Trump has been fiercely mocked in the media since the 1980s. But Trump learned from someone to let all the mockery roll off his back, that the negative publicity was still publicity.
Since the era of 'Sherlock Holmes,' private detectives had long been able to influence cases on their own. But the online detective, who had no sort of professional training or even long practice, is a purely modern phenomenon. The Internet changed everything by letting anyone become a self-appointed 'expert' on a case.
Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.
The diversity of perspective, the unwillingness to generalise - those are good traits in countries as they are in art.
Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form of virtue.
Many people, I've noticed by informally polling friends, are prone to distinguishing a beach read by genre. Some people thought all thrillers are beach reads; others thought all romances are. Some people thought only mass market paperbacks are eligible for beach read standards.
There is something a little vulgar about writing a novel that is too close to the present, too concerned with current events, too eager to critique technological advancements.
Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.
Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs.
The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.
It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all.
Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.
Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish - or read - books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction.
There are, of course, fat characters in books out there, some of them quite enduring and famous. But they tend to be creatures of young-adult or commercial fiction.