4/19/2024 0 Comments Anna delvey feetbombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine-Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”-Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. Vile! But this is what happens when we start writing the lives of the living. There’s another one for kids called The ABCs of AOC. There is an inspirational biography of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez titled Take Up Space. Inspirational figures from sport or business or, God help us, politics. But most biographies today, and especially most of the ones that sell, aren’t about artists or writers they’re part of the process of producing role models. I have little patience for those big glossy biographies of great artists and writers that come out every few years: surely what’s interesting about, say, Philip Roth is in his work, and not the sequential details of his life. I’m starting to think that any biography that is not in some profound sense a thanatography-which is to say, basically all biographies written now-might suck. Even now, if you have your entire life written up in a newspaper, it’s because it recently ended. A biographer must always be, in some sense, a gravedigger. The very earliest biographies are funerary inscriptions, immortalizing the deeds of kings as they follow their victims into the earth. Then they cut off all his toes, which each have their pious associations, and then his feet, his hands, his arms, his legs and finally his head. When they sliced off his seventh finger, he quoted the Psalm: “Seven times a day I have praised the Lord.” On the ninth finger, he cried: “At the ninth hour Christ gave up the ghost on the cross, and so, Lord, as I smart with the loss of this ninth finger, I confess your name and give you thanks.” His final finger reminded him of the Ten Commandments. James the Mutilated, who was tortured by having all his fingers cut off. Roman biographies, and the medieval biographies that followed, recounted the stories of great martyrs or great murderers. For most of the history of the genre, biography was usually a way of writing less about life and more about death. It is a long and often gruesome tradition. The biography is, of course, a very old form. Instead, I was wondering: What is a book, exactly? What are people doing when they read? Might banning a few books actually be a good idea? The questions the book had me asking weren’t to do with billionaires, or power, or our destiny in the stars. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. He’s just the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. I can’t summon the energy it all feels too much like a sideshow. But despite everything, I find it very hard to hate the man. Because of his terrible politics, or his hideous wealth. I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk I was asked to review his biography because I’m the kind of person who can be relied upon to hate Elon Musk.
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