Look away, look away!

• Listen, before I break the bad news, I want to say something: we all love hunks. No one is saying that hunks are bad, or that you don’t deserve a hunk in your life, let alone your fantasies. It’s just … are you sitting down? … Mr. Darcy was probably not a hunk, if we’re being honest. I know, I know, you’ve been turning the pages of Pride and Prejudice imagining Colin Firth for years now—we all have—that guy’s cut from fucking marble. But two professors have generated “the first historically accurate portrait” of Mr. Darcy and—think about it—why would he be a hunk? He was a gentleman, not a laborer! Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura writes, “The ‘real’ Mr. Darcy would have been pale and pointy-chinned, and would have had a long nose on an oval, beardless face. His hair, strangely, would have been white. And he would have been slightly undernourished, with sloping shoulders—‘more ballet dancer than beefcake,’ according to one of the authors … A real-life Mr. Darcy in that era would have been a ‘far cry from muscular modern-day television representations’ portrayed by actors such as Mr. Firth, Elliot Cowan and Matthew Macfadyen, the study concluded.”

• Alexander Nazaryan stopped by our office to talk about literature in the age of Trump, and to go spelunking in our back issues: “Diving into the digital archive, as I did, is a bracing reminder of the artist’s duty in times of national crisis—and there were very few times in the Review’s first two decades when the nation wasn’t in crisis … Thus you have William Styron publishing an excerpt from his hotly debated The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel of racial violence for a nation fighting over race anew; Edward Hoagland’s short story “The Witness” (1967), written from the perspective of a young man in New York ‘full of minority sympathy’; the poet Ted Berrigan, writing in 1968, in the bleakest days of Vietnam: ‘The War goes on & / war is Shit’; David Lehman admitting in 1995 that he’d never liked the towers of the World Trade Center, but after they were bombed in 1993, he suddenly came to appreciate “the way the tops / of the towers dissolve into white skies / in the east when you cross the Hudson”; the violent silhouettes of slavery life by artist Kara Walker, published in the Review in 1999, seven years before her career-making solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.”

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