ESSAY: The future of reading

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In a recent keynote address to the Writers' Union of Canada, philosopher Mark Kingwell observed that the development of the modern novel and a reading public the deepening of subjectivity on the one hand and of advent of "democratic liberalism" on the other.  --  He values the fact that "Reading offers a heady way of identifying with another, mirroring and reinforcing the self."[1]  --  But no sooner had Kingwell asserted this than he undermined his own position:  "there is no evidence that exposure to literature reliably expands your moral imagination."  --  In the end, he offered only this pallid hope:  "long-form reading will be with us as long as there is such a thing as individual human consciousness. . . . There is stimulation and pleasure in consciousness but also boredom, anxiety, frustration, loneliness, and grief.  Books . . . do not make me a better person, but they give me respite from the incessant noise of existence.  That market will never collapse."  --  There is nothing original in this conclusion.  --  In 2011, Alan Jacobs wrote a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading."  --  In it, he pointed out that "In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run.  --  'We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base:  a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.'"[2]  --  Jacobs's essay, like Kingwell's, is sadly lacking in conviction.  --  Yeats, "The Second Coming" (written in 1919, published in 1921):  "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." ...

BOOK REVIEW: Now is the time to pay attention to the warning in Julian Assange's 2012 book

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Edward Snowden's revelations have made big news, but they shouldn't have, because it has been known for some time that "all of our web-based communications are now intercepted by military spy organs."  --  In the Los Angeles Review of Books in April, Adam Morris reviewed Julian Assange's all-too-neglected (or perhaps all-too-blacked-out) 2012 book, the monitorial Cypherpunks.[1]  --  "[W]e are all living under martial law as far as our communications are concerned," is how Assange put it.  --  Assange "is not the first to read the writing on the wall," Adam Morris wrote.[1]  --  "Beginning as early as 1946, thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have warned of the imbrication of entertainment with disciplinary social control in the form of the 'culture industry.'  --  Since then a lineage of theorists influenced by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), Michel Foucault’s late lectures on biopolitics, and Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 essay on the rise of the 'control society' have expanded on these ideas, cautioning against the advent of technocratic governments that will crush opposition and difference through mass-surveillance and data- and statistics-driven managerialism.  --  More recent works bring these theories to bear on the internet.  Alexander Galloway’s book Protocol (2004) made explicit the link between the material architecture of the internet and the decentralized management style favored for the administration of such biopolitical control societies." ...

BOOK REVIEW: Critique of a critique -- Steve Coll on Vali Nasr on Obama's foreign policy

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Richard Holbrooke died in 2010, but if you want to know how that archetypal national security state diplomat (active from 1962 till the day he died) would have criticized the foreign policy of the Obama administration, you can read the new book by his one-time protégé Vali Nasr.  --  Vali Nasr is a member of the expatriate Iranian élite who has earned an influential role in the stable of U.S. national security state intellectuals.  --  In his review of The Dispensable Nation in the New York Review of Books, Steve Coll mostly defends Obama from Nasr's criticisms (he does say that Obama's "heavy use of drones" helped "lose Pakistan," though) and dismisses the alternative policies Nasr proposes (like throwing gigabucks at Egypt or Pakistan) as unfeasible or implausibly ambitious.[1]  --  By larding his book with uncritical praise of Hillary Clinton, Vali Nasr is clearly angling for a job when Hillary Clinton is elected in 2016.  --  BACKGROUND: Probably he dreams of becoming secretary of state one day himself.  --  Vali Nasr is son of a notable family that includes several generations of important Iranian intellectuals, of which is father, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, not mentioned here, is the best known....

  1. WISDOM: Tao Te Ching 58 -- 'When the government is invasive...'
  2. INTERVIEW: 'In foreign policy, the US executive branch is effectively a dictatorship' (Jeremy Scahill)
  3. LITERATURE: Did Dostoevsky really meet Dickens?
  4. TRANSLATION: The Knights Templar were 'the world's first international bank'
  5. BOOKS: 'Paradigm-shifting' research on staggering extent of US atrocities in Vietnam
  6. BOOKS: The spy who told me -- Gérard de Villiers writes 'fairy tales for adults, with some substance'
  7. BOOK REVIEW: Mark Mazower's 'Governing the World: The History of an Idea'
  8. BOOK REVIEW: 'The colorless surfaces advance a sense of collusion' (on Natsume Soseki)
  9. BOOKS: Joseph Heller's was 'perhaps the sole significant American contribution to existential philosophy'
  10. BOOK REVIEW: Lack of 'primacy in consumer goods' delegitimized USSR vis-à-vis capitalist West