Alan Jacobs

That Adler and Van Doren have these suspicions is indicated by their choice of the word entertainment—a dismissive word in comparison to ones I have just used, pleasure and joy, and often prefaced by the adjective “mere.” Graham Greene wrote works of fiction that he felt were seriously literary, and called them “novels”; others, largely thrillers like Stamboul Train and Brighton Rock, he called “entertainments.” But “pleasure” and “joy” are richer words, with a greater range of connotations: there can be guilty pleasures, but abiding ones as well. Adler and Van Doren don’t want to get into these complications, preferring the simple distinction between entertainment, on the one trivial hand, and information and understanding, on the strong and noble other. But to divide the world of reading in this way is to leave yourself unable to account for pleasure, and likely to mistrust it when it comes.

So this is what I say to my petitioners: for heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called “social and ethical hygiene.”

[gallery] mediumaevum:

Medieval Orthodox illuminations? Look closer.

These are actually “Lord of the Rings” illustrations by an Ukrainian artist Sergei Iukhimov. You can view many more here.

Mind. Blown.

[gallery] Tableware for people suffering from Alzhemer’s, via Sara Hendren on Twitter.

I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway. Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it’s statistically too improbable.

Twitter: LOOK AT THIS AWESOME ARTICLE!
Me: I read the article and didn’t like it at all.
Twitter: How could you say that? You are so mean! You’ve given no reasons!
Me: [explanation of why I disliked the article]
Twitter: You’re going on and on about this, aren’t you? Also, you’re so mean.

Which is basically the root of my disagreement with the left’s writers on a lot of these issues. They look at the state of sex and gender, masculinity and femininity, and see an uncomplicatedly progressive social revolution that just hasn’t fully succeeded yet — that hasn’t brought men, especially, into the sunlit uplands of egalitarian enlightenment — because far too many “traditional” concepts and constraints still perdure. I see a social revolution that has brought good and bad, intermixed, and whose supporters could profit from the realization that some of the human goods they seek are actually more clearly visible behind us, somewhere back in a cultural past they still insist they’re fighting to overthrow, whose actual details the darkness of forgetting has almost swallowed up.

[gallery] momalibrary:

Plastic People of the Universe just arrived in a red-flocked box hand-carried from Prague. Library and Museum Archives Director Milan Hughston acquired the set of the avant-garde Czech band’s albums while traveling in Eastern Europe as part of the MoMA’s C-MAP initiative. -jt

My fellow libertarians and I are often criticized for our opposition to policies like primary seat belt laws, helmet laws, aggressive enforcement of jaywalking laws, or nuisance laws, such as carrying an open container in public. The criticism is usually that these are petty concerns, and people who spend time opposing them are out of touch with the real world. But these sorts of laws give police more excuses to make pretext stops when profiling for drug couriers. Once they have you, they can take your cash, car, jewelry or other possessions based only on the flimsiest evidence that it might be connected to drugs. They’re opportunities for harassment. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that even a crime as petty as a seat belt violation is justification for an arrest — and all of the life disruptions that come with a trip to jail. (Don’t forget that no matter what the offense, a trip to jail can also include a strip search.) Heavy enforcement of these sorts of crimes can breed distrust between police and the communities they serve, and creates more interactions that carry the risk of escalation.

But even assuming that all of these stops, fines, and citations are always legitimate, they’re always going to have a disproportionate effect on the poor, because the poor are the people who can least afford to pay them.

SH: Your writing style tends to be very lyrical in ways, tends to be very poetic in a lot of ways.

TNC: Yes.

SH: This piece was not that. It was actually very prosaic in a lot of ways, almost flat in its dissemination of facts. Did you do that on purpose?

TNC: Well, I actually was trying to be lyrical, but that’s OK.

SH: Whoops.

TNC: I was trying to be a little lyrical. There was just so much. Just to be quite blunt: This isn’t even the half of it. The facts are so much and so overwhelming that, at a point, you just kind of let it go. In edit, my editors were like, “You got to cut a lot of this flowery shit… The facts are enough.”

SH: That’s what I do every day.

TNC: Yeah. They were like, ‘That was a pretty sentence you wrote… It does nothing. It does absolutely nothing.’ I have a bias towards more of the purple prose. I mean, you meet Clyde Ross, and Clyde is just Clyde. I met him and he just started talking. If Clyde was here right now, you would just get it. You don’t even need a filter. He starts talking and that really is it. And that’s true I think for African-American history in this country, regrettably. If you just outline the facts. If you just say, “This happened this year, this happened this year…” It’s pretty damning. I mean, it really really is damning.

The trouble with talking about right and wrong in the age of the internet is that our communicative systems are oriented towards communicating only with those whom we wish to. That is not an indictment of the individuals operating within those systems, but a result of the economic incentives for the companies that build these systems. It is the reason for Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithms, the space Google has tried so desperately to invade with the Google venture, the reason Tumblr has only likes and reblogs. Narrowing the stream, given the size of the internet, is necessary, and it appears, profitable. But either way, the result is that there is no necessary point where people agreeing about right and wrong becomes people convincing others about right and wrong, particularly given that avoidance is an easily practiced art when practiced electronically. And these systems are so carefully designed by their tech conglomerate creators, and our cultural and social inequality so acutely understood and policed by those at the top of that hierarchy, that it is very easy to mistake these tiny niches for the whole world. You can believe that even if you really, really agree with what people are really, really agreeing about. Perhaps especially then. You can believe it even as you live it.