Graffiti varies from place to place. In New York, it’s gallery-approved. In the Arab world, it’s political. In Pompeii, it was erotic and funny... In blogosphere graffiti it is connected by less than Six Degrees
After 33 years and 3,000 reviews, Jonathan Yardley, self-described “old-fashioned man in a new-fashioned world,” hangs it up as a book critic.
“If anyone had told me as I began this long career that I would spend most of it as a book reviewer and that I would even write a few books of my own, I would have been astonished.”
33 the little devil of a career many will miss
Margins are for scribbling, pages for folding, spines for breaking. We have a responsibility to read with a pen in hand. Tim Parks explains.. Media dragons with a sword
“A pen is not a magic wand. The critical faculty is not conjured from nothing. But it was remarkable how many students improved their performance with this simple stratagem. There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text.”
For 35 years, Denis Duttonedited Philosophy and Literature. His commitment was to language that is simple, clear, And Elegant
Norman Mailer was a writer for his time, not all time. He lived less as a novelist than as an all-purpose gadfly, taking on every issue of the day
How humanity learned to speak. A language organ? No. A language instinct? No. Our need to cooperate was what paved the way
For an apostle of alienation, Herbert Marcuse sure was a media star. To think his unsettling blend of Hegel, Marx, and Freud ended up in Play...boy
