Sharp by Michelle Dean

Nonfiction, 2018

The opening line of The Journalist and the Murderer, which originally appeared in three parts in the The New Yorker in 1989, is famous. “Any journalist who is not too stupid of too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” Malcolm wrote. This sentence lit a fuse. Many people never seem to have read the book that follows. The first time I saw Malcolm in person, it was twenty years after she’d published that sentence and she was on a high platform at the New Yorker Festival talking about her work. A young man in the crowd got up and questioned her angrily about it. She was silent a moment before she answered: “Well, it was a bit of rhetoric, you see.” The young man clearly did not see.

In Sharp, Michelle Dean presents biographical portraits of ten women who made their fame with writing that was often revered but also chauvinistically dismissed with the putdown that provides the book’s title. Starting with Dorothy Parker and ending with Janet Malcolm, Dean proceeds chronologically through their experiences, occasionally highlighting how they overlapped. The baton passing can is a little clumsy at times are there are few repetitions of fact that should have been shorn away during the editing process. Mostly, though, Dean is an engaging guide, generously and skillfully quoting her subjects to illuminate their strengths and acknowledge their shortcomings and blind spots. Dean’s own voice is shrewdly engaged and just loose enough to make it feel like she’s sharing her reflections and epiphanies as she comes upon them, like a student alive with newfound knowledge rather than an imperious crafter of staid scholarship. Her approach gives Sharp an spirited energy that mirrors that of the fierce talents she highlights.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner

Nonfiction, 2020

“There’s no menu, so you can’t just order, you know, a martini,” the engineer told me, as if I would ever. “You tell the bartender three adjectives, and he’ll customize a drink for you accordingly. I’ve been thinking about my adjectives all day.” What was it like to be fun, I wondered — what was it like to feel you’d earned this?

With withering humor and whip-smart clarity, Anna Wiener fills the pages of this memoir with reflections about the professional passage in her twenties when she stepped away from her aspirations toward some sort of literary career and worked for a couple of wholly characteristic startups in the tech industry. The power of Wiener’s observation is formidable, as is her journalistic instinct for sharing exactly the right quote that reveals how the toxicity of the self-congratulatory go-go culture of these workspaces winds up wounding the souls of those mired in it. The portrait of Silicon Valley and its satellite spaces isn’t flattering, but Wiener is no assassin. She’s just as forthcoming about her own foibles and anxieties, which in turn imparts some sympathy on even the most caddish individuals. Surely, they’re all adrift, too. Uncanny Valley is astute, funny, and fabulously memorable. Cautionary tales are rarely so entertaining.