So he is a sceptic of the scientific age?
‘Yes — a sceptic of the expert explanation, the sort of complete lack of self-doubt: total self-certainty and dogmatism of the proponents. I mean your friend Sam Harris would be an example. I’ve never really read him but I’ve read a bit of him here and there, and I remember thinking of him in much the same way as I think of Richard Dawkins, who I find very agreeable company too, that there’s something discourteous about claiming 100 per cent of the terrain, just nothing else to say from any other quarter. Somebody said about Macaulay, “I wish I knew as much about anything as Tom knows about everything”. ’
I usually avoid lists like those of 'most borrowed books' from various libraries (since they depend a lot on how many copies of books a given library has and hence obviously favor the biggest-name and most heavily-publicized, bought-in-bulk titles/authors), but the huge number of reviews at Publishers Weekly makes for a more balanced pool for an exercise like their list of The Most-Read Book Reviews of 2019 (though it's disappointing that they don't specify how many reviews they posted in 2019). Not necessarily the titles I would have expected, and an interesting variety.
The Myth of the Pagan Origins of Christmas
It’s true. Pop artist Andy Warhol, the legendary, ironically blank scenester, was also a devoutly religious man. He attended church faithfully, volunteered in soup kitchens, and made a late body of Christian themed works that have been largely overlooked by the hostilely secular art world.
There are tens of thousands of volunteers doing the dangerous work of fighting the Australian fires
HABITATION
by Margaret AtwoodMarriage is nota house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edgeof the desertthe unpainted stairsat the back where we squatoutside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonderat having survived eventhis far
we are learning to make fire
Complement with Anna Dostoyevskaya on the secret to a happy marriage and Virginia Woolf on what makes love last, then revisit other soulful and stirring readings by Amanda (who supports her music and life-poetry, like I do my writing and life-poetry, via donations): “When I Am Among the Trees” by Mary Oliver, “Questionnaire” by Wendell Berry, “The Mushroom Hunters” by Neil Gaiman, “The Hubble Photographs” by Adrienne Rich, “Having It Out With Melancholy” by Jane Kenyon, “Humanity i love you” by E.E. Cummings, and“Possibilities” by Wisława Szymborska.
Margaret Atwood on Marriage
“Marriage is not a house or even a tent…”
Lots here of interest (though, alas , quite a bit of it only in summary form) -- including potential future projects:
He thinks there is a big play to be written on capitalism and the City of London. ‘I think a lot of what I think of as being criminal behaviour is done by people who don’t consider themselves to be criminals at all. I think the artist’s job partly is to remind us of what’s fair, but in moral terms.’ But he worries that he doesn’t have the time and energy to do the research into the big problem that capitalism currently presents. What about one of his other ideas ? He has all the paperwork upstairs (including the Leveson report and the transcripts of the House of Commons committee hearings) to write a play about the press. He’s been thinking about that ‘from long before Leopoldstadt and long before The Hard Problem’.I hope to get a look at the playscript of Leopoldstadt; see also the Faber & Faber publicity page, or pre-order your copy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.