Italian a film Festival Kidnapped on Norton
I Was Wrong About the Death of the Book And Umberto Eco was right.
The Atlantic [read free]: “Fifteen years ago, in What Would Google Do?, I called for the book to be rethought and renovated, digital and connected, so that it could be updated and made searchable, conversational, collaborative, linkable, less expensive to produce, and cheaper to buy. The problem, I said, was that we so revered the book, it had become sacrosanct. “We need to get over books,” I wrote. “Only then can we reinvent them.” I recant. Umberto Eco was right when he said, “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.” When exactly the modern book was invented is a matter of debate. Was it by Gutenberg?
No. He mechanized the manuscript. Was it half a century later, at the end of books’ incunabular phase, with the addition of the title page, page numbers, paragraph indentations, and other characteristics of the book as we know it? I think not. That describes the form of the modern book, not its soul…”
Articles of Note
Tyler Austin Harper: “White American elites … are always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda”... more »
New Books
Intellectuals and the cult of seriousness. Sontag and Steiner made a performance of omniscience and moral solemnity that no one could honestly sustain... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more »
Articles of Note
Ed Ruscha’s books were so unpopular, “so doomed to oblivion,” that documenting them is an obligation... more »
New Books
To escape from boredom, we seek distraction and endless stimulation. A better path forward is leisured contemplation... more »
Essays & Opinions
The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more »
Articles of Note
The pandemic, the Trump years, the mental-health crisis: What is driving the current return to Freud?... more »
New Books
Progressive political thinking has fallen into the identity trap, where race, gender, and sexual orientation trump all else... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more »
Articles of Note
In the early days of American English, “timber” became “lumber,” “autumn” became “fall,” and “shop” became “store”... more »
New Books
Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris transformed 18th-century natural science. When will the sisters get their due?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more »
Articles of Note
In search of fresh material to mine, AI companies are hiring poets, novelists, playwrights, writers, and Ph.D.s... more »
New Books
Mom rage seems to be all about power — who has it, and who is denied it. But it is also about shame... more »
Essays & Opinions
Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more »
Articles of Note
The academic book review is on life support. If it dies, a vital plank of our intellectual ecosystem will vanish... more »
New Books
As a young man, Amos Oz discovered his literary identity on a kibbutz. “The more provincial you are, the more universal you get”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Today’s public intellectuals dumb down ideas and pander to their readers. Their snobbish, alienating tone is unmistakable... more »
Articles of Note
An essay about grief went viral in The Believer and was then adapted for This American Life. Does it matter that it was written by AI?... more »
New Books
“Loneliness,” Walter Benjamin wrote, is “a process of self-poisoning, whose anti-toxins lie in the creative attitude”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Simone de Beauvoir held fast to the ideas of freedom and reciprocity, as well as to the idea that women would not always be the Other... more »
Articles of Note
Justice for Neanderthals! A quixotic campaign seeks to restore dignity to humanity’s long-dead cousins. But why?... more »
New Books
AP courses are mechanistic, superficial, and they fail to live up to the liberal, humanist ideals on which they were founded... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 1942 Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg were a world apart in every way. They still converged on the same idea... more »
Articles of Note
For Betty Friedan, a titan of second-wave feminism, her reputation should be secure. But in the academy it is approaching pariah status... more »
New Books
Ulysses, Don Juan, The Power Broker. What’s the book that you’ve been meaning to read for the longest time?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. By that metric he was a great success... more »
Articles of Note
Shelby Foote was a failed novelist until he wrote about the Civil War. He was the Jewish Proust of the American South... more »
New Books
What is “woke”? Bashing vague, undefined concepts is easy. It’s harder to unpack them in philosophically serious ways... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous.” What do the clothing, decor, and stylistic choices of the Bloomsbury set mean?... more »
Articles of Note
The South African novelist Thando Mgqolozanamade being a feminist ally central to his work. Then allegations of abuse surfaced... more »
New Books
Angsty novels by cool girl novelists reflect the student condition, not the human condition. It’s time to leave the quad behind... more »
Essays & Opinions
“If some writers are hypersensitive to critique, there must be others who are hypersensitive to praise”... more »