Ron Charles Substack

Excerpted from an email from my new best friend. It all started with Noah’s Ark. For years — almost since before the Flood — I’ve been receiving emails intended for the Rev. Dr. Ron Charles, a biblical archaeologist and missionary who has written about his search for Noah’s Ark in Turkey. My questions about that endeavor are 300 cubits long, but that’s beside the point.

The Tuesday Review Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, A Tender Age, recalls a period of childhood freedom impossible for today’s iPhone-toting kids — or their anxious parents — to imagine. “In our 1970s town,” Lee writes, “the adults, for whatever reason, whether they were working a job or not, left us to our own, and to one another.” It’s true.

(Liveright, forthcoming Aug. 25) On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word marketing pitch tarted up as a manifesto. “We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity,” Zuckerberg — or his avatar — wrote in a document that smells like Ayn Rand’s eau de toilette. The message may be suspect, but the timing is superb. On Aug. 25, Jill Lepore will publish a wide-ranging warning about the deleterious effects of Silicon Valley on American democracy.

The Tuesday Review Twenty-five years ago, Richard Russo dedicated his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Empire Falls, to the filmmaker Robert Benton. In an interview around that time, Russo said Benton had changed his life by getting him into screenwriting, and he wanted him to know there were no hard feelings. The boundary between novels and screens is now so permeable that it’s hard to remember a time when producers and directors weren’t scouring bookshelves for their next adaptation.

(Island Press/Princeton University Press; background photo by Ron Charles) Every morning after breakfast, Dawn and I take a walk around my folks’ farmhouse in New Hampshire. A red-tailed hawk complains about us from atop a white pine. Dew glistens on goldenrod running down to the covered bridge. But these days, preparing to enter this idyll feels like dressing for combat.

Cockroaches can survive anything. Apparently, so can book critics. Today is the six-month anniversary of my pivot to Substack. I say pivot — so elegant! — but it was more like being pushed down the stairs. Last January, everybody at The Washington Post knew trouble was coming, but after surviving so many earlier cullings, I imagined I could once again duck under the swinging scythe and keep writing till they carried out my carcass in a book tote. That was not to be.

The Smithsonian’s task is not to canonize the Founders or conceal their contradictions, but to help Americans understand them. (Photo by Ron Charles) Last Friday, between bombing Iran and bombing at the Correspondents’ Dinner, President Trump issued an executive order requiring warning signs outside the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

The Tuesday Review Among the swelling collection of books confronting our imperiled planet, Claire Vaye Watkins’s fiction remains defiantly alive. Her stories and novels are rooted in the American West, that awesome expanse of dunes and deserts that uninformed observers would call empty. Where life has adapted to the damning conditions of heat and drought, Watkins finds characters burned away to their elemental anxieties and desires.

Back in March, I regarded H.R. 7661 — a national book-banning bill titled the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” — as dangerous but politically unserious. After all, Congress is designed to thwart rashness, to subject outrageous proposals to serious scrutiny, to allow bad ideas to fail like seeds sown on rocky soil. Election denier Rep.

The Tuesday Review Go slowly. This is goodbye. Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine concludes one of the richest portraits of New York — a suave trilogy of novels that opened in the late 1950s with Harlem Shuffle.