Poor printing is usually the printer’s fault, a mistake that publishers will correct once they learn about it. When I’ve received books that were hard on the eyes, I’ve complained to booksellers, left comments on Amazon, returned the books, and notified publishers. Generally, publishers can pressure their contractors to deliver higher quality. – First Things
Tag: 11.20
How (And When) Humans Learned To Invent
“Something happened in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to cause an explosion of ingenuity orders of magnitude greater than anything seen in other species, including our big-brained cousins the Neanderthals. But what? And when?” – Literary Review
The Fantasy Of QAnon (But A Sick One)
“QAnon is a joke. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make its long game of postmodern chaos magick any less dangerous. This is the latest iteration of the lulz agenda, following from the Great Meme War of 2015–16—the alt-right deployment of Pepe the Frog to influence Trump’s election—and the leftist hacktivist Anonymous’s radical trolling operations circa 2008–12 (all offspring of 4chan).” – ArtForum
Why Should Art Need To Be “Relevant”?
“The common forebear of both “relevant” and “relieve” is the French relever, which meant, originally, to put back into an upright position, to raise again, a word that twisted through time, scattering meanings that our two modern words have apportioned between them: to ease pain or discomfort, to make stand out, to render prominent or distinct, to rise up or rebel, to rebuild, to reinvigorate, to make higher, to set free.” – Harper’s
A Conversation On Editing-Driven Writing
“Commentary Magazine has, from the beginning, been an editor’s magazine. Very few pieces that Elliot Cohen edited, or that I edited, or that Neal edited, were not worked over, sometimes radically worked over. There are arguments about whether this is a good way or a bad way, but that’s the way it was at COMMENTARY. I don’t think any other magazine, except possibly the New Yorker, is as heavily edited as Commentary has always been.” – Commentary
What Does It Mean To Make “Relevant” Art?
“Artists feel the anxiety of relevance during every season of fellowship applications, those rituals of supplication, when we have to make a case for ourselves in a way that feels entirely foreign, for me at least, to the real motivations of art. Why is this the right project for this moment? these applications often ask. If I had a question like that on my mind as I tried to make art, I would never write another word.” – Harper’s