pre-dawn
Google’s search deal with Reddit is yet another of the thousand ways in which the open web is closing.
I’m reading Robert Richardson’s biography of William James and I’m struggling: almost every male person in it is named either William or Henry.
Here is the second in a series of posts about the battle for Guadalcanal and some artistic responses to it.
rainy morning in the canyon
For the Princeton University Press Ideas blog, I wrote about my critical edition of Auden’s collection The Shield of Achilles.
On renewing the art of biological taxonomy: “With genetic sequences, we can now identify the fundamental building blocks of life, but we need to be able to interpret genetic data in a way that humans can understand and use. That’s taxonomy’s job. And if we want to save what’s left of the vast diversity of life on Earth, we’ll have to reinvest in this science. How we delineate between species determines what we choose to save.”
Anthony Lane on a new book about SF movies released in the summer of 1982:
Such is Nashawaty’s command of superlatives that he merits a sci-fi yarn of his own. “The Optimizer,” perhaps. Or “The Hyphenator.” Thus, “Star Wars” is lauded as “a true once-in-a-generation pop-culture juggernaut,” while the triumph of “The Wrath of Khan” was to turn “a cash-grab sequel into a franchise-resuscitating classic.” Far from scorning this excitable tic, I find it both judicious and contagious; the book’s parsing of “Halloween” as “a babysitter-in-peril slashterpiece” is hard to quibble with, and I wonder what other paragons of the medium would profit from so crisp a paraphrase. Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers”? A crimson-tinged, don’t-hold-back Scandi cancerthon. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc”? A chat-free high-stakes teen roast. Once you slip into the habit, you can’t stop.
I’m gonna have some fun with this game.
One thing Substack has done very well (from their perspective, that is): Get people who write on Substack to link and respond only to other people on Substack. It’s basically a multi-level marketing scheme, though wholly voluntary.
Paul Kingsnorth says “everything is myth,” which is true, but if you want to understand how myth functions, maybe you should read my recent essay on the mythical method. Just a suggestion. Kindly meant.
Can’t get enough typography analysis.
