The perils of befriending your heros.

“Hunkered down in muddy trenches, the doomed scions of aristocratic families would take out their pocket editions of Housman and pine for the idealized, vanishing England they were fighting for.” On Peter Parker’s new book on A.E. Housman.

“One thing that could have made this story end differently is if the United States had a significant cultural policy. We have a trade policy – we protect industries we value – and we have an anti-trust policy designed to protect consumers. We have arts and humanities endowments that assist institutions. But our cultural policy is mostly to let culture fend for itself in the open market. It works great, but sometimes it doesn’t.” Salon looks at what Amazon, the Penguin-Random House merger, and the imposition of capitalism to culture might mean for literature at large.

Have you heard the one about the Holocaust historian who loves Donald Trump? No, really. Eric Metaxas, most well-known for his biography of the theologian/anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has claimed that Trump’s rhetoric is all just “schtick,” and that the man himself is “culturally Jewish.”