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But that was Didion before Salvador, before Miami, before Political Fictions. Before most of her work. Before “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” in which she concludes that the reason the rape of one white investment banker in Central Park captured more attention than any of the other 3,254 rapes re…

I think he’s wrong on this, but we’re talking about fossil fuels now. Oil and coal are capital, he says, and we need to leave that capital in the ground. We should not mine it, sell it, buy it, or burn it. But people already own it. A journalist recently observed, he says, that the last time we wal…

The babysitter reports that last week J asked her if she was poor and she said yes, but then she felt wrong about her answer all week. I didn’t want him to think this is what it looks like to be poor, she says, gesturing toward her North Face coat and her L.L.Bean backpack. The babysitter is a form…

“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive,” John Kenneth Galbraith writes in the great first sentence of The Affluent Society. “But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.”

This woman’s grandfather built her house, I’ll learn later. She owned it outright and could have left it to her children but the property taxes kept going up in her old age. Someone selling loans convinced her to remortgage the house to pay her taxes, another neighbor tells me. And that’s how she l…