Good morning. In National Review, Robert Dean Lurie writes about the “exhilarating” story of European auto racing on the eve of WWII: “Race cars . . . Nazis . . . Monaco . . . a brash heiress and taciturn underdog . . . an epic showdown in the Pyrénées. It’s hard not to fall in love with Faster, Neil Bascomb’s brisk new portrait of European auto racing on the eve of World War II. Assuming we’ll be able to venture out of doors this summer (a big ‘if’ at this point), Faster gets my vote for the season’s most exhilarating and substantive beach read. It’s precision-engineered for Hollywood, and, as far as I can tell, it’s all true.”

A “breathless” account of the Notre Dame fire “from the first confusing alarm on the screen of an inexperienced security guard to the moment a shaken Emmanuel Macron stepped up to address the nation, five hours later.”

A history of the Byrons: “Some curse hangs over me and mine,’ wrote Lord Byron, and thanks to Emily Brand, who is a genealogist, it is now possible to see why Byron was so darned Byronic: excess, incest and marital misery flowed in the bloodstream. The gloom that looked like a Regency pose was entirely pre-programmed; George Gordon Byron’s script was handed to him at birth. Being mad, bad and dangerous to know was as instinctive to the Byrons as howling at the moon for a pack of wolves. When he compared his family to ‘whole woods of withered pines’, the poet was not exaggerating. Every branch was rotten. The son of a sociopath known as Mad Jack and the grandson of an ill-fated mariner dubbed Foul-Weather Jack, the ten-year old boy inherited the title from his great uncle, the 5th Lord Byron, who was generally referred to as the Wicked Lord or Devil Byron. The barony came to little George Gordon after the premature deaths of a heap of cousins he had neither heard of nor met: in order to claim his coronet, the pudgy, club-footed lad from Aberdeen had climbed over more dead bodies than Richard III.”

A biased history of the American lawsuit: “Hoffer’s thesis seems to be that courts are wise (reaching decisions reflecting society’s values), except when they rule against the cause favored by the Left.”

There are almost no sports to watch, so Stephen Eide tunes in to WrestleMania: “‘Show’ it may be, but while WWE may not be ‘real sports,’ it is real entertainment with real athletes. One distinct appeal that the WWE has over MLB and the NFL, NHL, and NBA is its refusal to take itself seriously.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Times, Sam Anderson writes about the enduring popularity of Weird Al. “National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But — somehow, for some reason — Weird Al keeps rocking.” More:

“The Yankovic family is wonderfully wholesome. Al and Suzanne met fairly late in life, when both were established in their careers. Suzanne was a high-powered marketing executive at 20th Century Fox, and she was skeptical, at first, when a friend tried to set them up. She worried that Weird Al would be wacky, loud, shrill, insufferable, exhausting, always ‘on.’

“He turned out to be the opposite. Offstage, in his civilian life, Yankovic is shy, introverted, extremely private and unfailingly polite. Among the big personalities of the Los Angeles comedy world, his quiet decency is legendary. ‘He is so, so incredibly nice,’ Samberg (among many others) told me. ‘He is the nicest person you will ever meet, exactly what you’re dreaming he’ll be like.’ No one has ever heard Weird Al raise his voice in anger. He doesn’t swear. When a script comes to him with a bad word in it, he politely asks for revisions. Sometimes, experimentally, Suzanne will try to get him to say a curse word at home. ‘C’mon, honey, it’s just us!’ she’ll say. But he refuses.

“On a bright Saturday morning, the Yankovics invited me to join them for a family hike. Weird Al wore jeans, a large floppy hat and a muted Lacoste polo. (He avoids Hawaiian shirts in everyday settings, not wanting to draw attention to himself.) Suzanne, an avid photographer, seemed to notice every plant and bird we passed. She and Al are classic opposites: he is internal and unobservant and can disappear into his head for days at a time; Suzanne is chatty and social and hyper-present.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Connecticut

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