Oedipus Techs

Inside the May 28 issue

May 07, 2026

A still from a recording of Bill Gates’s deposition during the US Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft

Whither the Nerd-Bully?

Ben Tarnoff

When I was thirteen, I snuck into a theater to see South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The film is so vulgar that the Motion Picture Association of America insisted on giving it an R rating, which is why I had to sneak in. I’m glad I did. I have never laughed harder in my life.

What I remember most clearly is a scene that involves Bill Gates. It begins with a US Army general briefing a group of soldiers. In the middle of his presentation, his computer crashes. He demands to see Gates, who is promptly hauled out. “You told us that Windows 98 would be faster and more efficient, with better access to the Internet!” yells the general. “It is faster,” Gates insists—and the general shoots him in the face.

Everyone in the theater cheered when this happened. Loud, joyous cheering. How hated do you have to be, I remember thinking at the time, for your point-blank execution to elicit such unanimous delight?

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland on *The Judy Garland Show*, 1963

Mommie Dearest

Frances Wilson

On May 28, two days after the body of her eldest sister, Suzy, was found in her Las Vegas home, [Judy] Garland took an overdose in Hong Kong’s Mandarin Oriental hotel. She was in a coma for more than fifteen hours, and the tabloids excitedly reported the star’s death. On June 12, her divorce from Luft not yet finalized, Garland married [Mark] Herron in a ceremony presided over by a Buddhist priest. On July 20 she cut her wrists in London, and on July 23, only hours out of the hospital, she sang—against medical advice—at the Palladium for the charity gala Night of a Hundred Stars. The applause was rapturous. The Palladium saved her, and she was determined to return. That November, no longer able to do a show on her own, she invited her eighteen-year-old daughter to join her. “A lot of people have tried to explain the history of this concert,” Liza Minnelli says in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, her riveting new memoir. “Here’s what really happened.”

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Ben Lerner; illustration by Vivienne Flesher

‘Facing the Past’

Christopher Tayler

When we meet the unnamed narrator of Ben Lerner’s latest novel, he is holding an unread book and toying with his phone. The setting is a train to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is going to interview an eminent German polymath named Thomas, his old mentor from his college days there. It’s 2024; Thomas has just turned ninety. It’s possible that this will be their last meeting, not to mention Thomas’s last published interview. The narrator needs to think up a good opening question, but he can’t focus on the great man’s latest book because he has a seat “facing opposite the direction of travel…. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or, as my ten-year-old, Eva, put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I am ‘facing the past.’” Instead he texts with his wife, then dozes and has an uneasy dream.

By the end of this unemphatic three-page sequence, Transcription has dealt out most of the cards that it will go on to manipulate with some dazzling flourishes and much use of misdirection. There’s a kernel of drama—the looming encounter with a figure with whom the narrator has a charged, quasi-filial relationship—and there are already three generations in play, with the narrator, who’s forty-five, having to worry about all of them.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

Indiana’s Indiana Jones

Nina Siegal

In April 2014 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the family farm of Don Miller, a ninety-year-old electrical engineer and amateur archaeologist, and seized thousands of artifacts, skulls, and other bones that he had stolen from indigenous burial grounds and cultural heritage sites across the globe. Miller had hoarded his plunder in his house, his barns, and a disused fallout shelter in Rush County, Indiana.

Investigators found that he had also created eccentric and morbid displays: “arrowheads hammered into a skull for dramatic effect, a baby’s skull repurposed as an apple bowl.” Bones were mixed with animal remains, “strewn across shelves and stuffed into tote bags…. They were filthy with grime and black mold, infested with silverfish.” Mice were nesting in skulls. In a locked room, there was a nearly complete skeleton laid out on red felt cloth in a glass case labeled “Sioux Warrior, 19th Cent.,” which Miller claimed was the remains of Crazy Horse, the famous Lakota leader of a rebellion against the US military. Miller was so attached to it that he told his friends, “I want you to bury me with my Indian.”

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.