In an age in which every publication must bring surefire profit for the publisher, nobody’s translating foreign literature into English. That gave Alane Salierno Mason an idea … “You can trace the rise of Britart to the deregulation of the City and the growth of a class of super-moneyed hedge funders and share-optioned investment bankers [...]
Eight great links to make up for my mysterious absence … “Perhaps we should rethink our knee-jerk reflex to keep them safer than they wish to keep themselves:” Lane Wallace on risk and risk-aversion. Superman, Gilgamesh, Santa Claus, Dracula … who do you think is the most famous fictional character, ever? “It’s not the sort [...]
“My friends here esquivent the Bones for the more part,” wrote Samuel Beckett, “which means the bolus has gone home.” Anthony Lane explores an edition of letters full of prose that is “too deeply mired in private nudges and expostulations to be enjoyable.” “Few writers have excelled him in the arts of second-guessing and self-dissatisfaction:” [...]
You! Drop what you’re doing and read Chris Mooney’s critique of George Will’s hissy little column on “global cooling.” Mooney’s article is everything that op-ed writing ought to be: polite, well-reasoned, utterly devastating. I wish that all writers cared so much about explaining the problems of reliable knowledge that subtend superficial and overheated policy disputes. [...]
At the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Britt Peterson revives Jonathan Gottschall’s Boston Globe essay “Measure for Measure,” which created a minor brouhaha a couple of months back. Gottschall’s essay argues that literary scholars ought to try out techniques that are informed by – and accountable to – the sciences. Peterson draws on this to highlight [...]
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