The New Yorker

Reading Catullus in a college Latin course, Daniel Mendelsohn came across an unfamiliar word: irrumator, which the poet used to describe a provincial governor for whom he had worked. “You may render that word as ‘bastard,’ ” his professor said, a little too loudly. That evening, Mendelsohn looked up the word. The verb inrumō—the root of irrumator—means “to give suck, abuse obscenely.” “I grinned, thinking I had a pretty good idea of what Catullus was calling the governor,” Mendelsohn writes. “Just how you can call your boss a skullfucker and still maintain a reputation for refined erudition and literary sophistication was a question that stumped me,” he continues. “As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one.” On the one hand, Catullus was an impetuous, often swaggering young writer whose sometimes brash, sometimes tender personality vividly emerges from the hundred-odd poems that have come down to us. On the other, he was a refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, who peppered even his occasional verse with elaborate word games and abstruse allusions. Catullus’s extraordinary range, the naked intensity of his emotions, and his dazzling variety of tones made him a poet admired and imitated by others; the many registers of his verse have proved an irresistible challenge for translators. Mendelsohn writes about Catullus’s enduring appeal: https://lnkd.in/gDSHu6hU

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“I liked my younger face. We had a good life together. That face is dead now,” Sarah Miller writes. “At times, my grief about this loss is as overpowering as anything I’ve felt over a death or a lost relationship. There is the invisibility that middle-aged women speak of, but the moments of visibility aren’t that great, either.” “The worst, though, are those moments when I kind of forget that my face doesn’t look the way it used to, and I see myself in a mirror by accident, or in a photo, and I think, That can’t really be me,” she continues. “I am supposed to endure all this with dignity, silence, and maturity, and yet, as you age, especially if you’re suddenly single, or even if you’re not, you realize the best way to get the sort of attention and support that would help you face aging with grace and maturity involves remaining youthfully alluring. Botox is a reasonable tool in a world where a lot of things we do not want to be true are true anyway.” Miller reflects on aging and getting injectables: https://lnkd.in/gESccWmC

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Why has Disney’s new live-action remake of “Snow White” flopped at the box office? Recent articles pin much of the blame on Rachel Zegler. But the real reasons behind its implosion are “structural and multifaceted,” Jessica Winter writes. https://lnkd.in/gQJhywdZ

In “Fiume o Morte!,” the director Igor Bezinović combines nonfiction elements with fictionalizations of historical events—and reveals the behind-the-scenes creation of these reënactments, turning the work into a documentary about its own making. https://lnkd.in/gfP4y55Y

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A conundrum lies at the heart of “Sad Tiger,” Neige Sinno’s strange, shattering memoir of childhood sexual abuse: Can—or should—evil be understood? “For Sinno, who is also a novelist, essayist, and translator, this question could not be more personal, reaching into the very core of her identity,” Leslie Camhi writes. “Yet her tone, as the book opens, is coolly distant and almost conversational, inviting us to contemplate, alongside her, the unthinkable: the mind of a man who coerces a young child into sex acts; his pillaging of that child’s foundational store of trust.” The book joins a chorus of others that have been raising awareness about sexual violence and incest in France in the past few years, including Camille Kouchner’s best-selling memoir, “The Familia Grande.” Kouchner tells a story of growing up in a prominent family of freewheeling Parisian intellectuals with a terrible secret: her stepfather, a high-profile legal scholar, was sexually abusing her 14-year-old twin brother. In the book’s wake, the hashtag #MeTooInceste took off online, with thousands of testimonies, and President Emmanuel Macron vowed to tighten French laws on incest. Later that year, members of Parliament voted to establish 15 as the legal age of consent in France. Read about Sinno’s striking memoir and the role literature has played in shaping France’s ongoing reëvaluation of its laws surrounding sex with minors: https://lnkd.in/gZGr578U

Natalaya Lobanova illustrates just how low the bar can go. Sign up for our free humor newsletter to get more (painfully relevant) satire and cartoons directly in your inbox: https://lnkd.in/g5N2CTEF

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Brendan Loper. #NewYorkerCartoons