In Praise Of Negative Book and Doorstopper Reviews…

The Rotten Tomatoes score is a simple measurement of the percentage of critics that liked the film. As a generalization, I expect that for an average film, half of the critics will like it and half will not

Ripe for a kicking: Hollywood's love-hate relationship with Rotten Tomatoes and MEdia Dragon ...

Duong's idea was simple – to compile movie reviews – and it still drives Rotten Tomatoes. He was inspired by his love of Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies and would scour the internet looking for reviews of them. So why not put them in one place? Duong already had a full-time job, he says. “Rotten Tomatoes ...

BLACK PANTHER And More Audience Score Problems For Rotten T...

Over The Last Jedi's opening weekend, I wrote about how websites that aggregate both critic and user movie reviews were being reviewed-bombed in an apparent attack to lower its audience score. Over time, Rotten Tomatoes ended up with a 48 score and Metacritic ended up with a 4.5 score for The Last ...

'Black Panther' Rotten Tomatoes Score Has Been Revealed 100 ...

In Praise Of Negative Book Reviews…  

No, not every book is good. "An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good. It is an appeal for a greater investment in the context and content of a book, a task far different from the casting about for bits to extol." … [Read More]

Published in The Baffler

Yes, indeed, there are certainly those in the world who might find this a good doorstopper Cold River: The Cold Truth of Freedom: Jozef Imrich: 9781554043118 ...

 

The TLS interview: Twenty Questions with Steven Pinker: Jozef Imrich, twenty-two-year-old, who lived and wrote the Cold-war-River ;-)

Thomas Sowell, an eighty-seven-year-old African American economist, has written more than thirty mind-expanding books. These include his Culture trilogy which (among other things) anticipated Jared Diamond’s ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel and explains the ubiquity of anti-Semitism; A Conflict of Visions, which identifies the rival theories of the human condition underlying left-wing and right-wing political ideologies; The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which compares this quixotic pursuit with the quest for human justice; Intellectuals and Society, an uncomfortable exposé of the follies of all-star intellectuals; and Late-Talking Children, which anticipated Simon Baron-Cohen’s work on the extreme male brain. Sowell is a libertarian conservative, which makes him taboo in mainstream intellectual circles, but even those who disagree are well advised to grasp his facts and arguments.

Which author (living or dead) do you think is most underrated?   

The Great Book Acquisition Adventures Of The 17th And 18th Century…

Yes, it was partly about European colonial greed. "In Istanbul, the buying of books by foreigners eventually got so out of hand that in 1715 or 1716 the grand vizir, Şehid Ali Pasha, himself a book collector, 'enacted a law ... banning the sale of books to foreigners.' This protectionist measure was designed to prevent the disappearance of valuable intellectual resources from the capital." …[Read More]

Revealed: UK.gov's ‘third direction’ to keep tabs onspies’ potentially criminal activities

Details of secretive direction have been under wraps for years