Constance Grady in Vox:
The Great Gatsby is 100 years old this year, which feels right in a way. After all those years as a perennial mainstay of the American high school English curriculum, all those Gatsby-themed flapper parties, all those valiant but ham-fisted attempts to adapt it, we know the beats of it well: the parties, the glamour, the green lights, and the beautiful clothes. It might as well be a hundred.
On the other hand, there are parts of Gatsby that feel so fresh and modern that they could have been written yesterday. In our own moment, as the world’s richest man takes a hatchet to the federal government for sport, one of Gatsby’s most celebrated lines about the very wealthy feels resoundingly true: “They were careless people … They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
More here.
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