A Definition Of Modernism Not By Artists But The Bureaucrats Who Used It As A Weapon In The Cold War

“Cold War modernism,” then, doesn’t refer to experimental artwork produced between the end of World War II and the Reagan administration, but to “the deployment of modernist art as a weapon of Cold War propaganda by both governmental and unofficial actors as well as to the implicit and explicit understanding of modernism underpinning that deployment.

Remember That Time When Google Was Buddying Up To Librarians? (Long Gone)

“Don’t get me wrong, we’re doing pretty great on our own, better than ever really. We’ve gotten a bit more independent, not putting all of our eggs into any one basket, gotten better at establishing boundaries. Still not sure, after all that, how we got this all so wrong. Didn’t we both want the same thing? Maybe it really wasn’t us, it was them. Most days it’s hard to remember what we saw in Google. Why did we think we’d make good partners?”

T.S. Eliot Adored Detective Fiction

“Eliot’s attitude toward popular art forms was more capacious and ambivalent than he’s often given credit for. … And it so happens that, well before detective stories came into vogue among [Edmund] Wilson’s cohort, Eliot had become one of the genre’s most passionate and discerning readers.”

Winona Ryder, Holden Caulfield, And The ’90s

“‘The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding.’ At 17, Winona Ryder underlined those words by Holden Caulfield in one of two copies of The Catcher in the Rye she was carrying with her. ‘Me and Holden are, like, this team,’ she said.” Because she turned out to be completely incapable of phoniness, even when it might have done her some good.