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Commentary: Need a balm for these troubled times? I recommend the works of P.G. Wodehouse
Seeking succor when the world seems to be closing in on you is a quintessentially human habit. Some people do it by gorging on comfort food like macaroni and cheese, others choose drink, or drugs, or gardening, or the warmth of a puppy.
I always know when I’m feeling blue, because I feel the gravitational pull of my long shelf of P.G. Wodehouse books.
If you’ve never read Wodehouse, I envy you the pleasure of discovering him for the first time. I’m well past that point; some of his stories and novels I’ve read dozens, even hundreds of times, and they can still make me convulse in laughter. More so when the outside world provides little to laugh about.
Evelyn Waugh, who admitted to learning a hell of a lot from Wodehouse, may have put it best: “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale,” he wrote in a 1961 essay designed in part to defend Wodehouse over the one blot on his life story (more on that in a bit). “He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”
And what is that world? It’s timeless, and yet dated. Orwell narrowed it down to the Edwardian era — 1901 to 1919 — long before the irruptions of two world wars and the Great Depression. Its inhabitants are those of “there will always be an England” England: stern vicars, timid curates, lords and earls, penniless titled wastrels living on allowances from their uncles, imperious aunts, upper-crust twits.
They’re all presented on the page by an inspired farceur whose exquisitely penned prose seems effortless, but belies the painstaking craftsmanship needed to make his split-second timing come off.
Some Wodehouse lines are like time bombs, detonating with a momentary delay. My favorite comes in an exchange with the soupy Madeline Bassett in “The Code of the Woosters,” when Bertie comes up with a quote he heard from Jeeves, actually the title of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, to describe his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle as “a sensitive plant.”
“Exactly,” Madeline replies. “You know your Shelley, Bertie.”
“Oh, am I?”
Where to start with Wodehouse? He used several framing devices for his novels and short stories. The golf stories are narrated by the “oldest member” of an upper-class golf club who buttonholes unwary younger members to regale them with his memories of golfers he has known.
The peak of this series, to me, is “Farewell to Legs,” featuring a playboy who takes a house in a placid golfing community and discomposes its dour Scottish golfers with his high jinks: “Angus became aware with a sinking heart that here, as he had already begun to suspect, was a life-and-soul-of-the-party man, a perfect scream, and an absolutely priceless fellow who simply makes you die with the things he says.”
Then there are the fish stories told by Mr. Mulliner at his local pub the Angler’s Rest, involving his inexhaustible circle of relatives. To me, the glory of the Mulliner stories are a sequence of three stories — “Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo,” “The Bishop’s Move” and “Gala Night,” all related to his brother Wilfred’s invention of a tonic meant to “provide Indian Rajahs with a specific which would encourage their elephants to face a tiger of the jungle with a jaunty sang-froid,” and what happens when unsuspecting users swallow a tumblerful of something that should be taken by the teaspoon.
Some are set in New York and Hollywood, where Wodehouse spent some time writing lyrics for musicals with Jerome Kern and others. (His best-known song is probably “Bill,” from “Show Boat.”)
But at the summit of Wodehouse’s genius are the stories of Bertie Wooster and his “gentleman’s personal gentleman,” or valet, Jeeves. Of the short stories, all narrated by Bertie, to my mind the greatest are a trilogy beginning with “The Great Sermon Handicap,” continuing with “The Purity of the Turf,” and concluding with what may be the single funniest short story ever penned in English, “The Metropolitan Touch.”
Bertie and Jeeves, as the British essayist Alexander Cockburn once asserted, are a pairing as momentous in literary history as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Wodehouse never exhausted the counterpoint between Bertie’s slangy gibbering and half-remembered literary allusions with Jeeves’ carefully modulated responses: “Very well, Jeeves, you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?” “Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.”
Bertie is both a classic unreliable narrator and a stock comic character given life. Having inherited a fortune from parents who are almost never mentioned, he’s rich enough for financial difficulties to never be a plot obstruction, though he’s always willing to tide over a pal brought low by “unfortunate speculations” at the racecourse. Jeeves is a deus ex machina; we learn almost nothing about him, except for imperturbability and skill at solving the crises that Bertie falls into through his pure cloth-headedness.
Bertie’s romantic relations are entirely sexless, 20th-century echoes of courtly love, though throughout the oeuvre he gets engaged to at least six women by my count. Among them towers the frighteningly domineering Honoria Glossop. (“Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.”)
Jeeves extricates Bertie from every one of these entanglements, and thankfully so, because every fiancée begins their relationship with the determination to toss Jeeves out on his ear.
Wodehouse aficionados wage a never-ending debate over which Jeeves and Wooster book is his masterpiece, with “The Code of the Woosters” (1938) and “Joy in the Morning” (1946) typically trading the top two spots.
I’m partial to the former, in part because it features the only overtly political character Wodehouse ever devised. He’s Roderick Spode, a would-be British dictator plainly based on the real-life British fascist and Hitler partisan Oswald Mosley.
Spode is the leader of a gang of fascist toughs known as the Black Shorts. “You mean ‘shorts,’ don’t you?” Bertie says when he first hears about Spode. “No,” he’s told, “by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.” “Footer bags, you mean?” Bertie asks, a Britishism for football shorts. “How perfectly foul.”
Spode throws his weight around Brinkley Court, the country estate where the story takes place, harrying Bertie endlessly for reasons we don’t need to go into, until Jeeves provides Bertie with a magic word guaranteed to turn dictator Spode into a shrinking mouse. At the climax, Bertie presses his advantage, informing his nemesis:
“The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode,’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags. Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’”
It’s no spoiler to tell you that the magic word Jeeves provides to Bertie is “Eulalie.” As for who or what Eulalie is, and why it reduces Spode to jelly, you’ll have to read the book.
That brings us to that one blot on Wodehouse’s life. When World War II broke out, he was living peaceably in the French resort of Le Touquet. When the Nazis came through in 1940 they interned Wodehouse and transported him to Berlin, from which the Germans persuaded him to make a handful of “nonpolitical” radio broadcasts for his British compatriots.
There was an uproar at home. Newspaper columnists condemned Wodehouse as a “Quisling,” libraries took his books off their shelves, there were condemnatory speeches in Parliament.
The truth is that the broadcasts were indeed nonpolitical; if the Germans thought they had scored a propaganda victory it was instantly evident that they were wrong, and they halted the broadcasts after only five. Wodehouse had displayed nothing worse than the stupidity of the innocent. He knew nothing of the political context, much less that his broadcasts came at a moment when the very future of Britain was in question.
But that fit precisely with Wodehouse’s literary landscape. Farce, of course, depends on its characters’ failure to recognize what is near at hand; Wodehouse in his splendid isolation in France and in a bygone fictional Eden was incapable of recognizing the crisis in Britain was so near at hand that his broadcasts would strike hard at his countrymen’s diminishing morale.
Orwell’s opinion of Wodehouse’s attackers was withering. “It was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did,” he wrote in 1946, “but to go on denouncing him three or four years later — and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery — is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. … In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practicing appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940.”
One could go on. The pleasures of Wodehouse are inexhaustible, so I’ll stop here. With some news about Trump’s tariffs threatening to disturb my peace today, and having just finished a rereading of “The Code of the Woosters,” I will share the next few hours with G. Darcy (“Stilton”) Cheesewright, Zenobia Hopwood, Edwin the Boy Scout, Boko Fittleworth and Percy, Lord Worplesdon, and their horseplay in and around Steeple Bumpleigh, Hampshire.
Looking back on the affair and its satisfying resolution, Bertie tells Jeeves, “There’s an expression on the tip of my tongue which seems to me to sum the whole thing up. … Something about Joy doing something.”
“Joy cometh in the morning, sir?”
“That’s the baby. Not one of your things, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, it’s dashed good.”
Director Darren Aronofsky has pushed artistic boundaries with movies including “Requiem for a Dream” and “Mother!”
Now his production company is working with Google to explore the edge of artificial intelligence technology in filmmaking.
Google on Tuesday said it is working with several filmmakers to use new AI tools as part of a larger push to popularize the fast-moving tech. That effort includes a partnership with Aronofsky’s venture, Primordial Soup.
Google’s AI-focused subsidiary DeepMind and Aronofsky’s firm will work with three filmmakers, giving them access to the Mountain View, Calif.-based giant’s text-to-video tool Veo, which they will use to make short films. The first project, “Ancestra,” is directed by Eliza McNitt. Aronofsky is an executive producer on the film. “Ancestra,” which premieres at the Tribeca Festival next month, combines live-action filmmaking with imagery generated with AI, such as cosmic events and microscopic worlds.
“Filmmaking has always been driven by technology,” Aronofsky said in a statement that referenced film tech pioneers the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison. “Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling.”
The push comes as Google and other companies are making deals with Hollywood talent and production companies to use their AI tools. For example, Facebook parent company Meta is partnering with “Titanic” director James Cameron’s venture, Lightstorm Vision, to co-produce content for its virtual reality headset Meta Quest. New York-based AI startup Runway has a deal with “Hunger Games” studio Lionsgate to create a new AI model to help with behind-the-scenes processes such as storyboarding.
Many people in Hollywood have been critical of AI tools, raising concerns about the automation of jobs. Writers worry about AI models being trained on their scripts without their permission or compensation. Tech industry executives have said that they should be able to train AI models with content available online under the “fair use” doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder.
Proponents of the technology say that it can provide more opportunities for filmmakers to test out ideas and show a variety of visuals at a lower cost.
New York-based Primordial Soup said in a press release that Google’s AI tools helped solve “practical challenges such as filming with infants and visualizing the birth of the universe” in “Ancestra.”
“With ‘Ancestra,’ I was able to visualize the unseen, transforming family archives, emotions, and science into a cinematic experience that feels both intimate and expansive,” McNitt said in a statement.
The two additional filmmakers and films participating in the Google DeepMind-Primordial Soup deal are not yet named.
Google made the announcement as part of its annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View.
During the event’s keynote address on Tuesday, Google shared updates on its AI tools for filmmakers, including Veo 3, which allows creators to type in how they want dialogue to sound and add sound effects. The company also unveiled a new AI filmmaking tool called Flow that helps users create cinematic shots and stitch together scenes into longer films and short stories.
“This opens up a whole new world of possibilities,” said Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, in a news briefing on Monday. “We’re excited for how our models are helping power new tools for creativity.”
Flow is available through Google’s new $249.99 monthly subscription plan Google AI Ultra, which includes early access to Veo 3, as well as other benefits including YouTube Premium, Google’s AI models Gemini and other tools. Flow is also available with a $19.99-a-month Google AI Pro subscription.
Google is making other investments related to AI. On Tuesday, L.A.-based generative AI studio Promise announced Google AI Futures Fund as one of its new strategic investors. Through the partnership, Promise will integrate some of Google’s AI technologies into its production pipeline and workflow software and collaborate with Google’s AI teams.
Business
Commentary: Who's responsible for the aviation mess? Transportation Secretary Duffy says it's everyone but him
Picking out the worst performer among Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointees is a tough job — it’s a competitive race, after al l— but one member who deserves to be in the running by almost any measure of incompetence is Sean Duffy, the secretary of Transportation.
Duffy is a classic example of someone who knows who’s responsible for the screwups on his watch, and it’s never him.
He has spent the last weeks and months blaming the Biden administration for numerous operational failures in our air traffic system since he took over. Those include the Jan. 29 midair collision over Washington, D.C., that cost 67 air passengers their lives, as well as several near-misses on the ground.
I think we need to be a little bit more precise in downsizing a department with a mission as critical as DOT’s.
— Rep Steve Womack (R-Ark.)
Some Trump Cabinet members have more important portfolios than Duffy —Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, neither of whom has displayed anything approaching basic competence at their job, come immediately to mind.
But the American public is bound to be particularly sensitive to the functioning of our transportation infrastructure. That’s especially true when it comes to the safety and reliability of air travel; every flight delay and safety-related mishap hits American travelers in the gut.
The highest-profile failure (so far) is the disaster named Newark Liberty International Airport, where flight delays can last for the better part of a day and questions about safety are rife.
Duffy, a former reality show contestant and four-term congressman, comes to the blame game with dirty hands. Let’s take a look.
First, here’s what he’s said about the condition of FAA operations and staffing.
“I think it is clear that the blame belongs with the last administration,” he said Monday during a news conference at DOT headquarters. “Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden did nothing to fix the system that they knew was broken.” He said, “During COVID, when people weren’t flying? That was a perfect time to fix these problems.”
A couple of points are pertinent here. First, in 2019, when Duffy was a Republican member of Congress from Wisconsin, the bill to fund the Department of Transportation among other agencies came before the House. Duffy voted against it. So did 179 other members of the GOP caucus; 12 Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the measure.
Second, the pandemic year in which “people weren’t flying” was 2020. That year, the domestic passenger count plummeted to 369.4 million from 926.7 million the previous year. It was the lowest figure since 1984.
Who was president in 2020? Not Biden, but Donald Trump.
After 2020, passenger loads crept back up, reaching 666.2 million in 2021 and continuing higher to the record of 982.7 million last year. If there was an opportunity to upgrade the air traffic system at the least inconvenience to passengers, it was 2020. But nothing was done then, on Trump’s watch.
I asked the Department of Transportation last week if Duffy could reconcile these evidently misleading and inconsistent statements. I’m still waiting for a reply.
Duffy has maintained that it’s still safe to fly in and out of Newark, despite outages during which air traffic controllers’ screens went black and radios went silent — for 30 seconds on April 28 and 90 seconds on May 9. A backup system failed at the airport May 11 for 45 minutes, causing delays and cancellations for hundreds of flights.
Duffy admitted to the right-wing radio host David Webb on May 12 that he had switched his wife’s flight reservation for the next day from Newark to LaGuardia airport. He subsequently explained that he didn’t say to do so because he thought Newark was unsafe, but to spare her a long delay. In other words, he had found a solution for his family, but not for the overall traveling public, which didn’t speak well for his management of the mess at Newark.
It’s proper to note that the Federal Aviation Administration has been in an operational funk for years. Duffy can try to blame Biden, but that’s a smokescreen. During Trump’s first term, when the FAA’s problems were well known, hiring and deployment of air traffic controllers actually shrank from the level during the Obama administration according to the DOT’s inspector general, to the point where staffing “could not keep pace with attrition.”
In the first budget he submitted after taking office in 2017, Trump proposed slashing the DOT budget by 13%. The budget plan called for cutting 30,000 workers from the FAA staff.
The problems date back even further — at least to 1981, when Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air traffic controllers at a single blow to break their union. A frenzy of hiring and training followed, but the replacement cohort has passed its retirement age. The FAA is currently about 3,000 controllers shy of its target staffing, so the people on the job are stretched to their breaking point.
It isn’t as if Trump and Duffy pulled out all the stops to fix the FAA’s chronic problems upon taking office. Some 3,000 “probationary” employees at the agency were fired during a DOGE rampage, according to a count by the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, the union representing safety and technical workers at the FAA, and a statement by Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), chair of the subcommittee overseeing the Transportation Department budget. The probationary firings and two subsequent rounds of buyouts will bring staffing at the DOT down by 12% since Trump took office.
During appearances last week before the House and Senate appropriations committees, Duffy boasted about saving taxpayers nearly $10 billion during the first 100 days of the Trump administration. That provoked Womack to riposte, “I think we need to be a little bit more precise in downsizing a department with a mission as critical as DOT’s. … The question is pretty simple: How many departures can you handle without eroding the ability to carry out a safe and effective mission?”
“We can do more with less, Mr. Chairman,” Duffy replied. When staff accept buyout offers to retire or resign, he said, “we should take them up on that. … If I have people who don’t want to be there, let’s get some people in who are hungry to do the work.” Indeed, after the first round of firings at the FAA, DOGE boss Elon Musk issued a public appeal that air traffic controllers who had “retired, but are open to returning to work, please consider doing so.”
Furthermore, Trump’s freeze on disbursement of funds from Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act encompassed modernization projects at airports nationwide.
Musk’s fingerprints were also on the resignation of FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker, a former airline executive and former FAA deputy administrator who had been unanimously confirmed to a five-year term in October 2023. Whitaker resigned as of Jan. 20 after clashing with Musk over the FAA’s oversight of SpaceX, which Musk owns.
Trump has nominated Republic Airways Chief Executive Bryan Bedford as his replacement, but Bedford hasn’t been confirmed.
During his Senate appropriations committee testimony on Thursday, Duffy maintained that his budget cuts and firings hadn’t compromised safety at all. He specifically denied that any air traffic controllers had been fired or offered buyouts.
Unfortunately for Duffy, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a lawmaker whose mild demeanor masks her habit of coming to a debate with hard information in hand, was in the room. She listed for Duffy all the steps he had taken that had caused “unacceptable chaos” in the air transport system.
Since Jan. 20, she said, “virtually every dollar and transportation project has been held up at some point. You are causing a traffic jam, from freezing funding for projects to creating new hurdles by reevaluating grants that had already been approved, adding red tape by forcing unacceptable political demands on state and local transportation agencies, and outright canceling and cutting grants. … No prior Transportation secretary has cut funding for previously awarded grants in this manner.”
As for Duffy’s blaming the Biden administration “for absolutely everything,” Murray continued, “the last administration did not make the decision to hold up thousands of grants, had nothing to do with the new red tape that you have created, and certainly did not let go of hundreds of staff to help get those grants out the door.”
Turning to Duffy’s assertion that no air traffic controllers had been fired or bought out, Murray told him, “While you talk about modernizing the air traffic control system, you have forced out more than 2,000 FAA employees who support those air traffic controllers — the technicians, the mechanics, the engineers, the IT specialists at the FAA who were working on modernization.”
Duffy, indeed, stepped on his own arguments. He complained that the Biden administration had saddled him with some 3,200 contracts that had been awarded but needed to be signed. But he acknowledged that he had to go through those contracts to eliminate provisions he thought smacked of “wasteful DEI and climate requirements.” These are ideological shibboleths and by no means “wasteful,” since DOT projects have manifest effects on the welfare of residents in the communities where they’re built or planned and on climate change itself.
As it happens, on April 24, Duffy sent a letter to all recipients of DOT funds —effectively virtually every state and thousands of local jurisdictions, warning them that pursuing “DEI goals … violates federal law.” He threatened explicitly to withhold DOT funding from jurisdictions that fail to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. This is the “red tape” that Murray referenced.
Whether DEI programs and failures to cooperate with federal immigration roundups really violate federal law, as Duffy asserted, is not remotely a settled legal question, but the matter is before federal judges across the land. The fact that Duffy is wasting his time by making these threats and combing through awarded contracts to ferret out such putative violations is, however, a settled question: Of course he is.
It may not be long now before Duffy’s ideological vetting of transportation contracts and his decimation of the working staff at the FAA cause even greater disruptions in the air and on land, potentially with fatal consequences. His efforts to blame everyone else for his own failures are sure to have a very short half-life. Raise your tray tables and your reclining seats, and fasten your seat belts. We may be coming in for a hard landing.
Bankrupt genetic-testing firm 23andMe agreed to sell its data bank, which once contained DNA samples from about 15 million people, to the drug developer Regeneron Pharmaceuticals for $256 million.
The sale comes after a wave of customers and government officials demanded that 23andMe protect the genetic data it had built up over the years by collecting saliva samples from customers.
Regeneron pledged to comply with 23andMe’s privacy policy, which allows customers to have their personal information deleted upon request.
“We have deep experience with large-scale data management,” Regeneron co-founder George D. Yancopoulos said in a statement. The company “has a proven track record of safeguarding the genetic data of people across the globe, and, with their consent, using this data to pursue discoveries that benefit science and society.”
23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March after failing to generate sustainable profits by providing medical and ancestry-related genetic testing to more than 15 million customers.
About 550,000 people had subscribed to the company’s two primary services, which hasn’t been enough to keep the company afloat. One of those services, Lemonaid Health, was not part of the sale and will be wound down, 23andMe said in a statement.
As part of 23andMe’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a judge approved the appointment of a privacy ombudsman to monitor the sale process and ensure compliance with privacy policies related to the genetic material submitted by customers.
That material, and the genetic data it produced, was 23andMe’s most valuable asset. The company has said any buyer must comply with current privacy protections and federal regulations.
Regeneron said it will continue to run 23andMe’s personal genomic services once the sale closes. The judge overseeing the bankruptcy must approve the sale before it can be completed.
In the months leading up its bankruptcy, 23andMe tried to attract a buyer while struggling to end a class-action lawsuit related to a 2023 data breach that gave hackers access to customer information. The company will try to resolve those claims as part of the bankruptcy.
The case is 23andMe Holding Co., number 25-40976, in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
Church and Smith write for Bloomberg.
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