Thread of essays I've been reading
"What is remarkable about today’s oligarchy is not its ruthlessness but its pettiness and purposelessness. An all-consuming megalomania might at least produce some great art as a side-effect. But this collection of mediocrities cannot even do that." americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-re…
"The fact that ancient scriptural style can be defended by reference to the fictional monologue of an Irish woman relating the details of her many-sided sex life in turn-of-the-century Dublin is a sign of the luxuriance of our own culture." newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
"Tim Hortons is one of the only brands in the world whose appeal among its major consumer base is precisely its lack of worldliness or sophistication." nationalpost.com/entertainment/…
"Lerner includes very few passages of spread in the novel, and when you read an example — ‘Stevenson proves affirmative plan no solvency regardless because resistance from from internal agencies blocks imple-implementation’ — you see why." lrb.co.uk/v41/n23/joanna…
"The converse of a pretty lie is always an ugly truth. If there is no net aesthetic repulsion to the pretty lie, and no net aesthetic attraction to the ugly truth, the two have found a level field — and either can win." americanmind.org/essays/the-cle…
"Circa 1999, no sophisticated stereo stand was complete without an ECM CD showing, say, a picture of a collapsed stone wall." newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
"I had decided I no longer cared about ever becoming middle-class; the cost of earning a living this way was too high. The terror of poverty had become far less frightening than the wages of having wasted my life." harpers.org/archive/2019/1…
"What might set the Right and the Left apart more than anything now is that many – though by no means all – on the Left seem to have reached the conclusion that there can be no escape from this dreaded homogenisation." aeon.co/essays/left-an…
"'There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others,' Jorge Luis Borges wrote; 'I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.'" newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10…
"Epicurus himself was said to have lived a fairly ascetic life. But Playboy began with quiet discussions of Nietzsche and jazz and ended quite differently."
city-journal.org/epicurean-phil…
city-journal.org/epicurean-phil…
"Hints are scattered throughout of the way the events of 2016 affected Smith personally, in particular how exposure to some of the darker, weirder corners of online culture overhauled his core assumptions." lrb.co.uk/v41/n23/willia…
"If I were an algorithm, and I encountered an adult human happily watching Spiderman, I would greet that human with a 'You may also like…' offer to next watch 'Johnny Johnny Yes Papa' on a ten-hour loop." thepointmag.com/examined-life/…
"The relation of boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence." monoskop.org/images/5/59/So…
"He cautions students against losing themselves down a narcissistic rabbit hole: you are not a 'defrauded genius' simply because someone else has happened upon the same set of research questions." newyorker.com/books/page-tur…
"'How do you write like the Economist?', a new recruit asked a senior editor when composing their first leader for the title. Simple, came the response. 'Pretend you are God.'" newstatesman.com/culture/books/…
"Since the beer kegs could be bought on credit, I drank lustily from them." torontolife.com/food/restauran…
"He took it for granted that all strong ideas could be made lucid to a large audience, and that if there was one that couldn’t, it might not actually be that strong an idea." newyorker.com/culture/postsc…
"A better title might have been What Certain Literary Scholars in Search of New Secondary Fields of Study for Lack of Anything Else New to Do Talk About When They Go to Academic Conferences Whose Proceedings No One Will Read." newcriterion.com/issues/2019/12…
"Yukio Mishima said that he could not entertain the idea of romance if he was not strong. Romance is such a strong and overwhelming passion, a weakened body cannot sustain it for long. I have some of my most romantic thoughts when I am with the Iron." artofmanliness.com/articles/henry…
"Bugmen are what we get when a culture is infantilized, watered down and stripped of the very intellectual, philosophical and honourable fibre that once made it great." hackernoon.com/on-the-infesta…
"By any reckoning, the spread of gin has been a freakish phenomenon. (I have seen it described as a 'Ginaissance.' Anybody heard using this word should, of course, be banned from public bars in perpetuity.)" newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
"Whenever you see someone make an accusation of LARPing, all you’re really seeing is someone come into contact with a belief or ideal which is more than 50 years old, which to them is ghastly." meta-nomad.net/a-real-larp/
"Roman Jakobson protested, when Nabokov’s name was put forward for a full professorship of Russian, ‘Are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?’" literaryreview.co.uk/pride-prejudic…
"The idea of friendship seems almost quaint, and possibly imperiled. In the face of abundant, tenuous connections, the instinct to sort people according to a more rigid logic than that of mere friendship seems greater than ever." newyorker.com/books/second-r…
"'Get thee to the coffeehouse!' This is the fin-de-siècle Austrian writer’s prescription for a host of life’s ills." newyorker.com/books/page-tur…
"Unfortunately, there is reason to suspect that the actual coffee served in the 17th-century English coffee house may not have been so great." marker.medium.com/how-the-humble…
"Throughout the book, the reader will find evidence that the writer’s learning has been hard won. It must have been hard won because it is so heavily worn." prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/dan-b…
"Every linguistic subset constitutes a code. But this vernacular isn’t as innocently contagious as 'groovy.' In left-wing circles, neglecting to ape what has been tacitly declared as What We Say Now marks you as suspect." harpers.org/archive/2019/1…
"When your position commits you to saying 'Love isn’t important to humans and we should demand people stop caring about whether or not they have it,' you need to take a really careful look in the mirror — assuming you even show up in one." slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/rad…
"In the absence of either fear or hope, only the present moment has any reality: you do what is most amusing, or least boring, at each passing moment." city-journal.org/html/rush-judg…
"Whereas we once entrusted our arts institutions to highly trained specialists whose authority lay in their expertise and taste, today’s cultural arbiters often find themselves going along to get along." gen.medium.com/jordan-peterso…
"If the internet has made all of us critics, that means we are all now foot soldiers in a culture war: self-armed semioticians and practiced deconstructors of political signification." aeon.co/essays/john-be…
"The first time I quit restaurant reviewing, in 1995, I remember thinking that the fascination with food was a bubble: we had reached Peak Food. I may never have been more wrong about anything." newyorker.com/magazine/2014/…
"Lauren has attempted nothing less than the bringing to life, in the form of marketable goods, of his own remarkably consistent and Edenic idea of America." newyorker.com/culture/cultur…
"The religion of the culturally disinherited is not transmissible but it is renewable. Unlike economic poverty, cultural deprivation is entirely relative; the privileged can never buy off the dispossessed, and the causes of resentment are ineradicable." lrb.co.uk/v12/n11/malcol…
"In France, where Kennedy has lived for many years, his work is revered and he is a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The books read like super plush versions of Simenon’s romans durs (“tough” novels) – romans doux, perhaps." newstatesman.com/2019/01/the-gr…
"As the height of suffering meets sensuality, and the height of depravity verges on mystical energy, the height of banality lets us glimpse a hint of the sublime." theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/2…
"Wasting your time is not the worst thing the educational system does to you. The worst thing it does is to train you that the way to win is by hacking bad tests." paulgraham.com/lesson.html
"Her task, which she fulfills with terrific intent, is to chart the downfall of a resolute but precarious soul who was ill-suited to take the plunge. The movie’s larger mission is to prove that not an inch of that descent was of Seberg’s making." newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
"He deserves a lifetime record for never talking about himself, not even in his novels. Not until the very end. Essentially, I think he deprived himself of a pleasure." nybooks.com/daily/2019/12/…
"She is adept at floating scenarios, allowing for the existence of opinions she doesn’t share. It’s impossible to imagine her subscribing to the idea of an 'unfailingly' attractive woman. She is too tuned in to fallibility for that." bookforum.com/print/2604/the…
"I think that people should eat at my convenience, not that I should cook at their convenience. Pour savoir manger, il faut savoir attendre. If people have any common sense, they will subordinate themselves to the cook’s wishes." newyorker.com/magazine/1979/…
"It isn’t too long, but its length changes its mood and meanings, and makes it more disturbing. It’s as if the gangster movies I just mentioned had turned into meditations rather than action pictures." lrb.co.uk/v41/n23/michae…
"His other studies of vocation — New York, New York, The Color of Money and Life Lessons — all concern a human calling, like Scorsese’s own, which costs the hero and those around him dear but which feels in itself like a duty and a need." lrb.co.uk/v12/n05/philip…
"There is something almost poignant in the hope that we learn to treat scripture more like imaginative literature, since contemporary culture doesn’t seem to have much idea what to do with literature, either." harpers.org/archive/2019/1…
"He crafts each part of his sentence carefully enough that there are subdramas in the relationships of the words themselves, in the productive tensions between them. If you are looking for story and plot, you have come to the wrong place." theparisreview.org/blog/2019/12/0…
"Attrition itself might be said to be one theme of the movie: everything is eventually worn down; corruption eats away at everything; we lose something just by taking part." theoutline.com/post/8412/the-…
"There are things he would be willing to kill for." city-journal.org/richard-ford-c…
"There is no bygone era of a well-informed, attentive public. What we have had in lieu of a well-informed citizenry is what might be termed a 'load-bearing' myth — the myth of the attentive public." mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflect…
"'We have no future,' one character concludes. 'Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did.' Such 'fully imagined cultural futures' were possible only when 'now' was of some greater duration." newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
"The square was packed with newly arrived Russian émigrés and children carrying ice cream cones from the Italian gelateria facing the playground. 'Everything is as it should be,' Nabokov once wrote. 'Nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.'" nybooks.com/articles/2016/…
"It’s tempting to use one’s personal favorite (or least favorite) musical acts as an ideological weapon. More often than not, though, that opens the door to bad faith arguments and worse criticism." arcdigital.media/how-the-2010s-…
"Comparisons between Trump supporters and Nazis, digressions on the small-mindedness of Brexit, and fatalism about the ability of the United States or United Kingdom to recover any moral legitimacy abound." the-american-interest.com/2019/12/06/joh…
"A single vote does not sway an election, and therefore it follows… what? Other than undermining a cherished idea, which is indeed incorrect, what exactly is the larger value of the specific point?" sweettalkconversation.com/2015/07/09/the…
"We get constant news of Carrère’s romantic and sexual experiences — he’s in love, he’s out of love; this woman leaves him, this one is left by him. Something is clearly out of kilter." nytimes.com/2019/12/12/boo…
"I have very little shame. There are many things I’ve done or thought that I consider bad, but I don’t feel shame over them because I think that everyone feels they’ve done bad things. I think it does a reader good to see: ‘Oh, he’s the same way.’" nytimes.com/2017/03/02/mag…
"The mingling of fact and fiction sits a little uneasily in a movie that is dedicated to the righting of wrongs." newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
“If you have pro-democracy parties, then that must mean you have anti-democracy parties… but if a party is anti-democracy, and an election comes around, then surely…” lrb.co.uk/v41/n24/john-l…
"I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down." paulgraham.com/kids.html
"What we should imagine instead of an impartial skeptic is a person who gets a charge out of being the rational member of the exchange." aeon.co/essays/is-debu…
"When asked, I said that I lived in Little Italy rather than Nolita, as if I’d been there my whole life and couldn’t be bothered to learn the latest realtor jargon." newyorker.com/culture/person…
“The writer has almost disappeared through his sheer concentration on the task of lighting up a dull, depressing life without letting the reader notice any departure from sober realism.” lrb.co.uk/v41/n24/christ…
"Emmanuel Carrère lacks Kierkegaard’s anguished Northern masochism. In matters of appetite, he is pleasingly French: sensuous, libidinous — the healthy lover of pagan Mediterranean pleasures that Nietzsche admired and Camus incarnated." newyorker.com/magazine/2017/…
"In a Confucian society, where there is no distinct sense of heaven or hell, where a deity will not necessarily punish you for your sins and where citizens must ultimately manage one another, these movies suggest a different course of action." nytimes.com/2019/11/25/t-m…
"What remains after YouTube’s upcoming cleanup will inevitably be mostly crap, but it will be more established and refined crap." tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an…
