Our favorite adjectives are revealing. The reason we love people, the writer and interviewer Paul Holdengräber has said, is that we find that we have these favorites in common.
I wonder if shared aversions aren’t an even stronger bond. What if I were to describe a book as plain-spoken or lucid? If you felt a twinge of boredom (bonus if you thrill to disheveled, elusive, gamy), then I have a book for you.
Jeremy Atherton Lin’s “Gay Bar” is a restless and intelligent cultural history of queer nightlife. Atherton Lin began writing it in 2017; more than half of London’s gay bars had shuttered in the previous 10 years. “This was blamed on property developers, apps, assimilation,” he writes. “In Britain, the steep decline came not long after.