The Opinionist

“I need to tell you something.” The voice, a rush of liquid mercury dense, and metallic, poisonous silver. And it was Daisy, the wind chime promise. Beautiful and beautiful broken song. In the darkened kitchen her white dress looked like a phantom hand wrapped around her body, billowing ghostly light. Eyes dark and earnest and even in the wake of this woman more ghost than human, in the dying heat crumbling like flies around the corpse gasping nothing in the ashes; even as her fingers pressed so hard into his wrist he might have thought she was trying to push pearls from his pulse—he leaned irresistibly toward it, the siren call of Daisy’s voice. Like the shuffling of bills from the devil’s knuckles rapping life or death onto the wood—this limbo, now, that he lived. Tom Buchanan listened, because he could do nothing else, and when it was over her eyes were still. He was still shaking when he heard his own coarse croak let’s go to bed, Daisy, like it was someone else, and still as she t...

When Gatsby met Daisy, she was eighteen and he was twenty-seven. When they meet again she is twenty-three and he is thirty-two. Whether they were truly in love in 1917 Louisville is another question, but by the time Gatsby uproots out of nowhere to West Egg, Long Island less than five miles from the Buchanan residence, he is already more in love with Daisy the Idea than he had ever been with Daisy the Person. Not much of a hot take, but still. Buying a house directly across the bay from your married ex-lover’s five years after your one-month fling is not love anymore, but obsession. It reminded me weirdly of that time Taylor Swift (at twenty-three) bought a house just across the Kennedy residence a month into dating Conor Kennedy, a high school senior who had just turned eighteen. Perhaps all unethical billionaires really are alike. As the readers we are informed that for perhaps as long as he had lived, Gatsby was married to an ideal of a luxurious life that would make him untouchable...

When Ms. Rosenberger asked “No Swifties?”, almost incredulously, during the discussion of Sherman Alexie’s father and Jimi Hendrix, I didn’t say anything, fought the urge and killed it, didn’t raise my hand. I know what I would have said: some faux-nonchalant, socially acceptable spiel about how she was a billionaire or her music was mediocre or her MAGA-affiliations or performative activism—the ex-Swiftie, I am an ex-Swiftie, but I can’t wash away the past just like I can’t undo my neuron paths where every lyric from every song I played too many times and every “Taylor Swift being relatable” compilation and even the script from every Target advertisement is carved there like dormant volcanoes. Or that I bought three of her CDs without even owning a CD player, or once had her as my WeChat profile picture once or started lurking on a Taylor-hate subreddit and wondered why I ever liked her at all or didn’t say anything not a message not a syllable to my Swiftie friend in China about her ...