Acocella's essay deals with the improbable five-year affair between the Left Bank philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the tough-guy Chicago writer Nelson Algren-its title comes from their pet names for each other-and was occasioned by the posthumous publication of Beauvoir's love letters. Acocella begins with a block quote from one of the letters, a rarely attempted flex that may be the critic's equivalent of opening a song with the bridge.
In the aughts, after growing disenchanted with his dream of becoming a Disney animator, he decided cartooning would be his lot in life. When he learned, in the wake of the Great Recession, that The New Yorker was the primary outlet still publishing cartoons, cracking the code of America's idiosyncratic intellectual stand-by became his mission. Until that point, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Ren & Stimpy, and South Park had been his guiding lights ("all those '90s dudes").