Today is the birthday of Thomas Mann, who was born exactly 150 years ago. In honor of Mann, I’m posting this essay I wrote, several years back, about him, The Magic Mountain, covid, the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, and late capitalism. The essay never got published, and I’d forgotten about till I read the notification this morning from Lit Hub, that today is his birthday. I first read The Magic Mountain in the summer of 1990, a year after I graduated college and just before I was starting graduate school. I was house-sitting in New Haven and studying German. I didn’t know anyone, and back in those days, that kind of pervasive, seemingly permanent, solitude, made me anxious (nowadays, I struggle […]