Reviews and News:
Next time someone you know dies, please, don’t put it on social media: “The morning after my sister Lauren died was cold and quiet, a mid-March prairie dawn, lit by gray half-light. For several hours I tried to figure out how to get out of bed. The most routine tasks are extraordinarily difficult in the early days of grief – Lauren’s death had torn a hole in my universe, and I knew the moment I moved I would fall right through it. Meanwhile, across the city, a former classmate of Lauren’s learned of her death. I’m still not sure how – she hadn’t kept in touch with Lauren during the three years since they graduated high school. But bad news travels astonishingly fast. The classmate selected what is perhaps the only picture of the two of them together, and decided to post it on Lauren’s timeline. Beneath it, she wrote ‘RIP’ and something about heaven gaining an angel.”
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Cruise ships have libraries, apparently.
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The proposed memorial to Dwight Eisenhower – possibly the worst design of a monument ever produced by the minds of Washington bureaucrats – may be in trouble.
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Lionel Shriver’s American nightmare: “The dust jacket warns the potential purchaser that ‘this is not science fiction.’ Clearly the publishers of Lionel Shriver’s twelfth novel are worried that some of her fans may be put off by the future. They shouldn’t be. It’s true The Mandibles isn’t fully-fledged sci-fi, but it is in the tradition of speculative fiction, a tradition largely launched in the English language by women writers such as Aphra Behn, the Duchess of Newcastle and Mary Shelley (whose The Last Man, about an apocalyptic virus, languishes unfairly in the shadow of Frankenstein).”
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Bruce Bawer on the rising reputation of Wallace Stevens: “It is probably fair to say that, in the estimation of most critics, he has eclipsed all of his American contemporaries; of all twentieth-century poets in English, indeed, only Yeats is consistently ranked higher. The Library of America published a volume of Stevens’ poetry and prose in 1997; the innumerable critical studies of his work include one book by the dean of American literary critics, Harold Bloom, and two by the doyenne of poetry mavens, Helen Vendler. Then there are the biographies – for it is a truth universally acknowledged that a poet in possession of a lofty reputation must be in need of a biography. Stevens, however, poses something of a problem to anyone seeking to take on the task of chronicling his life…”
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Brendan O’Neill on the poison of identity politics: “The post-Orlando discussion should be of concern to anyone who considers himself a humanist. For it has confirmed the entrenchment of the politics of identity, and exposed how thoroughly it has usurped, or perhaps replaced, the older, more progressive politics of human solidarity.”
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Two linguists discuss The Wake, a novel written “in what might be called a shadow tongue – a pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today.”
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Essay of the Day:
Edward Mendelson examines six new books on what it means to be human in a digital age:
“Every technological revolution coincides with changes in what it means to be a human being, in the kinds of psychological borders that divide the inner life from the world outside. Those changes in sensibility and consciousness never correspond exactly with changes in technology, and many aspects of today’s digital world were already taking shape before the age of the personal computer and the smartphone. But the digital revolution suddenly increased the rate and scale of change in almost everyone’s lives. Elizabeth Eisenstein‘s exhilaratingly ambitious historical study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) may overstate its argument that the press was the initiating cause of the great changes in culture in the early sixteenth century, but her book pointed to the many ways in which new means of communication can amplify slow, preexisting changes into an overwhelming, transforming wave.”
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Image of the Day: A woman walks through the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.
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Poem: Rachel Hadas, “A Poultice”
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