Are critically acclaimed authors really terrible? Is feminism bad for women? New York Magazine runs down the greatest hits of what appears, in hindsight, to have been the Decade of Counterintuition (and, in the process, catalogues many of my personal bêtes noires).
Are Babies Racist?
A6: Edith Wharton
At some point, you’ve probably had a daydream about a vending machine that sells books. Well, guess what. (There’s also a video guide.) (Thanks, Andrew)
“As a boy”
In 2002, David Friedman thought of a question he wanted to ask Oliver Sacks, on the topic of 3D glasses and “pseudoscopic” vision. A week after he sent the letter, he received a typewritten reply, complete with diagrams. At The Morning News, a copy of the letter he received, along with background.
Felt Time
“As phenomenological philosophy has determined, self-consciousness is not a mental state that is added on to our experience, or that is particular; rather, it is a feature inherent in all experience. My perception contains me.” Send your Sunday into an existential tailspin with German psychologist Marc Wittmann and his heady ideas about the notion of time and consciousness.
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“Give things away”
Recommended Reading: this interview with poet Lucie Brock-Broido, whose new book Stay, Illusion is a finalist for the National Book Award.
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Up There
Northern England has its own distinct genre of crime fiction, yet it’s never taken off abroad the way its counterparts in Scandinavia and Scotland have. In The Guardian, AK Nawaz wonders why this is, arguing that “there is an argument for a common and marketable ‘Northernness’ – if not an identity, then perhaps a literary state of mind.”
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Tana French on the Celtic Tiger
Tana French pegs the cause of Ireland’s financial crisis on “a total disconnect between action and consequence.” For many Irish citizens since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, she writes, “their whole sense of a world governed by coherent cause and effect, of their ability to have any agency in their own lives, came under attack.” Bonus: our own Edan Lepucki has previously written about French’s novels and plotting.
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Four Easy Steps
1. Research a social issue. 2. Start a blog. 3. ??? 4. Become a public intellectual! Or not.
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I liked Rush Limbaugh’s quote (a sentiment not often observed in TheMillions) about the Newsweek story, “Are Babies Born Racist:”
“If homosexuality being inborn is what makes it acceptable why does racism being inborn not make racism acceptable?”