of it—Kerouac’s popularity and influence on generations of global readers and artists is undeniable. Bob Dylan put it this way: “I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”

Last year, a major documentary focused on the ongoing impact of On the Road was released: Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation. Premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, the film includes the participation of big names like Josh Brolin, Matt Dillon, Nathalie Merchant, Michael Imperioli, David Amram, Jay McInerney, and more. Over the years, the world of fashion has often turned to Kerouac for inspiration: in 1993, the GAP released a series of posters with the slogan, “Kerouac wore khakis.” In 2018 Harmony Paris released their Fall-Winter « Kerouac » collection, and in 2022, Kim Jones unveiled his Christian Dior fashion line for men based on Kerouac.

Musicians, especially, have been drawn to Kerouac’s work, from the Beatles and David Bowie to Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Lana Del Rey, and Zach Bryan, who purchased the On the Road scroll last week. Bryan, in particular, seems dedicated to keeping Kerouac’s legacy alive: last year, he purchased—for over $3 million—the St-Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, MA, a bastion of Massachusetts’ Franco-American cultural history, and the church where the author born “Jean-Louis Kérouac” was baptized in 1922, and where his funeral was held forty-seven years later, in 1969. In collaboration with the Kerouac Estate, plans are nowunderway to turn the space into a Kerouac museum, cultural center, and venue for performances.

Unsurprisingly, Kerouac’s influence is also pronounced among an array of writers who have dominated contemporary literature.

Non-anglophone authors range from Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard, who cites Kerouac in My Struggle as an inspiration, to Chile’s Roberto Bolaño, who translated into Spanish several poems by Kerouac. The Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera claims Kerouac as a key forebear: he wrote Tres Tristes Tigres in a Spanish dialect inspired by street talk and phonetics, as Kerouac did, and wrote the screenplay to Vanishing Point (under the penname Guillermo Cain), a cult-classic road movie directly inspired by Kerouac. Japan’s Haruki Murakami—whose heroine in Sputnik Sweetheart not only models her writing on Kerouac but also her sense of fashion—likewisenotes Kerouac’s imprint on his work.

His imprint can pop up anywhere; in 2020, during an interview with the Washington Post, former US President Barack Obama discussed some of the authors and books that had most influenced him. Included in Obama’s top five, alongside Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Mohandas K Gandhi, and Shakespeare, was On the Road. In her graphic memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021), the cartoonist Alison Bechdel undertakes a sustained dialogue with Kerouac’s Buddhism and follows in his footsteps in climbing Matterhorn Peak in Sierra Nevada.

Kerouac’s turn to Buddhism in the mid-1950s, is another important aspect of his multifaceted cultural legacy. The poet bell hooks, for instance, credits him for modeling a form of “resistance to that old patriarchal kind of Buddhism that was all about obedience to authority.” This Kerouackian strand of countercultural spiritual resistance continues in contemporary pop culture, as evidenced by Jason Sudeikis’s Ted Lasso character who reads a battered paperback edition of The Dharma Bums on the plane that will take him to the UK in the pilot episode. The trendy eyeglasses company, Warby Parker, named after obscure Kerouac characters, gives away a copy of The Dharma Bums to every new employee.

Poet, playwright, and editor Amiri Baraka, towering figure in the Beat world and the Black Arts Movement, considered Kerouac “a giant of swift exacting poetic insight” and included no fewer than four Kerouac pieces in The Moderns (1963), Baraka’s groundbreaking “Anthology of New Writing in America.” Even when Kerouac was placed alongside his countercultural peers, Baraka recognized in him a unique “occurrence as a style of American writing,” where he stands “absolutely alone.” And now, with this new auction record, Kerouac stands alone once more.

The King of the Beats has always attracted a fair amount of attention from collectors—especially since his passing in 1969. Kerouac had left everything to his mother, Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, who outlived all three of her children but was already in ill-health at the ime. Kerouac’s third wife, Stella Sampas, filed for and obtained one-third of the Kerouac estate, under a legal entitlement extended to widows by Florida law, and when Gabrielle died in 1973, total ownership passed on to Stella.

L'Heureux photograph

During her stewardship, Stella more or less left her late husband’s papers untouched and refused most requests by scholars and biographers to access its contents. Bootleg anthologies nevertheless began circulating in the early 1970s—often known as the “collected uncollected” Kerouac, as demand remained high. 

Private collectors and institutions sought to acquire whatever they could get from the Kerouac Estate.

When Stella passed away in 1990, her brother John Sampas—an antiques dealer by trade—took over control of the estate.

After appraising the extent of the collection, Mr. Sampas realized that Kerouac had left behind an impressive array of unpublished manuscripts—and slowly, posthumous works began to be released. Learning on the fly the myriad temptationsand possibilities that come with handling the estate of a coveted literary figure, Sampas began selling a few items to various repositories around the country—notably the New York Public Library and the Harry Ransom Center in Texas—as well as to some private individuals.

Through his contacts in the antiquarian book world, Sampas began looking for potential buyers and was put in touch with Michael D. Horowitz, a book dealer and archivist who specialized literary appraisals. Horowitz suggested he reach out to a young actor named Johnny Depp who was dating his daughter, Winona Ryder, at the time. According to the bill of sale’s invoice, Depp’s purchase included: raincoat, suitcase, travel bag, sweatshirt, rain hat, tweed coat, letter to Neal Cassady, and a canceled check to a liquor store, for a total sum of $50,640.

2001, was a major Kerouac year on the literary market: not only did the On the Road scroll sell for $2.43 million, which was at the time a world record for a literary manuscript, but Glenn Horowitz, the famed rare book dealer, also arranged for the auctioning of 76 items from the Kerouac archive, the vast majority being letters, along with a handful of short manuscripts, and a signed check. And the bulk of the collection—what Sampas qualified as “95%” of Kerouac’s literary and personal archive—was sold to the New York Public Library that same year.

In their announcement, The New York Times underscored that NYPL’s “acquisition of the Kerouac archive began more than a decade ago when Rodney Phillips, the director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library and a former curator of the Berg Collection, began buying items sold by the estate through George Minkoff, a dealer in Great Barrington, Mass.” And so, even prior to the main 2001 purchase, the Berg “had already, through purchase and gift, amassed the largest group of Kerouac papers in institutional or private hands.” As time passed, Sampas came to understand the value of keeping a such a collection together, and increasingly developed a growing sense of responsibility in his role as custodian to the Kerouac archive, even reacquiring some of the items he had sold into private hands.

In 2001, the record sale of the scroll at Christie’s further prompted a mystery collector to come forward with another Kerouac manuscript, one widely thought to be lost forever: The Haunted Life. Published posthumously in 2014 as The Haunted Life and Other Writings, the book is an unfinished handwritten manuscript Kerouac composed in 1944 when he lived near the Columbia University campus in New York. But even its author thought this one was lost to oblivion; in his 1968 novel, Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac mentions the “Haunted Life” as the “long novel I had been writing… in pencil” and “lost… in a taxicab: never heard from it again.”

This unfortunate taxicab loss would have presumably taken place in 1944, and this occurrence can be more or less corroborated through a convenient little document in Kerouac’s archive, entitled, “If He can be Call’d a Failure who Leaves 1 ½ million Unpublished Words at 32.” Written in 1954, this notebook page lists the titles of novels that a then 32-year old Kerouac has written thus far, the year in which he wrote them, and his estimation of their approximate total word count. It’s important to remember that in 1954, Kerouac had only been able to publish a single novel, 1950’s, The Town and the City; literary fame would only come when Viking finally published On the Road, in 1957, six years after he had composed the original. On his 1954, literary inventory, Kerouac had listed “The Haunted Life” with an added “(Lost)” in parentheses.

Therefore, the manuscript’s sudden resurfacing on June 18, 2002, on auction at Sotheby’s in New York, came as a shock and its provenance remained nebulous. In the Sotheby’s catalog, it was described as the “longest and most important autograph manuscript by Kerouac ever to appear at auction,” and was estimated to go for $100,000–$150,000. It was further listed as “an autograph fair copy, meticulously written in Kerouac’s hand and absent of marginalia, corrective marks, and significant grammatical errors—Manuscript in very good condition.” In the end, the manuscript sold to an unnamed bidder for $95,600 via phone—$80,000 was the “hammer price,” with the buyer’s premium bringing it up to $95,000.

When Todd Tietchen was hired to edit the manuscript for publication, he worked exclusively with a photocopy of the manuscript—the original remained with the buyer, a private collector named Mark Novak (as someone who was present at the moment of the sale confirmed to me). In his introduction to his 2014 edition of the book, Tietchen does not identify the seller (or the buyer), but shares what he had been able to find out, namely that “the manuscript had [apparently] been willed to the seller by his longtime domestic partner, who claimed to have discovered it decades earlier in the closet of a Columbia University dorm room.”

This narrative is plausible because Kerouac did spend parts of October of 1944, living in his friend Allen Ginsberg’s dorm room at Columbia. Tietchen speculates that Kerouac “had left the manuscript in Ginsberg’s room after accepting a berth on the merchant vessel Robert Treat Paine (only to jump ship in Virginia and head back to New York). Why he subsequently lost track of the manuscript,” Tietchen adds, “is impossible to say.”

Whether or not more “lost” Kerouac manuscripts will appear on auction—and whether any of these will keep breaking sales records—is equally impossible to say. One thing we can say is that even though interest in Kerouac is alive and well (despite what the professors would have us believe), Kerouac himself could never have come close to reacquiring any of his own creations on auction. As author Joyce Johnson, who was Kerouac’s girlfriend in 1957, when On the Road was published, reminded us in the wake of the latest sale of the scroll, “Jack was the poorest person I ever met.”

Jack Kerouac Jean-Christophe Cloutier literary auctions literary legacies On the Road

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019) and of Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac, forthcoming in October 2026 from Columbia University Press.

Let's write about enjoying our creative passions like starting a band regardless of age or talent

This opinion in the New York Times seems appropriate for  "boomers of all ages". The author Hugo Lindgren gives us permission to continue our interesting passions even if we are not good at what we want to do!  Have fun reading! Mr. Lindgren is editor of the zine (aka "zeen") "Let’s Start a Band". 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/opinion/band-music-community.html

In the spring of 1982, six friends got together in an East Village New York City apartment to start a country-punk band. They had a guitar, a bass and some sticks and spoons to bang on. 

“We tried Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette songs and our voices wrapped around each other as everybody found their natural level,” wrote Amy Rigby in “Girl to City,” her 2019, memoir. “We wailed through a version of ‘Hey Good Lookin’ that lasted long enough to cook an entire spaghetti dinner. It was the most fun I’d had in my life.” That band was called Last Roundup. 

You’re forgiven for not knowing the name. Though the group had a relatively brief existence and never had anything close to a hit, Ms. Rigby’s memoir — a lucid, unguarded account of band life — is one of the best I’ve read. And I’ve read tons.
In fact, I’ve spent the last year plundering music biographies, memoirs, magazine profiles, documentaries and podcasts for stories of start-up bands.

I did this after Chris Scianni, an old friend, got in touch and asked for my help in writing about his decades of hustling in the music business. In high school, Chris and I had both been in bands — we shared a drummer — but mine was a bunch of goofballs burdened with too many opinions and too little patience for rehearsing. He was truly talented and dedicated, the best guitar player any of us knew, obsessed with Buddy Guy, Keith Richards and Joe Strummer.

While we caught up over lunch, I recognized that Chris has another exceptional gift: He is a band builder. That thing we both did as kids❓ He kept doing it — he’s had a band that was signed to Sony; he played in the tennis star John McEnroe’s band; and he has jammed with Bruce Springsteen at the Stone Pony. He has also spent his adult life keeping an eye out for collaborators to help him go places he wouldn’t be able to reach on his own.

The more we talked about it, the more I came to understand that Chris’s band-joining impulse is the perfect resistance to these stupefying times. Chris and I decided to create a zine about starting a band, dedicated to a simple message: Life’s problems, big and small, recede when you get in a room and play music with a few friends or friends of frids or, why not, complete strangers. 

Make it up as you go along. If nobody else wants to sing, you sing. 

Be a zealot about keeping your instrument in tune but nothing else. Force yourself to write one new song a week, no matter how dreadful the first ones come out. Reach out across the divide of awkwardness to the closet geniuses in your life, like that ex-co-worker who has a thing for modular synths. Be especially kind to your drummer, if you have one, because drummers are impossible to find. Or maybe you’ll have to learn the drums. Book a gig. Make stickers and hand them out on the subway. Stop chasing what everybody else is chasing. Create your own center of gravity.

I told myself I was doing all this for my teenage daughters, both of whom are musically inclined but have been tentative about forming their own bands. It’s not something teenagers do as naturally as Chris and I once did.

For one thing, live music, once ubiquitous, is now almost quaint. And kids who can sing or play an instrument start professional training today around age 3. We’re inundated with evidence of other people’s superior talents and superhuman work habits.

On YouTube, you’ll discover you can’t play guitar half as well as a teenager who does a multilayered rendition of “There She Goes” with a delay pedal while skateboarding down her street. Sticking your neck out as an inspired beginner takes courage. Yet that’s also how the best stuff always starts.

I know what some of you are thinking. What if I’m old? What if the last time I picked up my guitar, my kids marched out of the house? These are reasonable concerns. If making music will never be your thing, find co-conspirators for something else. Your band could be a book club, a knitting collective, a pop-up theater, a game night, or a pinball laundromat mahjong club in Gowanus (which does not yet exist, as far as I know, but act fast). It could even be starting a zine (pronounced "zeen" as in "magazine".).

Even after we published our zine, I couldn’t stop collecting stories about the origins of bands. I’ll go to the music section of a bookstore and flip right to the part of each book where they start their first band. It rarely fails to be inspiring — the coolest bands were ridiculously uncool in their early incarnations.

At its first paid gig, for high schoolers in Summit, N.J., the Velvet Underground literally fell to pieces: “Our set was only about 15 minutes at the most,” the drummer Maureen Tucker has recalled, “and in each song something of mine broke.” Robert Smith of the Cure was mortified at first by his own voice, and when he tried being lead vocalist at a gig, he sang the words to “Suffragette City” while the band played “Foxy Lady.” At early rehearsals for the band that would become Radiohead, Thom Yorke, the singer, told the keyboardist Jonny Greenwood, “I can’t quite hear what you’re doing, but I think you’re adding a really interesting texture.” It turned out Mr. Greenwood had switched off the power on his keyboard because he didn’t know how to play the chords.

What made these kids push through such cringe-inducing incompetence and keep going? The safety net of having other kids on their side. It inspired them to not only persevere and get better but also to keep taking risks in pursuit of their own distinctive sound.
If there’s one thing that digital technology is exceptional at, it’s fueling the ambition of the solo practitioner. We barely need anybody for anything these days. A practically infinite (and utterly obedient) orchestra lives in our iPhones. But relying too much on these tools keeps us in creative silos. It denies us the connection we all crave, which is the real meaning of music and the best reason to start a band. People want to connect.

A band is not just a mechanism for doing that, it’s a model. It can also be a path to a deeper creative life. That’s how it worked out for Amy Rigby. Since Last Roundup split up, she has made a career as a solo artist; the critic Robert Christgau called her “one of the great unknown American songwriters.” Connecting with those original collaborators had turned Ms. Rigby, a self-described “goofy amateur,” into an artist.

“Certain people let you feel free to be a true part of yourself,” Ms Rigby wrote. “Not the only part, but one facet that lies dormant until somebody else says: ‘Come on out, it’s OK.’”