Tom Wolfe and White Suits

The Electric Gin-and-Tonic Acid Test.

RIP Tom Wolfe, whom I met only once.

I was dressed as a WWI soldier and we rode a golf cart together through the Connecticut twilight. And then Bill Buckley walked by with Big Bird.

I swear to god this was a 100% true story.

— Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) May 15, 2018

All his books after The Right Stuff were very ignorable, but for about a decade he put out some very good and readable material that said interesting things about how people lived in the USA. Then he tried to become an Important Thinker and lost his mojo.

the haughty, vicious interchanges between Wolfe and Mailer are classic

RIP

Vanities was when I got off the bus, but he was on fire for much of the 1960s

rip -- i could never get much out of his later books but his classic stuff was great to discover as a teen. rick perlstein dismissed him on twitter as "the jordan peterson of the 70s," which kinda surprised me b/c i see a lot of echoes of wolfe's style in nixonland.

He definitely calcified early and kept on calcifying. No use for his fiction. But his heyday stuff is fun to read.

Mentioned upthread:

https://frinkiac.com/video/S12E03/IbdT3oyCmI4lj2Dbx5884F6AeGo=.gif

didn't believe in evolution!

I did like this recent essay on how the 2008 financial crisis let Wall Street gracefully retire a generation of traders and executives whose testosterone was no longer as valuable in the age of quants.

Just starting on this:

https://newrepublic.com/article/177571/tom-wolfe-electric-kool-aid-conservative