n+1 provides a fascinating study of today’s divisive concept of cultural elitism: “Today, though, it’s the bearers of culture rather than the wielders of power who are taxed with elitism. If the term is applied to powerful people, this is strictly for cultural reasons, as the different reputations of the identically powerful Obama and Bush attest. No one would think to call a foul-mouthed four-star general an elitist, even though he commands an army, any more than the term would cover a private equity titan who hires Rod Stewart to serenade his 60th birthday party.”
The So-Called Elite
Pickwick Posts
Joshua Cohen, author of the recently published Book of Numbers, will begin writing a serialized, twentieth-century version of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers live and online next week. Beginning October 12 at 1pm, viewers can watch Cohen spend five days reimagining the book and will be able to offer criticism that may affect the ending.
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The Giant of Myth
The late David Rakoff was a longtime Salon contributor, and to celebrate his memory, the site published an excerpt of his rhyming novel, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, which came out today.
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Scrutinizing Letters from Sylvia Plath
Anwen Crawford reflects on newly published letters from Sylvia Plath; “The belief among many of Plath’s devotees seems to be that if we can get clear of other people’s fingerprints on her texts, allowing Plath to ‘fully narrate her own autobiography,’ as the editors here describe it, we will at last solve the riddle of her. The extremities of her poetry will balance against the circumstances of her life; the latter will equal the former. But her griefs were ordinary; it is what she did with them that wasn’t. Plath turned her common sorrows—dead father, mental illness, cheating husband—into something like an origin story for pain itself, as if her own pain preceded the world.” In the New Yorker
LARB talks TNI
Rachel Rosenfelt, Editor in Chief of The New Inquiry, gets interviewed by Evan Kindley, Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. In their conversation, Rosenfelt reveals that TNI‘s prevailing editorial principle is: “Is this boring? Is this safe? If the answer is yes, then it’s not for us.”
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Archiving the Internet
“Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web — communal, crowdsourced and shared online in real time.” Jenna Wortham writes on how archiving the Internet would change history. We’ve written about the implications of the Internet more than once.
That seemed a rather long-winded way of reiterating the research, which shows conservatives are afraid of change and new ideas while progressives embrace such things.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
Not long-winded, just illustrated with some good specific examples.