“There are at least two reasons why almost every anglophone novelist feels compelled to get as near the Booker Prize as they can. The first is because it looms over them and follows them around in the way Guy de Maupassant said the Eiffel Tower follows you everywhere when you’re in Paris.” Even so, writes Amit Chaudhuri, “I’m not saying that the Booker shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that it requires an alternative, and the alternative isn’t another prize.”
Tag: 08.16.17
Charlottesville Showed Us The Trouble With That HBO If-The-Confederacy-Won Series
Jelani Cobb: “Last month, HBO inspired an avalanche of criticism when it announced that it would produce a series called Confederate, which would explore a hypothetical world in which the South had won the Civil War. The events in Charlottesville illustrated a problem with that idea: only by the most specific, immediate definition can we consider the Confederacy to have lost the Civil War, and its legacy has defined a great deal of our history since then.”
We Barely Pause To Look At Art In Museums. So Why Do We Spend So Much Time On Selfies?
“Mobile technology encourages us to forego the Enlightenment Era experience and its accompanying promise of profound self-knowledge. With the invisible audience of social media always lurking in our mobile phones, we are tempted to permanently affix a scrim of personal narrative over the artwork we see and experience. Do art selfies correlate with lower levels of engagement with the artwork?”
Are We Really In A Time Of “Post-Truth”? That Presumes A Lot
Post-truth’s stations of the cross are pretty familiar. Most if not all of them are given some attention in each of the books under review. In terms of contemporary evidence, any journalistic book on the subject will do what all three of the ones here do at some length. They pick over the global warming “debate”; over claims made in the Brexit referendum – especially the notorious £350 million figure on the side of the Vote Leave bus; and the various lies of the great orange elephant in the room, the forty-fifth President of the United States. The row over the crowd size at the Presidential inauguration, the “birther” conspiracy, “alternative facts”, “fake news” – it’s all here. Where they differ a little in their approaches is in how they unpick what led us here, and in their more or less optimistic ideas as to how we (that we being less interrogated than perhaps it should be) can fight back.
Study: Millennials Don’t Watch, Don’t Like, Classic Movies
A new study finds that less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from start to finish that was made back in the 1940s or 50s and only a third have seen one from the 1960s. Thirty percent of young people also admit to never having watched a black and white film all the way through – as opposed to 85 percent of those over 50 – with 20 percent branding the films “boring.”
As ‘Hamilton’ Opens In Los Angeles, What Does It Mean Now?
It means the same thing it did before, only more so: “With a cast far more racially mixed than the European-descended men who penned the Constitution, the play’s power is that promises of equality made in the 1700s should never be forsaken. The American dream, the play suggests, belongs to all, not to the resentful and narrow vernaculars reverberating through red and blue state battles.”
Study Says There’s More Swearing In Novels Now? So What Does That Actually Mean?
“On a broader level, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the art of a culture and the psychology of the society that produced it. Furthermore, noting word frequency in published writing does not have a one-to-one correspondence with spoken language in everyday life. Further furthermore, without any contextual information about how these words are used, we just have semantic fragments floating in history’s void, free of any of the things that turn them into actual language.”
A Piece Of Theatre That Tests The Will Of The Majority In Real Time
The Majority, a new show at London’s National Theatre by the performer and playwright Rob Drummond, is inspired by a wave of recent electoral upsets, from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 to the Brexit vote last year. Throughout the show, Drummond asks a series of timely questions to which the audience votes “yes” or “no” on in real time, with the results immediately revealed, as he demonstrates how easily the shape of a question can alter its answer.
High Anxiety: Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Hard Road Back To Acting
The Pulitzer-winning playwright (Between Riverside and Crazy, The MF with the Hat, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot) began his career as an actor, and old colleagues still want to work with him. But until this summer, he hadn’t been onstage since 2004, and in the meantime he’d let stress affect his health in other ways and backed out of several acting jobs he’d already accepted. As the time approached for the revival of Mamet’s American Buffalo he’s now co-starring in, his body brought things to a crisis.
The Startling Rise Of Killer Technologies
“As biochemists concoct new life-extending medications, calls to Poison Control after swallowing the wrong pills or the wrong number of the right pills have recently doubled. We put a smartphone in every hand, and now more than 1,000 distraction-related crashes happen on our roads every day (also steadily rising). Kids and pets succumb to heatstroke inside cars that are more environmentally sealed than ever—we’re on track to set a new record for hot car deaths in 2017. Falling off of ladders? Even those numbers are climbing, and if you’re wondering how that could possibly be related to technology, well, read on.”