If you’ve watched the Tour de France (it was both surprising and disappointing this year, wasn’t it?), you know there are more races than the one for the yellow jersey. There are other jerseys, of course, a team prize, and a most combative rider prize. There is also the “race” to simply finish. That’s the one Texan Lawson Craddock was riding after he fractured his shoulder blade and bruised an eye socket a mere 120 kilometers into the 3,351-kilometer route.
Joe Mungo Reed’s cycling novel We Begin Our Ascent is receiving lots of praise from the critics, including our own Andrew Egger. It’s also a story about those other cyclists in the big races: “Our protagonist, Sol, is a domestique, a cyclist whose goal is not to win the Tour, but to maximize his team leader’s chances of winning—pacing him early, shielding him from the wind, frustrating other riders’ attempts to pass him. A lifetime of unceasing toil has brought him this far, to a spot in cycling’s most prestigious event, but Sol lacks the mental and physical gear that distinguishes the true greats—he will never become an endorsement magnet, a media darling, a star. He suspects that, professionally, he has more or less peaked. This bothers him less than you might think. His aims are more existential.”
A guy finds 15 books in a dumpster. Then he discovers they belonged to Thomas Jefferson. (HT: Alan Cornett)
Daniel Mahoney looks at Pierre Manent’s defense of political liberalism: “ La loi naturelle et les droits de l’homme confronts the prejudices, or dogmas, of those who have repudiated the classical and (especially) Christian notion of ‘liberty under law.’ Manent denies that we can generate obligations from a condition of what Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau call the ‘state of nature,’ where human beings are absolutely free, with no obligations to others. Manent’s book is an exercise in defending liberty under law, in both the Christian and the political senses of the term.”
In praise of Andrew Lloyd Webber: “Andrew Lloyd Webber is a self-deprecating fellow, and properly so, since his self has done much that is worthy of deprecation. Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Starlight Express, Cats...the one about the chap with half a Chinet plate sewn to his cheek...the one about Mrs. Dictator. Lloyd Webber perpetrated them all. Your average war criminal at the Hague has less to apologize for. So say the theater nobs, anyway. But not I. I thrilled to them all. Well, not Cats so much, and not Starlight Express at all, but still: The gift is there, and I’d call Phantom of the Opera, Evita, and J. C. Superstar three of the most enchanting works of the musical theater since Richard Rodgers laid down his pen.”
French director Luc Besson has been accused of rape: “In the French filmmaker Luc Besson’s thrillers and science-fiction movies, the women are serious, smart and strong, occasionally stronger than men. Sometimes, they even save the world. But recent allegations of sexual abuse against Mr. Besson put his regard for his actresses in a different light. One of the women, Sand Van Roy, has told the Paris police that Mr. Besson raped her more than once.’”
Have archeologists discovered the remnants of a church built on the spot where Constantine is said to have converted to Christianity? “During work along the right bank of the Tiber this summer, the archaeological group Cooperativa Archeologia uncovered what was first thought to be a villa, but later considered to be a church.”
Essay of the Day:
Taffy Brodesser-Akner explains how Goop haters made Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle company worth $250 million:
“At first, Goop — so named not just for her initials and for, you know, goop, but because someone along the way told her that all the successful internet companies had double O’s — appealed to an audience that admired G.P.’s rarefied lifestyle. Martha Stewart (for example) was an aspirational lifestyle brand, true, but the lifestyle was so easily attainable once Stewart took her wares to Kmart and Macy’s.
“G.P. didn’t want to go broad. She wanted you to have what she had: the $795 G. Label trench coat and the $1,505 Betony Vernon S&M chain set. Why mass-market a lifestyle that lives in definitional opposition to the mass market? Goop’s ethic was this: that having beautiful things sometimes costs money; finding beautiful things was sometimes a result of an immense privilege; but a lack of that privilege didn’t mean you shouldn’t have those things. Besides, just because some people cannot afford it doesn’t mean that no one can and that no one should want it. If this bothered anyone, well, the newsletter content was free, and so were the recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins.
“By the time she stood in that Harvard classroom, Goop was a clothing manufacturer, a beauty company, an advertising hub, a publishing house, a podcast producer and a portal of health-and-healing information, and soon it would become a TV-show producer. It was a clearinghouse of alternative health claims, sex-and-intimacy advice and probes into the mind, body and soul. There was no part of the self that Goop didn’t aim to serve.
“‘I want to help you solve problems,’ G.P. said. ‘I want to be an additive to your life.’ Goop is now worth $250 million, according to a source close to the company.
“The students nodded studiously as she spoke about her clothing line and CPGs and ‘contextual commerce’ and open rates and being ‘cash positive’ and ‘radical wellness’ and how she likes to hire ‘smart people with founder DNA’ and working mothers...For all the students’ questions about those newsletters and their use of all kinds of three-letter acronyms, it felt to me as if everyone was missing the point. G.P.’s business began in 2008 and was incorporated in 2013, but it really started when she was being hunted by the paparazzi and living in such a lonely, high-altitude world that she could basically be friends with only Madonna.”
Photo: Little Chapel
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Ode: Yes, Lord, But Not Yet”
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