Between Slate’s own Dear Prudence, Carolyn Hax, Dan Savage, Jolie Kerr, Amy Dickinson, and more, the advice column is flourishing. But Heather Havrilesky, writer of “Ask Polly” and a new book, How to Be a Person in the World, is just a little bit messier than the rest of her cohort, crafting long, winding, metaphor-filled answers to letter writers’ queries and urging them to find power in their flaws. “She’s an alluringly wry cheerleader, an enthusiastic volunteer offering sports drinks as we struggle past during the half-marathon of life,” Katy Waldman writes in her review of the book, which also addresses a central conundrum of modern life: What really separates us all from Beyoncé?
Superhuman achievement is the subject of another piece in this week’s Slate Book Review, Rebecca Schuman’s assessment of The End of the Perfect 10, which tells the story of how gymnastics went from Nadia Comaneci’s historic perfect score to McKayla “Not Impressed” Maroney’s head-scratching 16.233 in 2012. Schuman calls it “the Simone Biles of gymnastics books,” and if you know anything about Biles, you’ll understand what a high compliment that is. Also in the Slate Book Review, Katy Waldman asks whether hatred of poetry might be love in disguise. And Laura Miller uses the occasion of a best-selling thriller from Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley to dig into the differences between the communal craft of TV storytelling and the lonely art of novel-writing. For more Laura Miller, allow her to introduce you to Trollope’s Barchester Towers, an ecclesiastical 19th-century workplace comedy and the next selection in the Year of Great Books Slate Academy.
You’ll also want to make room in your schedule for The Night Of, a new HBO miniseries that has drawn some lofty comparisons from Slate’s Willa Paskin: “For all that The Night Of shares with Serial and Making a Murderer, it shares as much with The Wire, a series about the omnipotence of dysfunctional power structures.” All roads lead back to The Wire, eventually. Unless they lead back to Hamilton. Speaking of that, if you’ve got $40,000 lying around, you might be able to score tickets to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s final performance of the show this weekend.
A few more bits from the week in culture:
- Hollywood’s surprising new mode of destroying city skylines
- The true magic of The Lord of the Rings books
- Fergie douses MILFs in milk in her new music video
- Stop taking Spielberg for granted!
- Elie Wiesel’s language of silence
- Maxwell’s album trilogy has become the R&B Song of Ice and Fire
- The offbeat comedians who prove that Trump is not immune to satire
- Talking to The Act of Killing’s anonymous co-director
- Star Trek now officially has a gay character
- A medieval historian speculates on Daenerys Targaryen’s future
