Well... Let's just say I felt gleefully bad for them.

My writing nemisis (of twenty years! due to an insult in college!) became *super* famous and haunted my dreams because their book was everywhere, but then had a very public burnout to the point that I started to feel bad for them.

But getting back to your original post: Yiddish idioms and sayings have always felt very sarcastic to me, meaning I'm sure my grandmother would 100% approve of your take.

I always think of it as Yiddish-coded because it's something all the relatives in my grandparents' generation used to say. I can hear the accented "I could care less" in my head any time it comes up. But I appreciate that could/couldn't is a global phenomenon. Language is cool.

100%!

Idioms exist. Idioms don't always make perfect logical sense. That's part of what makes them idioms. Why is this the one idiom everyone is always desperate to correct?

(I actually have my theories on that, but I'll keep conspiracy theories to myself.)

It looks incredible

I loved this book! I have a story coming out in Exacting Clam next year that was inspired by it. (The final version that's being published lost most of the docu-science format in editing, though I still credit Labatut as my muse.)

It really taps into an important aesthetic of pre-prestige TV which was that nothing had to make any logical sense beyond the confines of its limited premise.

I can picture this 80s cartoon down to the animation style and music. It would have fit right in.

Our understandable tendency to revere the literary giants of yesteryear does tend to mean we take them too seriously, when, actually, most of the time they were making jokes.

Yeah, I wasn't meaning to correct you, exactly. They don't give anyone else respect or agency so why should we differentiate them?

Wasn't that the other one... Bret Stephens? Or did they both do that? Anyway, not a defense of this personified eyeroll, more just an acknowledgement of how awful they ALL are over there.

That is a fantastic, tactile, dirge of a poem.

My top books of 1859:

I'm declaring a tie between:

fromtheheartofeurope.eu/september-bo...

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

and

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, by Edward Fitzgerald

and

fromtheheartofeurope.eu/january-book...

On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin

Hard to top it. House of the Seven Gables is good, and in any other year, as they say. But not Moby Dick's year. Moby Dick wins almost any year.