The structure of the modern plague novel, all the way to Stephen King’s “The Stand” and beyond, is a series of variations on “A Journal of the Plague Year” (a story set within the walls[…]
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Category: Books
“the existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading”
In the long centuries during which the plague ravaged Europe, the quarantined, if they were lucky enough to have books, read them. If not, and if they were well enough, they told stories. In Giovanni[…]
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“Reading on-screen tempts us to see things only through the pinhole of our immediate curiosity”
Reading on-screen tempts us to see things only through the pinhole of our immediate curiosity. I don’t mean to sentimentalize the Reading of Books, but as a practical matter, when you hold a book in[…]
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“The Jedi…had unwittingly trained their students to be the perfect fugitives, able to cut and run at any moment”
The Jedi had always preached against forming connections, to prevent their acolytes from putting too much value in any one relationship. In so doing, they had unwittingly trained their students to be the perfect fugitives,[…]
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“…if ArtScroll refuses to acknowledge that it has made a terrible error…, then one must conclude that ArtScroll is knowingly suppressing the words of a great rishon”
…if ArtScroll’s mikraot gedolot becomes the standard, anyone who uses the commentaries of R. Hoffmann, R. Kamenetsky, Cassuto and so many others will be very confused. These commentaries will cite Rashbam and explain his words,[…]
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“…men exist in a state of perpetual confusion about when, exactly, human females are receptive to the idea of having sex”
What it tells us is this: Women are interested in sex. This may be obvious to women, but, trust me, it is not obvious to men. In fact, it is contrary to everything men are[…]
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“…the landscape in which “Fifty Shades of Grey” has found its audience, with a story almost perfectly suited to this dream: A fantasy of being…”
…our sexual egalitarians don’t want to shut down the party or end the bacchanal. They just want hookup culture to be governed by affirmative consent, for prostitutes to become empowered sex workers, for misogynistic porn[…]
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“there’s something miraculous about books that stops me from tossing them in the garbage”
[P]hysical books — the creepy retronym for the objects formerly known just as books — …take up space. They demand shelves. They can crowd us out and weigh us down. And though no divine injunction[…]
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“Jumping into the boundless streams of Twitter is not very different from compulsively buying books”
Jumping into the boundless streams of Twitter is not very different from compulsively buying books in the false hope that, one day, you might read them. Of course, you won’t, but this doesn’t matter: it’s[…]
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The crucial revolution was not of print but of paper, with an easier production of paper, lists were generated
Among Ever-Wasers, the Harvard historian Ann Blair may be the most ambitious. In her book “Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,” she makes the case that what we’re going through[…]
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