1. Research a social issue. 2. Start a blog. 3. ??? 4. Become a public intellectual! Or not.
Four Easy Steps
Taste Lessons for Adults
How do you eat your broccoli? British food historian Bee Wilson’s newest book, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat takes a hard look at how eating is a learned, cultural behavior–and how it’s never too late to change bad eating habits.
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Discovering Ice
Recommended Reading: On the secret history of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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Start Again
Lucky Alan, which came out in February, is Jonathan Lethem’s first new story collection in more than ten years. He talked with Matt Bell about it in an interview at Salon. “What’s great about short stories is the opportunity to play at reinvention; all those new departures, all those new landings to try to stick,” he says. You could also read our review of his novel Dissident Gardens.
Threat Level Seven
It’s hard to know exactly what North Korea will do these days, but if you’re looking for context, The Morning News published a cartoon guide to recent history.
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The Boot’s Literature
Why aren’t more people reading Italian literature? Is it due to an English “mistrust of ‘abroad’?” “Linguistic incompetence?” Or is it that “Italy’s not produced much that’s exciting or innovative … for a few hundred years?” Peter Hainsworth, author of Italian Literature: A Very Sort Introduction, investigates.
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Playboy and Madame Bovary
Macy Halford at Book Bench imagines Playboy as the Madame Bovary of the 1950s.
The second paragraph made me check out. We’re less educated than we were forty or fifty years ago? There isn’t a single example of a public intellectual writing today who is as intelligent or well read or profound as those titans of yesteryear because…what, human beings now are just dumber? Please.