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The New Yorker staff writer Zach Helfand joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss his Profile of Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education. They talk about the sweeping layoffs and downsizing at the Department of Education during Donald Trump’s second term—a fulfillment of a long-standing conservative effort to dismantle the agency—and the consequences for students and schools that rely on its services. They also explore how McMahon’s tenure as C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment set her up to be one of Trump’s most reliable and effective Cabinet members, across both his terms—and why the President has long been drawn to McMahon, her husband, Vince, and the world of professional wrestling.

This week’s reading:

“How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon for Trump’s Cabinet,” by Zach Helfand

“J. D. Vance’s Bumpy Ride,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

“Donald Trump’s Triumphal Arch and the Architecture of Autocracy,” by Adam Gopnik

“What Nicolás Maduro’s Life Is Like in a Notorious Brooklyn Jail,” by Diego Lasarte

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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As the well-known expression goes, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” But where is the line between inspiration and appropriation? When do we have a right to borrow someone’s story, and when should we stay our hand? Daniyal Mueenuddin’s newest novel, “This Is Where the Serpent Lives,” draws in part on the lives of people he knows; as Mueenuddin recently reported, his use of reality has sometimes put him in “hot water.” Not long ago, Mueenuddin sat down with us to talk about a few fictional works that draw directly from truth—sometimes honorably, and sometimes, he thinks, not. “In some way, description is violation,” Mueenuddin said. “Does beauty forgive everything? If we make something beautiful enough, does that mean you get a free pass? I don’t know. I hope so.” His remarks have been edited and condensed.

Dubliners

by James Joyce

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There’s a reason why Mr. Joyce spent much of his adult life in Trieste, and that’s because he couldn’t run into people there—especially people from Dublin, whose lives he used in his work, most notably in “Dubliners.” I think we have to agree, though, that, of Joyce’s appropriations, particularly shocking is the way he uses Molly Bloom as, to an extent, a stand-in for his wife, in “Ulysses.” Joyce wrote about sex, disclosing things that his contemporaries didn’t—and certainly breaking from the mores of his predecessors. That was part of why his work was so shocking. But, as I say, he could afford to do it, because he could just go off and live in Trieste.

In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

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I’ve been engaging with Proust all my life. He’s a profound thinker and an amazing writer. One thing I don’t think we should forget about him is that when he wrote this book, he went into a version of what we in Pakistan call pardah—he stopped going out. Here’s a guy who used to dine out seven nights a week. Suddenly, he goes into seclusion and produces this book. I’ve thought a lot about why he did this. I don’t know how much of his motivation was shaped by the fact that he was a dandy, and that aging was therefore, I think, problematic for him. He had been a very handsome young man, and as he got older he got less beautiful. But I also think a big part of it was that, in a way, he used people he knew, and he spilled the beans. He might have found that he wasn’t actually being invited to so many dinners anymore.

My Struggle

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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For me, a person who can really speak to these issues I’ve been circling is Mr. Knausgaard. He really did spill the beans—and he got a divorce out of it. I don’t know all the details about what happened to his marriage, but I do remember reading that his wife felt very violated by what he wrote, and also that some relatives of his father—on whom he focusses in the first volume of this series—were very upset. And rightly, too. I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted to ride into history with the characterization that Knausgaard gives his father in that book. He comes off as a horrible, stupid drunk of the most unattractive kind. And I guess Knausgaard just said, That’s O.K. He was willing to let people be really upset.

For Lizzie and Harriet

by Robert Lowell

Amazon

When we talk about the questions I’m talking about here, we really have to look at the relationship between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Both of them were writers—Lowell a poet, Hardwick an essayist and novelist. She also co-founded The New York Review of Books. Lowell, famously, was a difficult man and a difficult husband. And he wrote about Hardwick extensively, including by appropriating portions of letters that she sent to him in a collection called “The Dolphin.”

The poet Elizabeth Bishop, with whom Lowell was close friends, famously told him, when asked to read the collection before it came out, “art just isn’t worth that much.” I’ve thought about that a lot, because I care about these two writers—Lowell and Bishop—more than I care about any others, probably. But I disagree with Bishop—I hope that art is worth that much, or can be. “The Dolphin” is a brilliant book. But “For Lizzie and Harriet”—which was named for Hardwick and the daughter Lowell had with her—is not very good. It didn’t have to be published, it doesn’t add to his stature. It was a misfire. And, ultimately, being a writer who borrows from life is something that should be gone about in a considered way, because life matters. People matter.

Day One: Something is stirring in New York City. A chill spring wind is picking up, littering sidewalks with cherry-blossom petals. And a new pain is forming at the back of your head, disarmingly close to your parietal lobe (you discover after Googling “brain areas labelled”).

Day Two: This mysterious pain is progressing, and quickly. Your husband calls out to you from the kitchen that there’s a more colloquial term for an ache in your head, but you tune him out to focus on the A.I. summary search result for “What does the parietal lobe do?” You learn that it’s “crucial for processing sensory information,” which sounds like a vital skill for a brain to have.

Day Three: You wake up to a feeling of dread and decide on a brisk morning walk to take in the restorative Brooklyn air, much as a tubercular Romantic poet would have retreated to the seaside. You see, on your walk, that the trees lining the streets are fast turning green, which is cheering. The sight of new life doesn’t fix your sore head, however. Instead, you return home with a cough.

Day Four: The cough is worsening, particularly on your walks, forcing you to stay inside your cramped “study” (or, as the realtor for your fourth-floor walkup apartment pitched it, “think of this as a half room”). Your husband asks if your throat is still “tickling,” which makes you scoff—“tickling” being an inadequate word for the turmoil in your trachea. This triggers another coughing attack.

Day Five: You are now experiencing flashes of pain every time you blink, contemptuously, at your husband. Opening all the windows (necessary, given that the hottest boiler in all of Brooklyn is still turned on in your building) only aggravates your cough. Being relegated to your sickbed leaves you no other choice; you upgrade to Victorian accounts of suffering. You start passive-aggressively rereading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and aggressive-aggressively reminding your husband that it’s a crime against feminism that he hasn’t read it yet.

Day Six: In what you assume is a sign of your body’s imminent total collapse, your eyes are now itching and watering. What condition could so swiftly wear down your most basic abilities—thinking, breathing, seeing? You consider how, at last year’s vision checkup, you turned down the optometrist’s offer to use a hundred-thousand-dollar machine to take photos of the back of your eye, because it would have cost you an extra seventy dollars. Pointlessly, you wonder whether they would have caught the eye cancer/brain tumor/stroke that is causing your current demise.

Day Seven: You think back wistfully to the start of this week, when your condition was confined to a mere ache in the sensory-processing lobe of your brain, and curse yourself for underreacting to the onset of this sickness. You fumble, weakly, for the pulse oximeter in your nightstand, which you bought when you had pneumonia three years ago, and had to keep going back to urgent care for a daily chest X-ray, until you were told that there’s a limit to how many “medically unnecessary” scans your insurance will cover (the limit is zero). Your hand seizes on a pink oblong pill, fexofenadine—and what a relief to find it there, a reminder of your regular April allergy flareups! After all, you surely wouldn’t want your eyes to be red or your nose to be runny when your nearest and dearest see you in your open casket.

You go to set a calendar reminder for this time next year that says, “REMEMBER YOU HAVE ALLERGIES,” then stop yourself. You don’t want to make this any harder on your soon to be widowed husband than it already will be. You picture him, sitting alone in your former not-legally-a-room room, in the throes of mourning, most likely questioning why he never took his late wife to Rome for the rest cure she so frequently suggested. You delete the event from your phone and sigh, contemplating a life lesson learned too late. Nevertheless, you’re glad you took the fexofenadine while you still were able. You’re already feeling better for it. ♦

Told a certain way, the life of Kimberly Noel Kardashian maps neatly onto the entire history of media in the new millennium. In her teen-age years, Kim’s family was part of the biggest televised spectacle to date, as her father, Robert Kardashian, successfully defended O. J. Simpson in his murder trial. In her twenties, Kim worked as a personal stylist for Paris Hilton and showed up as a bit character in Hilton’s reality series “The Simple Life.” That show prompted grumblings that Hilton and her ilk were famous only for being famous, a mantle that Kim soon took up. In 2007, a sex tape starring her with the singer Ray J became an early case study in virality in the streaming era. (Ray J has since claimed that the tape was leaked by Kim and her mother, Kris Jenner, an allegation that they both deny.) The same year saw the début of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” which would, of course, become one of the most successful reality franchises ever and transform the Kardashian clan into both television celebrities and online protagonists of innumerable memes derived from choice snippets.

TV made the Kardashian clan, but the internet clinched and multiplied their fame—they are “new media” celebrities, perhaps the biggest examples thereof, as the writer and psychotherapist M. J. Corey documents in her book “Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto.” Kim and her siblings, particularly her half sisters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, built up millions of followers in the early days of social media, becoming ur-stars of Twitter and Instagram. (One of Kim’s memorably random tweets from 2010: “Nicole Richie reminds me of my jeep.”) Kim’s climb from there to the glam heights of Hollywood inspired a mobile game in 2014, the goal of which was to rise from the E-list to the A-list of celebrity. Her buxom re-creation of a Grace Jones photograph for the cover of Paper was designed to “break the internet,” as the magazine itself trumpeted. In 2015, her voluminous selfies were collected in a glossy book published by Rizzoli, titled “Selfish,” which helped to legitimatize a genre once derided for its narcissism as a modern mode of self-expression. Her marriage to Kanye West cemented a new kind of multi-platform fame, as the couple became omnipresent cultural forces in music, fashion, television, beauty, and even religion, when they launched a “Sunday Service” series of spiritual events, complete with streetwear. Propelled by our algorithmic feeds onto every small screen, in every conceivable format, Kim Kardashian became less an individual mega-celebrity than a scalable digital spectacle, attaining the kind of iconicity that the entire family seems to crave; they have even been known to turn Robert, their late patriarch, into a hologram to dispense fatherly wisdom.

Corey has long operated as a kind of meta-Kardashian influencer online, building up hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube by sharing conversational videos (“why fans feel betrayed”) and Kardashian memes remixed with quotes from critical theory (Kris Jenner x Chris Kraus) under the name Kardashian Kolloquium. (Corey is a pseudonym; she studied creative nonfiction and counselling psychology at Columbia and has contributed pieces of Kimlinology to The New Yorker.) The book, an extension of this œuvre, deploys a litany of canonical media theorists and philosophers—Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Bourdieu, Thorstein Veblen—to argue that the Kardashians are “an intentional amalgamation,” “a composite of historical touch points, media tropes, and shifting identities.” They are ciphers that consciously assume whatever shapes are most likely to gain them the most exposure—in other words, they are flesh-and-blood memes.

Corey charts the many different pop-cultural archetypes that the Kardashians, and Kim in particular, have played with through the years, often by playing dress-up: the all-American romantic doom of Marilyn Monroe, the ethnically ambiguous curvaceousness of Disney’s Princess Jasmine, the wifely devotion of Jacqueline Kennedy, the girl-group antics of the Spice Girls (when Kim dressed up as Posh in high school). Kim excels at metabolizing the idols of past eras—“performing the particular thrill of borrowed glamour,” Corey writes—but she is also a bellwether of the present. Extravagantly mutable and well maintained, the Kardashians’ very bodies have morphed to take on trends. Their self-transformations include Kylie’s filler-stuffed lips, Kim’s rumored Brazilian butt lift, and Kris’s recently publicized facelift, all of which helped inject such cosmetic procedures into the mainstream. “Kim’s ass . . . seemed to expand in tandem with all the growing interest in her body,” Corey writes. The more ass, the more attention—at least until that particular semiotic bubble popped, and the Kardashians appeared to deflate their rear ends, around 2022. Swapping paramours, hobbies, and physical features, the Kardashians shape—and epitomize—the Zeitgeist.

Corey is at her best when parsing the ways in which the Kardashians resonate with their vast audience. They are aspirational American consumers, flaunting their luxury-brand logos, in addition to being models of the American dream, as billionaire entrepreneurs. (The Kar-Jenner sisters have benefitted from collabs between their respective companies, such as a KKW x Kylie “lip set,” and from posing for Kim’s Kardashian-silhouette-inspired shapewear brand, Skims.) They are relatable mothers, daughters, sisters, and stepsiblings, as a blended family whose tumultuous relationships are documented on reality TV. The book is studded with amusing pieces of Kardashian lore that might be familiar only to devotees. Do you remember Kimoji, a $1.99 mobile app that provided two hundred and fifty Kim-themed emoji? The family once used prosthetic costumes to blend into the normie crowd on a Hollywood bus tour, only to make a run for it to escape photo-takers. Kimye’s 2022 divorce saga was effectively styled by Balenciaga, incepting the label into the public consciousness, one paparazzi photo at a time. Corey pithily sums up Kim’s pattern “of accommodating the public’s appetite for private affairs, and of making reality out of make-believe.”

Yet “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” is also a frustratingly frenetic and recursive book, whose agglomeration of details doesn’t always amount to a deeper narrative. It can read like social-media commentary, with disjointed riffing on one subject after another, and familiar critical ideas trotted out repeatedly. Corey references McLuhan’s famous dictum “The medium is the message” in the book’s preface, then repeats it three times in the first chapter, then once more, for good measure, in the sixth. In a final “Archives” section, she writes, “Now is a good time to bring in good old Marshall McLuhan.” (The McLuhan is the message.) The book seems designed for an online follower of Corey’s, who already knows the details of the Kardashian story and craves exegesis. The lay reader would benefit from a more sustained, linear biography of Kardashianism, but even in the latter half of the book, which proceeds roughly chronologically, the text darts among subjects and eras, often in the span of the same paragraph. A passage about varieties of self-concealment skips from ninjas to Odysseus to Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper.” Ironically, the Kardashians themselves, usually so expert at capturing attention, get lost in the mix.

Corey is generous in quoting the works of other writers (myself among them) and includes many Kardashian-fandom social posts as a kind of vox populi, but an overabundance of references disrupts the flow of larger ideas. The book is more dekonstruction and less manifesto; its credo may be contained in the line “To me, the Kardashians are no different from other enduring national institutions such as Las Vegas, Disney, and the WWE,” which is not a particularly controversial statement about a family that has long been accepted as American royalty. One of the book’s more sustained, intriguing scenes comes, several hundred pages in, when Corey describes how she came to start posting videos about the Kardashians. She was staying at her mother’s home in Arizona during the pandemic and began filming herself in the carport, after getting advice from a Gen Z friend that “pop culture-tok” could be a good home for cultural commentary that she had begun to do on Instagram. She went from having fifteen thousand followers on Instagram to more than a hundred and eighty thousand on TikTok. “If I’d learned anything from the Kardashians, it was that diversifying mediums is a wise move,” Corey writes. The Kardashian scholar had become a Kardashian-style content creator.

If you hitch your fortunes to the Kardashians for long enough, you’re bound to get ensnared in one drama or another. Late in the book, Corey describes the harassment she faced when she declined to weigh in on a Balenciaga controversy that some observers felt implicated Kim and Kanye by association. “It was my job, as a volunteer cultural critic, to deconstruct and then moralize about such a revelation, as everyone else on the platform was doing,” Corey writes in an apt summary of a writer’s current role on the internet. Other accounts then tried to rage-bait their followers into attacking Corey’s “silence.” Attention online—which is to say, the modern entertainment industry at large—can look a bit like a pyramid scheme, with each lower layer trying to siphon a segment of audience away from the more famous one above. It is that ruthless practice of eliciting engagement at any cost that may be the Kardashians’ true innovation, and the life style is not for everyone. As Corey writes, “I just wanted to post my wannabe Barthes takes in peace.” ♦