"But Trump’s urge is toward gigantism, not grace. This is as true about his ballroom... as it is about the proposed arch."

"It is, simply, un-American. It is even, in its derivative way, un-French, since the Parisian instances are, at least, right-sized for their place and their purpose. If it were ever to be built, future generations would dream of its demolition. Its injury to the democratic spirit is too large to contemplate, and would be too hard to look past, even from a distance."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "Donald Trump’s Triumphal Arch and the Architecture of Autocracy/When asked by a reporter whom the arch would be for, Trump said, 'Me'" (The New Yorker).

Is gigantism un-American?

"If the White House must be remade, let there be a plan; let it be debated; let the financing be transparent and free of kickbacks and corruption."

"It isn’t complicated, and it’s the very principle at the heart of the American Revolution: following rules is not weakness.... Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them. Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life. To conserve, after all, is the essence of conservatism. The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it."

Writes Adam Gopnik, at the end of his New Yorker essay, "Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing/The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat."

Reverence for the past and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known — but is that your general principle? If it is, you are a committed conservative. 

***

As long as we're talking about rules... the traditional rules of punctuation would reject those those commas after "the past" and "fully known." It's easy to see if you put it this way: Reverence and reluctance is not timidity. Not: Reverence, and reluctance, is not timidity. And, obviously, "is" is wrong! I suspect that at one point the sentence was "Reverence for the past — along with reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known — is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life." 

Punctuation and grammar embody values; they are not merely a receptacle of them. I remember when the great tradition of The New Yorker was scrupulously tending to these matters. Is my grief an overreaction to the loss of a beloved publishing tradition?

"The French Revolution looms large in the philosophy of crowds because it was the first time that a 'mob' or what looked like one..."

"... was responsible for a decisive turn in the history of humankind. The Roman Republic was always an upper-class affair, with the mob a mere chorus, and even the American Revolution was... very much a legislative revolution, made by the manor, with the crowds much smaller than they are remembered to have been. The Boston Tea Party was more a publicity stunt than a significant popular protest.... Americans celebrate a group of merchants and planters signing a document on July 4th; the French celebrate a crowd of citizens storming the monarchical prison called the Bastille on July 14th. There is a difference.... When you are 'taking democracy into your own hands,' what you have in your hands is not democracy, because democracy begins with the recognition that other people have hands, too....  Can we speak of the wisdom of crowds? Sometimes. The madness of mobs? Sometimes, too. Perhaps, within the winningly minute range of terms that Bobrycki captures, vulgus and populus and the rest, lies a truth that resonates through centuries, even millennia. We see the shifting varieties of human assembly and search to give them meaning, when the meaning lies exactly in the mutability.... A crowd can become a mob; a crowd can even become an army. To turn a crowd into a community? Ah, that’s the hard work."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest? From the French Revolution to January 6th, crowds have been heroized and vilified. Now they’re a field of study" (The New Yorker).

Bobrycki = Shane Bobrycki, author of "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages."

"The logic of the suit is balanced against the magic of the tie. The two together become symbolic..."

"... the gray or blue jacket reminds us of a common class background; the distinctive pattern of the tie orients us toward the wearer’s unique identity.... The tie could sometimes get so compressed in its significance as to lose its witty, stealthy character and become overly and unambiguously 'loaded.' There is no better story of suicide-by-semiotics than that of the rise and death of the bow tie, which, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, became so single-mindedly knotted up with neoconservatism, in the estimable hands of George Will, that to wear one was to declare oneself a youngish fogy, a reader of the National Review, and a skeptic of big government. The wider shores of bow-tie-dom—the dashing, jaunty, self-mocking P. G. Wodehouse side of them—receded, and were lost. It became impossible to wear a bow tie and vote Democratic...."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "The Knotty Death of the Necktie/The pandemic may have brought an end to a flourishing history" (The New Yorker).

"It is... easy to forget that Chris Rock preceded Donald Trump in deriding John McCain for having been captured..."

"... during a 2008 performance in defense of Obama: 'There’s a lot of guys in jail that got captured. I don’t wanna vote for nobody that got captured—I wanna vote for the motherfucker who got away!'... What separates Chris Rock from Donald Trump is that Rock knows the liminal space he’s in, poised between actual revelation and wicked hyperbole—a truth to which we are clued in as much by his performance style (his constant nervous pacing, his sidelong glances) as by his words. The impieties are to be taken as possibilities, not as actual truths. It may be that Trump intuitively understands this, too, and that one reason his sneers and terrifying invocation of cruelty are not taken as seriously as they should be is that some people think of Trump’s discourse as that of the insult comedian: He doesn’t really mean it. He does...."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "What Do We Want from Comedy?/We insist that comedians respect our sacrosanct ideals—and pray that they skewer our sanctimony. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it" (The New Yorker).

Do you know what "liminal space" that sentence about liminal space is in? "What separates Chris Rock from Donald Trump" — I'd say — is that we are all equally "clued in" to what Chris Rock is doing — because he's plainly and clearly a comedian — and we are differently clued in about Donald Trump. Some of us feel that we get him, and we can deal with the mix of humor and seriousness. It's even quite brilliant. Others hear the odd things as crazy and threatening, and they can't relax and enjoy it. And taking Trump's words seriously makes them useful to his antagonists. He said he'd be a dictator on Day 1! 

"'You mean, that’s it?' I gasped. 'We have Zach again?' I added incredulously. If the worst thing humanly imaginable happened—i.e., Donald Trump’s reëlection—I will not sound more disbelieving or distraught...."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "No, Not Aaron Rodgers! It’s hard to name a position in the history of sports so manifestly cursed as that of quarterback for the New York Jets" (The New Yorker).

I love the way Donald Trump intrudes himself even into an article about football almost as much as I love the diaeresis in "reëlection" and the screwy use of "happened" in "If the worst thing...  happened... I will not sound...."

"We tend to overstate the poverty of the style that precedes a style we admire..."

"... histories of rock and roll treat what accompanied it on the airwaves of the fifties as if the music were all 'Sing Along with Mitch' and 'How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?,' when it was also Sinatra’s concept albums, Sarah Vaughan’s collaborations with George Treadwell, and Dave Brubeck’s million-selling recording of a jazz instrumental in five-four time. And so we remember paperback books, pre-Push Pin, as either clinically bare, as with Modern Library editions, or outlandishly lurid, as with an edition of 'Madame Bovary' featuring an Ava Gardner-style femme fatale, complete with slipping negligee....There was, in truth, much ambitious 'art' illustration in those years, including Ben Shahn’s covers for S. J. Perelman and Kauffer’s cover for Ralph Ellison’s 'Invisible Man.'"

Writes Adam Gopnik in "How the Graphic Designer Milton Glaser Made America Cool Again/From the poster that turned Bob Dylan into an icon to the logo that helped revive a flagging city, he gave sharp outlines to the spirit of an age" (The New Yorker).

Here are those Ben Shahn covers.

Here's that Kauffer cover.

And I think this might be the referenced "outlandishly lurid" "Madame Bovary" cover:

Or... this fits the description better (but it's a British edition):

"Though 'obscurantism' may be a word that is, well, obscure, to Americans, [Macron] is right. The line between the fight for freedom..."

"... and the surrender to hatred is absolute. The assault on Rushdie only clarifies its contours."

Writes Adam Gopnik, reacting to what Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, said on Friday evening:

“For 33 years, Salman Rushdie has embodied freedom and the fight against obscurantism. He has just been the victim of a cowardly attack by the forces of hatred and barbarism. His fight is our fight; it is universal.”

That comes at the end of "Salman Rushdie and the Power of Words/Efforts are bound to be made to somehow equalize or level the acts of Rushdie and his tormentors and would-be executioners. This is a despicable viewpoint" (in The New Yorker).

"He came to office, it seems, on a platform of little else except his clowning.... Once, when called a clown, Zelensky did not argue, but..."

"...  posted a video on Instagram of his own face with a big red nose upon it. The refusal to act like a grownup infuriated Zelensky’s opponents as much as Groucho Marx infuriated his political opponents in Fredonia, in 'Duck Soup,' with his unseriousness.... [W]atching Zelensky now, one does not think, Oh, wow, he once was a comedian! One thinks, This is what a comedian looks like in power.... The one willing to degrade oneself knowingly, as a clown does, is the one afterward most able to act with dignity.... In interviews with the French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy in 2019, Zelensky made it clear that he was quite aware of the interconnection between his place as a clown and his role as a leader. When Lévy asked him if he could make even Vladimir Putin laugh 'just as he had made all Russians laugh,' Zelensky insisted that he could. Though, he then added, 'This man does not see; he has eyes, but does not see; or, if he does look, it’s with an icy stare, devoid of all expression.... Laughter is a weapon that is fatal to men of marble'...."

Writes Adam Gopnik in "Volodymyr Zelensky’s Comedic Courage/The Ukrainian leader shows how wit and mockery can undermine brutal authority" (The New Yorker).

From the Wikipedia article "Death from laughter":

"Joseph Frank Keaton spent his youth in his parents’ knockabout vaudeville act; by the time he was eight, it basically consisted of his father, Joe, picking him up and throwing him..."

"... against the set wall. Joe would announce, 'It just breaks a father’s heart to be rough,' and he’d hurl Buster—already called this because of his stoicism—across the stage. 'Once, during a matinee performance... he innocently slammed the boy into scenery that had a brick wall directly behind it.' That 'innocently' is doing a lot of work, but all this brutality certainly conveyed a basic tenet of comedy: treating raw physical acts, like a kick in the pants, in a cerebral way is funny. 'I wait five seconds—count up to ten slow—grab the seat of my pants, holler bloody murder, and the audience is rolling in the aisles,' Keaton later recalled. 'It was The Slow Thinker. Audiences love The Slow Thinker.' A quick mind impersonating the Slow Thinker: that was key to his comic invention. The slowness was a sign of a cautious, calculating inner life. Detachment in the face of disorder remained his touchstone.... It was only when Joe started drinking too hard and got sloppy onstage that, in 1917, the fastidious Buster left him and went out on his own. It was the abuse of the art form that seemed to offend him."

From "What Made Buster Keaton’s Comedy So Modern?/Whereas Chaplin’s vision was essentially theatrical, Keaton’s was specific to the screen—he moved like the moving pictures" by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker).

"But his themes are part of the inheritance of modernity, ones that he merely adapted with a peculiar, self-pitying edge and then took to their nightmarish conclusion..."

"... the glory of war over peace; disgust with the messy bargaining and limited successes of reformist, parliamentary democracy and, with that disgust, contempt for the political class as permanently compromised; the certainty that all military setbacks are the results of civilian sabotage and a lack of will; the faith in a strong man; the love of the exceptional character of one nation above all others; the selection of a helpless group to be hated, who can be blamed for feelings of national humiliation. He didn’t invent these arguments. He adapted them, and then later showed where in the real world they led, if taken to their logical outcome by someone possessed, for a time, of absolute power. Resisting those arguments is still our struggle, and so they are, however unsettling, still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."

From "Does 'Mein Kampf' Remain a Dangerous Book?" by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker).

In this short article, Gopnik uses variations on the word "creepy" 5 times: "not so much diabolical or sinister as creepy.... The creepiness extends toward his fanatical fear of impurity.... Creepy and miserable and uninspiring as the book seems to readers now.... Putting aside the book’s singularly creepy tone.... it contains little argumentation that wasn’t already commonplace still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."

That suggests that, if we readi the book, we will feel an instinctive revulsion against the writer, even as the writer was endeavoring to inspire revulsion against designated others. Is it good to rely on this instinct to deliver us from evil?

"Saying they used [the song 'Memory'] to calm [Trump] down! In his rages. It helped me understand what’s baffled me about its appeal to him."

"The literal aspect of it is about this old cat who’s dead and dying, but beneath the beautiful music and beautiful poem is such a longing to connect! So, like, Trump was a handsome kid, but his dad was a bully, so he became a bully, just trying to impress Daddy. I can’t win with charm, he thought . . . and he’s always felt outside. In his heart of hearts, there’s this tremendous need, an insatiable need, to be loved, the love he never received from his father or mother. So that is in that song: that incredible longing to belong, to connect, to not be rejected, that’s what this whole thing is. All these years, I had no clue why that song touched him, but now, with this [Stephanie Grisham] book . . . I get it, I get it!"

Said Betty Buckley, who played Grizabella, the cat who sings "Memory," in the original Broadway production of "Cats," quoted in "How to Explain Trump’s Love for the Musical 'Cats'/To unlock this mystery, we went straight to the source: Betty Buckley, the actress who sang 'Memory' in the original New York production of 'Cats'" (The New Yorker).

"And just so you know, because all Biden does is talks about COVID. Right? He doesn’t call it the China virus. You know why?"

"Because China has him paid off. He can’t use that term. They gave his son one and a half billion to manage. He makes millions of dollars a year, I assume. Right?... He walked in, he walked out with one and a half billion. Hey, maybe he’s not so stupid after all. Right? That’s the only thing. I thought he was so dumb. Maybe he’s not as dumb as we think.... The biggest story, no, the second biggest story, the worst was when they spied on my campaign and they got caught. That’s the biggest political corruption story in the history of our country, but this could very well be second. And we have what’s called the laptop from hell, the laptop from hell. From what I’ve understood, you only have seen a tiny portion of it, but you know what the press is now doing? They’re blaming Russia. It’s Russia did it. Russia is the one that created the laptop. And Russia brought it into that little shop to have it fixed. Russia. I think Russia’s looking at us, they’re saying, 'Those people are stone cold crazy. This is…' No, it was Russia’s fault. They said it. Loud and clear. It was Russia, Russia, Russia. Aren’t we tired of this crap? I saw a Schiff the other day, two days ago, watermelon, he looks like a watermelon head. Right?"

Just a little sample of what your President said in Tampa, Florida yesterday.

Do the people understand that kind of talk? It made me think of that sentence from a New Yorker article about French poets that I saw fit to quote for you yesterday: "Rimbaud’s 'A Season In Hell' gave the idea that poetry should be, first of all, a journey into extreme experience, evidenced not by a coherent evocation of a story but by subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself."

Trump's Tampa speech gave the idea that politics should be, first of all, a journey into extreme experience, evidenced not by a coherent evocation of a story but by subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself.

Me, I get it. It's thoroughly poetic.

"I will have gold: I will be idle and brutal. Women nurse those fierce invalids, home from hot countries. I’ll be mixed up in politics. Saved. Now I am an outcast.... Forward! The march, the burden and the desert, weariness and anger. To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies should I uphold? In what blood tread?" — Arthur Rimbaud, "A Season in Hell." 

"By the testimony of Dylan’s mentor Dave Van Ronk, it was a paperback copy of modern French verse, heavy with underlining..."

"... which a fresh-from-Minnesota Dylan took down from Van Ronk’s bookshelf, on Macdougal Street, in 1960—that provided the impetus for that poet’s own stream of imagery. Rimbaud’s 'A Season In Hell' gave the idea that poetry should be, first of all, a journey into extreme experience, evidenced not by a coherent evocation of a story but by subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself. (Dylan’s great songs from 'Blonde on Blonde'—'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' and 'Visions of Johanna'—are straight applications of Rimbaud’s symbolist methods to popular music.)... Rimbaud is the exemplar of the mad youth, the poete maudit, that runs right to Kurt Cobain, and also the model of the mysterious disappearance, which touches legends as different as those of Ambrose Bierce and Jack Black. (Not the actor Jack Black, but the California vagabond whose memoir has the best title in American literature, 'You Can’t Win,' and who disappeared, in New York, in the nineteen-thirties.)"

From "The Very French Fight Over Reuniting Rimbaud and Verlaine in the Pantheon" by Adam Gopnik (in The New Yorker).

If you're trying to remember the Bob Dylan song with Verlaine and Rimbaud, it's: "Situations have ended sad/Relationships have all been bad/Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud/But there’s no way I can compare/All those scenes to this affair/Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go."

Are you looking for incoherent stories of extreme experience, evoked with subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself? Yeah, me neither. And yet, I do still read the newspaper.

"Emptiness and absence contradict the very concept of the city. The point of a city is social proximity..."

"... to see people deliberately spaced out, like the walking but never intersecting figures in a Giacometti, is to see what cities aren’t. In a historical sense, cities are always organisms of a kind, like coral reefs, where a lot of people come together to barter spices and exchange ideas and find mates, and endure the recurrent damage of infectious disease....  Outside, new patterns of wider spacing and greater caution assert themselves: Is that masked man contagious and to be avoided by crossing the street?...  Until last week, no one ever thought that Camus’s 'The Plague' was about the plague. It was the text through which generations of high schoolers were taught how not to read literally. It was always taken as a fable or an allegory, specifically of the German occupation of France. The people in Camus’s plague town of Oran did not in any way deserve to suffer from the disease, but the crisis revealed all the various human responses of cowardice, denial, and courage. The point was not that actual plagues tell us much, but that the pressure of extreme and unexpected events forces the flaws in our common character to the surface."

From "The Coronavirus Crisis Reveals New York at Its Best and Worst/In a time of containment, the city searches for a way forward" by Adam Gopnik (in The New Yorker).

Here's "The Plague" by Albert Camus, in case you don't already have it and you want to read/reread it. I just put it in my Kindle (though I have read it twice, quite a while back, including that time in high school French class).

And here's the Giacometti sculpture I'm 99% sure Gopnik had in mind:



It's "Piazza" (a familiar sight at the Guggenheim in NYC). And here's sculptor's explanation:

"In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity.... It’s the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do...."

So Giacometti did not think his figures were — as Gopnik put it — "walking but never intersecting."  Giacometti saw the figures streaming together, then going apart, then approaching again. The artist was not — as Gopnik saw it — "see[ing] what cities aren’t." That is, the writer was seeing what the sculptor was not.

Giacometti was seeing what cities are — in times of plague and normal times — a living, moving, continual coming together and moving apart. We're in an apart phase, but we are together in our hearts, and we are keeping the city — the civilization — alive.

"One of the ironies of the moment is that, where it’s been the usual path, in modern times, to find small, incremental measures having big effects..."

"... on public problems, in this case, big, seemingly outsize measures—cancelling public activities, closing schools and offices—are necessary to create the small changes in vectors that can at least manage the pandemic. This novelty perhaps explains why it is so hard to wrap our minds around the changes: it turns out that it is possible for something to be at once a huge public-health crisis while creating, so far, a minimal number of visible, obvious cases of illness. The sane thing right now is not to hope for a miracle cure but to accept that maximal measures might have usefully minimal effects."

From "The Coronavirus, and Why Humans Feel a Need to Moralize Epidemics" by Adam Gopnik (in The New Yorker).

"Anyone old enough to remember the moon landing, fifty years ago today, is also old enough to remember what was said about the moon landing while it was happening."

"At the time—the very height of the Vietnam War, when the establishment that had sent up the rocket faced a kind of daily full-court-press rebellion, from what had only just been dubbed the 'counterculture'—the act of sending three very white guys to the moon seemed, as Norman Mailer wrote at the time, like the final, futile triumph of Wasp culture... Mailer’s book on the topic, 'Of a Fire on the Moon'... was the usual mid-period Mailer mix of eight parts bullshit to two parts very shrewd observation... The Apollo 11 mission was, he insisted, chilling in its self-evident futility, its enormous orchestrated energy, and its ultimate pointlessness. We went there because we could go there, with the strong implication that this was also, to borrow the title of another Mailer book, why we were in Vietnam; the Wasp establishment had been restless since it got off the Mayflower, and was always seeking new worlds to conquer for no reason. What is easy to forget now is that it was a summer balanced between two equally potent national events: the Wasp triumph of the moon landing, answered, almost exactly a month later, by the counterculture triumph of Woodstock...."

From "Between the Moon and Woodstock" by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

I'm old enough to remember the moon landing and not only do I remember what was said about the moon landing while it was happening, I remember having the same opinion as Norman Mailer.



From a review by Steven Achilles Brown (at Medium):

Throughout ["Of a Fire on the Moon,"] Mailer returns to a recurring question: is the moon landing a good and noble achievement of America, or is it an errand of the Devil?... ... Mailer seems ambivalent until the very end, when he writes

the expedition to the moon was finally a venture which might help to disclose the nature of the Lord and the Lucifer who warred for us . . . probably we had to explore into outer space, for technology had penetrated the modern mind to such a depth that voyages in space might have become the last way to discover the metaphysical pits of that world of technique which choked the pores of modern consciousness — yes, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who know that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure.

This quotation discloses much about Norman Mailer. He had a degree from Harvard in aeronautical engineering, yet as a writer in this technological age, had roots in 19th-century romanticism; he wished that all men, including astronauts, be poets and philosophers. Throughout the book, indeed throughout most of his career, Mailer was preoccupied with one central theme, that God was an embattled vision: good and evil fight each other for possession of the souls of humankind....

"A friend who is still creative in his eighties points out what he calls the geriatric possessive: people past eighty, he says, are expected to say, 'I’m going to take my bath,' 'I’m going to take my walk.'"

"We can counterpoise that to the pediatric possessive: 'You’re going to take your bath,' 'It’s time for your nap.' Only in midlife do we feel secure enough to enumerate actions as existing individually outside our possession of them: 'I’m going to take a bath,' 'I’m going to take a nap.' A bath and a nap exist, briefly, outside our possession of them—they’re just around for the taking, we suppose, and always will be."

From "Can We Live Longer but Stay Younger?/With greater longevity, the quest to avoid the infirmities of aging is more urgent than ever" by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

"The best argument for impeachment is, ironically, the case for national unity. Americans ought to be able to agree..."

"... that, while all opinions are open to debate, some behavior really is out of bounds. An impeachment trial can’t be won? Well, the Republican Party may be obedient now, but there is just enough Never Trumping among those who were once the staunchest of conservatives to make it clear that the difference between constitutional conservatism and thuggishness is real and can be argued for, and maybe even partly won.... Pragmatism is not a way of negating principle but, rather, the realist’s way of pursuing principle. The arguments against impeachment today are primarily pragmatic, the arguments for it primarily principled, but the principled course could, before long, turn into the only practical course. Impeachment may be too good for Trump. It may yet prove just the thing for the country."

Writes Adam Gopnik in "The Pros and Cons of Impeaching Trump/Real and reasonable arguments among congressional Democrats—and, indeed, among the public—range from the practical to the procedural" (The New Yorker).

I'm posting this because it reads like nonsense to me. I presume it makes perfect sense from inside the bubble.

"The utopian feminists are also eugenicists and anti-Semites; the men who dream of a perfect world where same-sex attraction is privileged also unconsciously mimic..."

"... the hierarchy of patriarchy, putting effeminate or cross-dressing 'Uranians' at the bottom of their ladder. The socialists are also sexists, and the far-seeing anarchists are also muddle-headed, mixed-up mystics."

Writes Adam Gopnik in "What Can We Learn from Utopians of the Past?
Four nineteenth-century authors offered blueprints for a better world—but their progressive visions had a dark side" (a New Yorker article about the new book “The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy” by Michael Robertson).

Edward Bellamy is the first of Robertson’s nineteenth-century utopians. When his blandly written book “Looking Backward” appeared, in 1888, it created a now puzzling craze both in his native America and in England. Bellamy’s hero falls asleep in 1887—bizarrely, he’s been entombed in a specially built cell designed to help cure his insomnia—and wakes up in 2000. Instead of immediately rushing off to see “Mission: Impossible 2,” though, he enters a world of communistic order. As Robertson rightly sees, Bellamy offers a nightmarish vision of a hyper-regimented society in which everyone works for the government and retires at forty-five, and where the most fun you can have is to go shopping by picking out goods from a catalogue, ordering them from big depots via pneumatic tube, and then having them delivered at home. Where Wells’s “The Time Machine,” which came out not long after, gave us pale Eloi and proletarian Morlocks, Bellamy was chiefly prescient about Amazon Prime....

As Bellamy’s book progresses, power, brutality, and the capacity to dominate become all that matters. Rules are made and harshly enforced. Robertson chides Bellamy for being inconsistently feminist, which is true, but what is chilling in Bellamy is how much of the totalitarian imagination is already in place in his work, and how alluring it can seem. It’s the same phenomenon that we find in the Athenian intellectual’s idealization of Sparta: intellectuals always dream of a closed society even though they themselves can exist only in an open one....

Much more at the link. Gopnik complains about Robertson's "too facile identification of utopianism with 'progressive' causes" — "only left-wing utopias are recognized."

By the way, I learned from Gopnik that the word "dystopia" was first used by John Stuart Mill (in 1868). But when did that word catch on? I remember being in a conversation in the mid-80s with professors (and their spouses) where we were talking about science-fiction books and one of the male spouses (mine, actually) used the word "dystopia," and one of the professors (an unusually intelligent person) said he thought that was the condition where male genitalia grew inside the body. What was he thinking of? Ectopia? Or was that some weird humor? If the latter, it's not evidence that the word "dystopia" has caught on only fairly recently. I remember being surprised that this person didn't know the word, but over the years, I've leaned more in the direction of thinking he was pulling our undescended leg.

Here's the John Stuart Mill quote: "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable."

To fussily correct the New Yorker — and only because of its longstanding reputation for fact-checking — Mill said "dystopian" (the adjective, not the noun "dystopia"). That's easily checked in the OED, where I learned that "dystopia" is first recorded in 1952:

1952 G. Negley & J. N. Patrick Quest for Utopia xvii. 298 The Mundus Alter et Idem [of Joseph Hall] is..the opposite of eutopia, the ideal society: it is a dystopia, if it is permissible to coin a word.

Mill also said "caco-topians," and the noun form of that was used in 1818 by Jeremy Bentham: "As a match for Utopia (or the imagined seat of the best government), suppose a Cacotopia (or the imagined seat of the worst government) discovered and described."

I'm seeing one and only one appearance of "cacotopia" in the archive at The New Yorker, in "With 'Black Mirror,' Our Dystopia Gets the Television Show It Deserves" by Troy Patterson (January 2018):

Cacotopia is a synonym for dystopia coined, in the eighteenth century, from the Greek kakós, meaning “bad.” It shares that root with kakistocracy, a word that denotes government by the worst persons, and which therefore has gained unprecedented prominence in the past year. Anthony Burgess, discussing “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” favored the term on account of its gagging acrid sound: “I prefer to call Orwell’s imaginary society a cacotopia—on the lines of cacophony or cacodemon. It sounds worse.” Some academics differentiate between dystopian fictions as those that primarily contend with political oppression and cacotopian ones as those that foreground moral decline, and the distinction has its uses.