Posts tagged "books"
The writer Elizabeth Wurtzel got to know Franzen and Wallace in the mid-nineties. “Do you know how there’s some people that when it’s raining it doesn’t rain on them?” Wurtzel says. “On a sunny day it would be raining on Jon Franzen.
lovely article. how do i meet, and become one of, the people doing this today?
If you’re interested in the social aspects of debt and indebtedness, please check out my friend Richard’s book.
(I helped put together the index, so I’ve had a chance to read the manuscript - it’s very geisty.)
One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.
Michiko Kakutani, “Texts Without Contexts”
A thoughtful and non-polemical analysis of reading in the digital age.
The main character in this book is so so so so unattractive and irredeemable. I read it in one sitting but the only part I really liked was a very scientfic description of salt and vinegar chips. I would recommend it for that alone.
Since when is this out?! Why did it not cross my radar? I love Ian McEwan.
- Monogamy by Adam Phillips
- How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
E-mail is a new medium but death is a very old one, perhaps the oldest. That is, if death is a medium at all—a means, a channel, an avenue. It may be that death communicates nothing, that is it merely another phase of disintegration, another pose for the ashes and dust on their return from two feet to space. But if death does communicate something, like Razi occasionally thought, that news might be the most valuable news we could ever get.
Nick McDonell, An Expensive Education, p. 284
Everywhere the digital detritus of the American upper-middle class.
Nick McDonell, An Expensive Education, p. 27
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition.
Some loser, reviewing Malcolm Gladwell.
