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Cool Machine Sets the Mind to Musing

Colson Whitehead’s marvelous Cool Machine (2026) is the third in his series of Harlem crime novels. They feature Ray Carney, the street-smart owner of a 125th Street furniture store and a sporadic fence who is often in trouble. Cool Machine reminds me again that New York City is not one city. It is, instead, a conglomeration of many cities that sometime overlap. Whitehead’s trilogy, which included Harlem Shuffle (2021) and Crook Manifesto (2023), has its center in the Harlem world of hustlers and criminals and business people and strivers and family men, but those people intersect with gem merchants of midtown Manhattan, the changing world of the Lower East Side, Radio Row in lower Manhattan, a part of the New York scene that was demolished with the construction of the World Trade Center. Some of his other books also show us the differing New York City worlds. Sag Harbor is about a tony part of eastern Long Island, but it is also about the world of the privileged living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and its culture of exclusive private schools. And his The Colossus of New York is a marvelous prose poem, something of an ode to the many “cities” of New York City.

Reading Whitehead makes me think of the cities within the City that I inhabited or entered into during my more than half-century in the City. But it also brought to mind some other authors. The cover of Cool Machine reminds us that Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction…twice. He is one of the few writers who have won more than once, but the kudos go further. Yes, he won a Pulitzer for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad and again three years later for The Nickel Boys, books much different from the Harlem crime trilogy. However, he also was awarded the National Book Award for The Underground Railroad, and he has been the recipient of many other honors. This got me thinking about the twentieth century writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a National Book Award for a different novel, and two Pulitzers for drama, Thornton Wilder.

Today Wilder is largely overlooked, even though many of my generation have read the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey, an innovative, powerful work. And many of us have seen or read or even acted in his innovative, powerful play that won a Pulitzer: Our Town. On the other hand, I have never seen his other Pulitzer-Prize winning play, The Skin of our Teeth, although I would have liked to have seen the original Broadway cast of it, starring Frederic March and Tallulah Bankhead. Now there’s a pair.

Some years back, I found that our library in the country, the Barrett Friendly Library, had a copy of Wilder’s The Eighth Day, which won the National Book Award four decades after Bridge won the Pulitzer. It is very good, and that made me wonder why he wasn’t read much these days. Even so, I did not seek out more of his output or reread Bridge, and perhaps it is telling that I could not recently remember the title of The Eighth Day nor could I tell you a lick about it other than I remember it as being a good book.

These thoughts returned when I plucked Theophilus North, Wilder’s last novel, published when he was 76, out of a leave-one-take-one book kiosk. I enjoyed reading it and read more about Wilder, an astonishing man. In addition to the Pulitzers and the National Book Award, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Letters and the Presidential Medal for Freedom. He knew many languages and his translation of Ibsen’s A Doll House was running on Broadway when Our Town opened. He wrote The Matchmaker, which had a long Broadway run, and its adapted version, Hello, Dolly, played even longer. He wrote a famous screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock, and his friends included both Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein. Even with all of these accomplishments, few of us would think to place him on our list of great American writers.

Theophilus North is set in 1926 and reads as if it is a slightly fictionalized version of the author’s life. In the summer of 1926, Theophilus, our narrator, a graduate of Yale, has left his teaching job at a prestigious prep school in New Jersey (Wilder had taught at Lawrenceville and graduated from Yale) and heads off to Newport, Rhode Island, near where Theophilus (and Wilder) had been stationed in World War I. Importing archeological ideas from ancient Troy, North tells us his theory of nine cities of Newport—early settlers, seaport, playground for the rich, local workers, and so on. North spends the summer teaching tennis to and tutoring youngsters and reading to the elderly. Each chapter is a short story, with some of the same characters popping up in many of them. Each story has a similar structure: A problem or a mystery crops up, and Theophilus resolves it. Although those helped are grateful, he always rejects pay or any hint of future consideration. The book explores the various posited Newport cities but does not have any central plot or moral or theme. Each chapter could stand on its own. This made for satisfactory, episodic reading. A chapter a day is the way I approached it.

As I was reading, I kept thinking that Theophilus North reminded me of something else that I had read at about the same time, but at first I could not place it. It was not the dissection of a time or place as in Updike’s Rabbit novels. It was not the intertwined short stories of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. Or a book like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge with vignettes of intersecting characters. It was not his contemporary or semi-contemporary authors writing about American themes, like O’Hara, Bellow, or DeLillo. Instead I realized it reminded me of another episodic book, The Second Rumpole Omnibus by John Mortimer, a collection containing three Rumpole books that had been separately published. Each Rumpole book consists of short stories, but, as with Theophilus North, characters recur and incidents from one story are referred to in another. The Rumpole stories are similar to Theophilus not only because of the first-person narration, but also because at the beginning of each story a problem or mystery is presented and by the end the situation is neatly resolved by the narrator. Both North and Rumpole, the well-worn barrister, have pockets of erudition;­­ North has a vast knowledge of literature and languages; Rumpole knows bloodstains, Wordsworth, and judges. But given the choice, I would take Rumpole over North. Wilder has created a character that seems too good to be true, while one can imagine the true existence of Rumpole because, although an idealist, he is flawed. North is a prig; Horace Rumpole has self-deprecatory humor and a wife who at least slightly terrifies him (the infamous “She who must be obeyed”). I would like to have a glass or three of Chateau Fleet Street at Pomeroy’s with Rumpole because I might not only enjoy the conversation, but I also might learn something about human nature. I can’t imagine having a drink with North unless I wanted to learn more about him. I’m sure he would be delighted to tell me.

The New York Times in its book review interviews writers and asks them what writers, living or dead, they would like to have dinner with. No one is going to interview me for The New York Times Book Review, but I find that interesting to think about. If asked, I would like to get together with the fictional Ray Carney and Horace Rumpole. I think that they would find each other fascinating, but I would like it to be in a New York bar, or diner, or Chinese restaurant. For various reasons, I no longer live in New York, but Whitehead reminds me of how much the City has been part of my being. I miss it. I relate to the conclusion of Cool Machine when Carney is thinking about the next phase of his life and ruminates: “Escape from New York. The question remained: Where do you go? There was no place else. It was like going on the lam from yourself. He had been suckered before and fallen for scams. Swindled himself when he let vanity or pride get the best of him. Same as anyone. But he’d never been so foolish as to fall for that long con, the biggest con of all, that there were other places besides New York City.”

As Whitehead dedicates his most recent book: for New York Fuckin’ City.

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First Sentences

“In 1976, even boxes of fried chicken celebrated the American Revolution.” Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (2026).

“In all of Ray Carney’s years as a fence—he had been a reluctant fence and a ruthless fence, at times imperiled by his choices and at others the embodiment of crooked intelligence—there was only one occasion when he participated in the theft itself, and that was in the summer of 1981 when Uncle Rich came back to town.” Colson Whitehead, Cool Machine (2026).

“I have lived for twenty years in the county of Lancaster, where my neighbors on all sides are ‘Pennsylvania Dutch.’” Phebe Earle Gibbons, “Pennsylvania Dutch” and Other Essays (1882).

“On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry from Port Marlborough and arrived in the late afternoon at the small quay near Maentwrog-under-Sea that serves the Bodleian Snowdonia Library.” Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (2025).

“When I was six, my father took me to Grand Central Terminal in New York to see the imposing bronze statue of my great-great-great-grandfather ‘Commodore’ Cornelius Vanderbilt.” Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty (2021).

“Fran sat with her eyes closed.” Ann Cleeves, Blue Lightning (2010).

“I take my kids to church every week—well, usually.” JD Vance, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (2026).

“Twenty past one in the morning on New Year’s Day.” Ann Cleeves, Raven Black (2006).

“As Lord Randolph Churchill lay dying in the final stages of syphilis, his mind slowly but inexorably slipping into madness, his wife Jennie wrote letters from the Bay of Bengal to her sisters.” Elisabeth Kehoe, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the British Aristocratic World into Which They Married (2006).

“Ann opened her eyes and saw a pair of hands, streaked and shiny with blood.” Ann Cleeves, Red Bones (2009).

“William Cody was not always an icon of historical memory.” Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000).

“The Logia de Cerchi stood in the heart of old Florence, within a labyrinth of narrow streets behind the Badia, now rarely threaded by the stranger, unless in a dubious search for a certain severe doorplate bearing this inscription, QUI NACQUE IL DIVINO POETA.” George Eliot, Romola (1863).

“On the morning of September 26, 1792, several days of cold English rain came to an end, a light wind picked up from the north, and the HMS Lion, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line unfurled its sails and weighed anchor, to depart the harbor in Spithead.” Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.

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Dividing the Nation

We are reminded regularly that the country is divided, but we have always had divisions. The Civil War comes to mind. Now there was a divided country. We have had, however, other divisions, often violent ones, including our many, many Indian wars as well as strife between labor and the plutocrats that took the lives of lots of mostly working people.

          Increasingly, however, we think of divisions that aren’t as stark or cause as much violence. A lot of that comes from politics where vote seekers dice the electorate into more and more interest or demographic groups. The New Yorker writer and Harvard history professor Jill Lepore in her book If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future suggests that 1960 was a turning point in this process. Simulmatics, formed in the 1950s, was a little-known company with big dreams. It sought to collect data about voters and consumers, analyze the information by what was then new computer technology, and predict how people would vote. It tried to take credit for at least some of JFK’s success in the 1960 election, but it is not clear that anyone in the Kennedy campaign saw the Simulmatics reports. I never fully comprehended what the corporation actually accomplished other than its many public relations efforts to promote itself before it disappeared into bankruptcy in 1970. However, the book did make me think about the data I might like to collect if I were going to segment the American populace to better understand it for political purposes.

          Of course, we are aware of some categories that pundits and politicos already consider: race, age, education, and income, and whether voters live in an urban, suburban, or rural setting. All useful information, but I would want to ask further questions.

          Religion, for example. That seems to be an important piece of information. What is your faith? Do you worship with an established denomination? Would you describe yourself as an evangelical? How often do you attend a house of worship in a year? What percentage of your income do you give to charities? How much of that flows to non-religious charities?

But my questionnaire goes further:

          Where do you get your news?

          How many books do you read a year?

          What two sports do you most like to participate in? To watch? “None” is an acceptable answer.

          Do you play video games? Which ones? How often?

          How often do you go to a gym? How often do you otherwise exercise?

          How many sexual encounters have you had that you regret or want to apologize for? (Our questionnaire is, of course, confidential.)

          What social media accounts do you have? How much time do you spend each day with them?

Which is more important for protecting freedom, the First or Second Amendment? What rights are protected by the First Amendment? The Second Amendment? The Fourteenth Amendment?

How many guns do you own?

          How much money does a family of four need to live comfortably?

When in American history did Italians come to be considered “white”?

Have you ever had a mullet? If so, when was the last time?

Have you ever had teased hair? If so, when was the last time?

Do you find yourself feeling superior to someone with a mullet or teased hair?

Do you know what white guilt is? Have you personally experienced it?

What kind of vehicle do you drive? If you had more money, what kind of vehicle would you drive?

Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

Have you ever served a sentence in jail longer than 60 days?

If you don’t now, would you consider living in a manufactured home?

Do you live in a gated community?

Do you own your own home?

Do you know what stock options are? Have you ever owned a stock option? Do you own stocks or bonds?

Do you have a savings account?

          What kind of music do you most listen to?

Where did you buy your last pair of shoes?

Have you served in the military? If so, what rank did you achieve? If you have children or grandchildren of an appropriate age, would you encourage them to join the military?

Would you encourage your children or grandchildren to join law enforcement?

How was your last medical procedure paid for? How much did you have to pay out of pocket?

Define a bell curve, a t-test, statistical significance, a control group.

          Do you think that the following statement is correct?  “If you weren’t a little dirty at the end of the day, you weren’t much of a man.” (Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad.)

          What kind of shows have you binge watched?

When was the last time you went to a museum?

What podcasts do you listen to?

Do you agree with this statement? “The greatest pleasure I have known is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.” (Charles Lamb.) Has that ever happened to you?

Please press “Submit.”

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First Sentences

“At the turn of the twentieth century, before Zionist colonization had much appreciable effect on Palestine, new ideas were spreading, modern education and literacy had begun to expand, and the integration of the country’s economy into the global capitalist order was proceeding apace.” Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.

“Had Ernst Simmel known he was to be the Axman’s second victim, he would no doubt have downed a few more drinks at The Blue Ship.” Hǻkan Nesser, Borkmann’s Point: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery.

“In the early morning hours of Wednesday, November 28, 1917, someone knocked on Khalil al-Sakakini’s front door and brought him great misfortune, indeed almost got him hanged.” Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (translated by Haim Watzman).

“We are the earth, the land.” Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

“It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life., though I didn’t know that quite yet.” Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

“Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed.” Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

“In 1848 Will and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple in Georgia, embarked upon a five-thousand-mile journey of self-emancipation across the world.” Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife.

“My journal is a private affair, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid that others will see these pages.” Percival Everett, Erasure.

“Mark Twain counted pockets among the most useful of inventions.” Hannah Carlson, Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close.

“They were still traveling, into the dark.” Denise Mina, Field of Blood.

“It was a November afternoon in Queens and Jie Zou was looking for a parking spot.” Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.

“From then on whenever he heard the song he thought of the death of Munson.” Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto.

“A little more than two hundred years ago, Europeans contemplated the Islamic countries of the Middle East from afar and imagined rare silks and spices, harems, and gold—yellow gold, not the underground sea of black gold that modern Westerners associate with the region.” Nina Burleigh, Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt.

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Snippets

Just to set the record straight: Many Trump trial commentators have said that Trump needs only one hold-out juror to avoid conviction. This is true, but it lacks context. The jury of twelve must be unanimous to convict or acquit. If all the jurors cannot agree, we have a hung jury. The state would then have to decide whether to retry Mr. Trump. It should be noted, however, that although the exact rate is unknown, hung juries are not frequent. Getting such data is difficult because no uniform definition of “a hung jury” exists. For example, if five defendants are tried in one trial and the jury convicts four but can’t agree on the fifth, some jurisdictions would record this as a hung jury, while others would label it a conviction, while others would record four convictions and one hung jury. Similarly, when one defendant is charged with a number of crimes, many jurisdictions will consider only what happens to the most serious count. Others will call it a hung jury if the jury could not reach a result on any one count. Without going into methodological details, a study a few decades ago found that the hung jury rate throughout New York state was 2.8%. In other words, rare. Moreover, the little data we have indicate that few of those rare hung juries are hung because only one person won’t agree with the other eleven. One person can hang a jury. It rarely happens. (Drawn from my book, The American Jury System [Yale University Press.])

“What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?” Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto.

A lesson for our time? Jacques Chirac was President of France from 1995 to 2007. Allegations of corruption swirled about him. However, a controversial judicial decision concluded that he had immunity from prosecution while he was president. The court gave reasoning similar to what has been said in this country for granting immunity to a sitting president: i.e., he will not be able to perform his duties as president if at the same time he faces prosecution. In France, however, the authorities realized that such protection should end when Chirac left office, and he was indeed prosecuted for and convicted of various crimes when he became an ex-president. He was given a suspended two-year sentence for his convictions. (Chirac had suffered a stroke near the end of his presidency, and his mental health deteriorated after leaving office.) This precedent has not led to the regular prosecutions of ex-presidents in France, as it has said will occur unless Trump as an ex-president is given immunity from all criminal prosecutions.

The performance of the “Vespers” of 1610 by Claudio Monteverdi was marvelous. I expected as much with the twenty-five voices of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. The accompanying Trinity Baroque Orchestra had violins, violas, a cello, bass, harp, harpsichord, and organ, but there was a bonus. The orchestra had not just one but two cornett performers; not just one but two theorbo players; and not just one but—wait for it—three performers on the sackbut. (Sackbut is one of those words, like Lake Titicaca, that I can’t say without smiling.)

As I neared my stop, a woman across the subway car, spotting the book in my hand, asked if I was reading the new Tana French novel. After I said that I was, she wanted to know if it was good. I said that I was enjoying it, but it was too long and was not as good as her last one. The woman got off the train as I did. She asked if I was familiar with the Scottish mysteries of Denise Mina, which she felt were similar to French’s. I was not, and she urged me to try them. Later that week I got one out of the subscription library. She was right. Field of Blood, which introduced the character, Paddy Maheen, is quite good.  And I have also learned that I can get useful book recommendations in all sorts of places including a subway ride. I doubt I will ever see that Tana French fan again, but thank you for the Denise Mina mention.

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Making More Decisions

          We are reminded regularly that the country is divided, but we have always had divisions. Who can forget the Civil War? Now there was a divided country. We have had, however, other divisions, often violent ones, including our many, many Indians wars as well as strife between labor and the plutocrats that took the lives of lots of mostly working people.

          Increasingly, however, we think of divisions that aren’t as stark or cause as much violence. A lot of that comes from politics where vote seekers dice the electorate into more and more groups. The New Yorker writer and Harvard history professor Jill Lepore in her book If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future suggests that 1960 was a turning point. Simulmatics, formed in the 1950s, was a little-known company with big dreams. It sought to collect data about voters and consumers, analyze the information by what was then new computer technology, and predict how people would vote. It tried to take credit for at least some of JFK’s success in winning in the 1960 election, but it is not clear that anyone in the Kennedy campaign saw the Simulmatics reports. I never fully comprehended what the corporation really accomplished other than its many public relations efforts to promote itself before it disappeared into bankruptcy in 1970. However, the book did make me think about the data I might like to collect if I were going to segment the American populace to better understand it for political purposes.

          Of course, we are aware of some categories that pundits and politicos already consider: race, age, education, and income and whether voters live in an urban, suburban, or rural setting. All useful information, but I would want to ask further questions.

          Religion, for example. That seems to be an important piece of information. What is your faith? Do you worship with an established denomination? Would you describe yourself as an evangelical? How often do you attend a House of Worship in a year? What percentage of your income do you give to charities? How much of that flows to non-religious charities?

          Where do you get your news?

          How many books do you read a year?

          What two sports do you most like to participate in? To watch? None is an acceptable answer.

          Do you play video games? Which ones? How often?

          How often do you go to a gym? How often do you otherwise exercise?

          How many sexual encounters have you had that you regret or want to apologize for? (Our questionnaire is, of course, confidential.)

          What social media accounts do you have? How much time do you spend each day with them?

Which is more important for preventing oppression by the government: free speech or possession of a gun? What rights are protected by the First Amendment? The Second Amendment?

How many guns do you own?

          How much money does a family of four need to live comfortably?

When in American history did Italians come to be considered “white”?

Have you ever had a mullet? If so, when was the last time?

Have you ever had teased hair? If so, when was the last time?

Do you find yourself feeling superior to someone with a mullet or teased hair?

Do you know what white guilt is? Have you personally experienced it?

What kind of vehicle do you drive? If you had more money, what kind of vehicle would you drive?

Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

Have you ever served a sentence in jail longer than 60 days?

If you don’t now, would you consider living in a manufactured home?

Do you live in a gated community?

Do you own your own home?

Do you know what stock options are? Have you ever owned a stock option? Do you own stocks or bonds?

          What kind of music do you most listen to?

Where did you buy your last pair of shoes?

Have you served in the military? If so, what rank did you achieve? If you have children or grandchildren of an appropriate age, would you encourage them to join the military?

Would you encourage your children or grandchildren to join law enforcement?

How was your last medical procedure paid for? How much did you have to pay out of pocket?

Define a bell curve, a t-test, statistical significance, a control group.

          Do you think that the following statement is correct?  “If you weren’t a little dirty at the end of the day, you weren’t much of a man.” (Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad.)

          What kind of shows have you binge watched?

When was the last time you went to a museum?

What podcasts do you listen to?

Do you agree with this statement? “The greatest pleasure I have known is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.” (Charles Lamb.) Has that ever happened to you?

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“One winter morning several years ago, I got an email with some ridiculously exciting news.” A.J. Jacobs, The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life.

“The police decided to enter the flat, but rather than break down the door they called a locksmith, figuring that a few minutes either way were unlikely to make a difference.” The Shadow District by Arnaldur Indridason (translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb).

“At a recent lecture on the Piltdown disclosures a member of the audience remarked, ‘When I read in the paper that Piltdown man was bogus, I felt as if something had gone out of my life; I had been brought up on Piltdown man!’”  J.S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery.

“In my dream I was reaching right through the glass of the window on a hockshop.” Fredric Brown, The Fabulous Clipjoint.

“Magic matters.” David Copperfield, Richard Wiseman, David Britland, David Copperfield’s History of Magic.

“It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York.” Katie Kitamura, Intimacies.

“A little before eight on the morning of March 21, 1829, the Duke of Wellington, England’s prime minister, arrived on horseback at a crossroads south of the Thames, about a half mile beyond Battersea Bridge.” Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

“It’s hard to know, ever, where a story begins.” Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street.

“We forget that love is revolutionary.” Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.

“His cousin Freddie brought him on the heist one hot night in early June.” Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle.

“The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas.” Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

“It wasn’t far off midnight, but it was still light.” Ragnar Jónasson, Snowblind. (translated by Quentin Bates).

“’We need every one of you,’ proclaimed an anonymous 1985 article in a major white power newspaper.” Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

“The dust hovers in a cloud behind the Reykjavik coach, the road is a ridged washboard and we rattle on; bend after bend, soon it becomes impossible to see through the muddy windows and, before long, the Laxdoela Saga trail will vanish into the dirt.” Auour Ava Olafsdóttir, Miss Iceland.

“Somewhere in the vast northern ocean, between Iceland and Norway, Thorsteinn Olafsson got himself involved in the biggest mystery of the middle ages by making an honest mistake: he turned his ship a few too many degrees west.” Egill Bjarnason, How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island.