Last week I was at one of those small town diners you hear about on NPR, enjoying a hamburger steak piled with mushrooms, black coffee, and an increasingly grease-stained paperback edition of Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). Late in the meal I came across this bit in Chapter Three: After marking it, I stared at it for a minute. The server came over and chided me for not getting very far in my book. I showed her the bit about the cattle truck bit and she agreed with Read more