August 7, 2025 First Person The United States vs. Sean Combs By Harmony Holiday Sean Combs in 2010. Photograph by John Seb Barber, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. A Great Villain Is a Great American Prisons are American tourist attractions, and criminals who become fugitives or inmates our outlaw heroes—Al Capone, Alcatraz, Charles Manson, Sing Sing, Angola, Luigi Mangione, O. J. Simpson, Diddy, né Sean Combs. A collective underdog fetish means that the image of a civilian outwitting, outrunning, or confronting “the man” is enough to negate his trespasses. Maybe achieving the apotheosis of success in the United States requires becoming a convict, being threatened with or facing real incarceration and exile, doing time, paying dues, and making a grand comeback. At that finale you can sell that story to restore your fortunes, dignity, and maverick glory. Combs is the latest public figure to go from celebrated to disgraced to tentatively redeemed in some eyes by a show trial and the masculine compulsion to cheer when men get away with terrorizing women. The rapper Jay Electronica stood outside of the courtroom with his two Great Danes on the day the verdict was delivered, and announced, “I’m just here supporting my brother.” He looked half-ashamed, half-deviant about it, like he was both courting and afraid of backlash. Others call Diddy’s comeuppance a legal lynching, insinuating he’s a survivor of a because-he’s-black character assassination, since other powerful, abusive men have yet to be held accountable. It’s a truly American malfunction, this belief that the once oppressed should have the freedom to become as evil and ruthlessly decadent as their oppressors. This is what is sold to the public as prestige, and imitations of it exist at every stratum. With this in mind, Diddy’s story could be construed as a bootstraps tale—from Harlem to Howard to Hollywood endings. His recent downward spiral might be just another buoy, one that will help him ascend anew. Hip-hop music understands this about the American subconscious, taps into these delusions of impunity for material, and dresses its best emcees in rap sheets, threats, beef, high and low-level street violence—sometimes actual death and martyrdom. Even the so-called success stories who sell the genre out to the mainstream cannot be too clean—they better be rumored to run a trap house, attract a harem of groupies, and defy the legal system if they expect to maintain credibility. As the wealth of those at the top has increased, their criminality has grown reckless and entitled, blasé even, but no less compulsory. Now it’s tied more to contracts, NDAs, and designer drugs than to desperation to break through; they run media companies, liquor brands, parts of the NFL. In June 2022 Diddy was granted BET’s Lifetime Achievement Award and thanked, among others, Cassie Ventura, his on-and-off girlfriend between 2011 and 2018, for holding him down in the dark times. That same year, he dressed as the Joker for Halloween. He was so creepy and persuasive in his white face and sleaze that many didn’t know it was him in the costume; it felt like a mimed confession of his true attributes. In 2023, New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, presented Diddy with the coveted key to the city. The key was returned the following summer, after news began circulating that Combs had abused Ventura. In September of 2024, Combs was taken into custody by the Southern District of New York and held without bail on RICO charges of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion and transportation to engage in prostitution. He was considered a flight risk and a threat to potential witnesses. His loyalists formed a hush harbor. This month, he was acquitted of the most serious charges and cheered on by many who seem to feel vicariously acquitted themselves ready to get back to a White Party or freak-off; when he’s released from prison, it seems likely he’ll be offered a hero’s reentry, a new lease on cultural domination and indiscriminate sexcapades, a new deal, as if he’s some kind of New Age abolitionist. Villainy was good for business. Read More
August 6, 2025 Rereading A Duel or a Duet: On Graham Greene By Yiyun Li Graham Greene. Unknown photographer, public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have the luxury of having no known biography. Greene, having written about his life and having had his life extensively written about by others, remains near when one reads his work—not insistently dominating or distracting, as some writers may prove to be, but as a presence often felt and at times caught by a side glance. The first moment appears in Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape. In a chapter about Brighton Rock, which Greene called a labour of love, he explains the original inspiration for the novel with a reminiscence about the first film he saw at age six—a silent film about a kitchen maid turned queen, with live music played offscreen—he writes, “Her march was accompanied by an old lady on a piano, but the tock-tock-tock of untuned wires stayed in my memory when other melodies faded … That was the kind of book I always wanted to write: the high romantic tale, capturing us in youth with hopes that prove illusions, to which we return again in age in order to escape the sad reality.” The second moment appears in Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant by Leopoldo Duran. In 1983, Father Duran accompanied Greene on a journey to Spain for the filming of his novel Monsignor Quixote. At a Trappist monastery, Father Duran noticed an elderly monk, Father Juan. “I saw him, standing discreetly apart, at the entrance to the porter’s lodge, learning on this walking stick, chin in both hands, and totally absorbed by these people and the strange things they were doing … With seventy years’ experience of Trappist rule behind him, Father Juan did not want to go to heaven without seeing how films were made.” Read More
August 5, 2025 Diaries My College Diary By Tao Lin I didn’t black out my diary like this—my process involved underlining parts I wanted to keep—but this gives a sense of how much is missing. I kept a typed diary in college. It started three weeks into freshman year and ended three days into senior year. Over 1,079 days, I typed 76 entries, totaling 21,975 words. Here, I’ve edited it down to 43 entries and 2,286 words. I edited only by deleting. I retained grammatical errors, such as incorrect comma usage, but I fixed typos and standardized the word-level style—italicizing books, etc. An erasure poem is made by blacking out words in a poem. Memory is a mode of erasure that blacks out most of life. A diary is an erasure of memory—everything not written is blacked out. This post is an erasure diary where the smallest unit of erasure was the sentence. I erased 89.6 percent of the original. I feel wonder, thinking back to my college self, who did not anticipate this happening to his private diary. Read More
August 4, 2025 Bookmarks Sundress: What a Beautiful Shiny Word By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky: Sundress: what a beautiful shiny word; my mother used to wear a light blue one that she sewed for herself. She made everything she wore with her own two hands, she was a dressmaker. For a few months in 1954, she even had a shop, which she called her butík. But she made more clothes for herself than for her clients, and she knew how to make herself look far more beautiful than any of the women who paid her to make them look good. Even when she had to go out to buy bread or fruit, she’d walk out of our low-income building looking like a rich movie actress, like a different mother entirely, whether she had on her winter coat with its astrakhan collar, or a pencil skirt, or a bell skirt, or her sundress. And maybe she actually was a different woman, that’s how I see her now anyway, my eyeglasses briny with the sea air, my nerves shot, cataracts clouding my sight. When she went in the water, she’d never go in deep and she always swam the breast stroke: her long neck extended, her chin held high, her mouth closed so as not to swallow the salt water, her small ears with their delicate lobes. She often lost things on the beach she considered precious, and when she started digging desperately in the sand, we children would always try and help. Read More
August 1, 2025 On Film The White Blouse of Sandra Mozarowsky By Clara Usón Mozarowsky in Beatriz (1976), directed by Gonzalo Suárez. For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and poets have pursued the meaning of life. Is there one, and, if so, what is it? Spirituality? Religion? Ask a man on the street the meaning of life and he might just say “Surviving.” But ask a teenager, and you’ll get your answer. She’ll tell you the meaning of life is Love, and her certainty should make you happy for her. By twelve, I’d fallen in love more than fifteen times. My romances were huge, earth-shattering, much more devastating and intense than any of the ones that came later. All the men were perfect, being imaginary, and since I saw no need for messy breakups, we always ended things on good terms. When I was six or seven, our babysitter entertained us with fairy tales. She always told the same story. Once upon a time, in a faraway land, Pablo (my brother) married a princess and became king. Blanca (my sister) wed the crown prince of the country next door, which meant she, too, was in line for a throne. I always got the prince’s younger brother, which meant contenting myself with being a princess—and I was not content. Who would be? In my imagination, I stole my sister’s boyfriend. Sandra Mozarowsky was never a queen. She was never a king’s girlfriend. She was the king’s lover, though, if you believe the rumors. Read More
July 31, 2025 Document But How, How to Occupy Life? By Marguerite Duras Marguerite Duras in 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Marguerite Duras’s Le navire Night (The ship named Night) is both a film and a would-be film, or rather a documentary of a film that the writer decided never to finish. Duras abandoned her initial project after several days of shooting, deciding instead to record the “disaster” it became. What results is an eighty-nine-minute composition of slow, panning shots and zoom-outs on the actors that would have starred (Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier, and Mathieu Carrière), the makeup and wardrobe they would have worn, and the Parisian backdrops and candlelit rooms in which they would have played their roles, overlaid by the voices of Duras and her friend the film director Benoît Jacquot reading directly from the text she had planned for the actors to use as their script. The original text, written in 1978, describes the paranoia and passion of an erotic affair conducted entirely over the telephone by a young man and woman, insomniacs both, the man working a night shift and the woman dying of leukemia, as they pleasure themselves to each other’s voices and make ill-fated plans to meet in person. Below, in a new English translation by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, is Duras’s account of the making and unmaking of Le navire Night, a film which she would elsewhere call “beautiful and vain.” —Owen Park, editorial assistant The story in Le navire Night was told to me in December ’77 by the person who had lived it, J.M., the young man of Les Gobelins. I knew J.M. and I knew the story. There were about ten of us who knew of its existence. But we had never spoken about it together, J.M. and I. It was after three years passed that one day—I had spoken about it with a friend of J.M., who said she had already forgotten certain details—I was afraid that the story would be lost. I asked J.M. to record it on tape. He agreed. Apart from certain dates and the knot of names in Père Lachaise that he had never managed to disentangle, he remembered. Everything was still there. It was three years after the end of the story, F.’s wedding. Hearing him tell it, I understood that J.M. had no doubt always hoped to bring this story face to face with a listener, but that he had always feared—when the moment came—that people wouldn’t believe him “if he said everything.” And that rather than being troubled by it, he was happy to speak about it. It was based on that tape recording that I wrote Le navire Night—twice over, with six months in between. The first version of the text is from February ’78, it appeared in Minuit journal. The second version of the text is what is published here, it is the final text from the film shoot, July ’78. I gave the first version of the text to J.M. He read it. He said that “everything was true but that he recognized nothing.” I asked him if I could publish it and then perhaps, later on, turn it into a film. He told me that he hoped I would. That day we stopped talking about the story. T o tell the truth, never again. After having read what his own experience became—in the words of another—J.M. remained silent but as if he were always on the verge of speaking. I think he must have realized that other versions of his story were possible—that he had silenced them because he didn’t know that they were possible just as they were possible for any story. I think too that his own version had carried him so far that he had forgotten its sprawl, its banality. Read More