This one won’t do much to lift the Sunday spirits, but it’s an important read nonetheless. Here’s Ed Miliband’s thoughtful essay at the London Review of Books on the growing inequality problem in Britain, which should look very familiar to those of us stateside. Here are a couple of less depressing Britain-related links to bring you back around.
God Save the Queen
Selling Marxism
An extremely rare copy of Karl Marx‘s Das Kapital sold at auction for $51,739 this past month. That’s more than five times as much as this extremely rare copy of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
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Ugly Mugs
Recommended Reading: Walker Rutter-Bowman on Arthur Bradford’s Turtleface and Beyond. Pair with Jonathan Russell Clark’s review of the book.
Virtual Fictitious Reality
“In his column, Manjoo goes on to call out virtual reality for being ‘a lonely, anti-social affair’—but, hey, isn’t that what reading a novel used to be? I mean, before we figured out how to make books ping and arouse competitive instincts by flagging favorite passages of readers who got there before we did. (I don’t mean to harp on Farhad Manjoo or to denigrate his excellent work; his reticence is shared by others in both legacy and new media cautioning against VR.)” It looks like VR is in desperate need of good storytellers.
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World of Redundant Forms
Recommended Reading: Over at Electric Literature, Lori Huth writes about Jeanette Winterson and contemporary war metaphor: “I wanted to feel powerful emotions commensurate with the horror of the story behind the images. I wanted to feel bewildered, and to lament, but instead I felt numb.”
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