Reviews and News:
How the Old Masters became the Old Masters: “According to Prettejohn, Victorian painters couldn’t fight to the death with their ‘major’ precursors, as Bloom would have it, because they hadn’t yet decided who their precursors were. While the usual story assumes a fixed canon from which nineteenth-century artists radically departed, the painters in her book discovered their predecessors in the course of discovering themselves. What makes them modern is not just their own work but their establishment of the aesthetic preferences many of us now take for granted. In Prettejohn’s striking list: ‘Botticelli, Giorgione, Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, Van Eyck, Velázquez, Vermeer: these are among the artists who became masters when they were adopted by nineteenth-century pupils.’ Central to this process of discovery and imitation was the advent of the modern museum.”
The progressive thought police that patrol YA fiction: “The Black Witch, a debut young-adult fantasy novel by Laurie Forest, was still seven weeks from its May 1 publication date, but positive buzz was already building, with early reviews calling it “an intoxicating tale of rebellion and star-crossed romance,” “a massive page-turner that leaves readers longing for more,” and “an uncompromising condemnation of prejudice and injustice.” The hype train was derailed in mid-March, however, by Shauna Sinyard, a bookstore employee and blogger who writes primarily about YA and had a different take: ‘The Black Witch is the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read,’ she wrote in a nearly 9,000-word review that blasted the novel as an end-to-end mess of unadulterated bigotry. ‘It was ultimately written for white people. It was written for the type of white person who considers themselves to be not-racist and thinks that they deserve recognition and praise for treating POC like they are actually human.’”
Why women prefer male bosses.
Swearing in books occurs 28 times more frequently today than 50 years ago.
The gentleman Nazi: “Albert Speer was responsible for, among other things, the ghastly fate of countless slave laborers pulled from concentration camps to work in German armaments factories. Responding to Ophuls’s quiet probing, this most slippery of customers speaks at length about the moral blindness and criminal opportunism that came from his ruthless ambition. Unlike most Germans of his generation, Speer believed that the Nuremberg trials were justified. But then, he could be said to have got off rather lightly with a prison sentence rather than being hanged. Where Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer. But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West as ‘a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,’ a man one could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: ‘If that’s the explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.’ In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten. Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him ‘the true criminal of Nazi Germany,’ precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, ‘normal’ human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime.”
A year of college for free? “Students looking to claim college credit without paying anything for the classes now have another option, courtesy of a project called Freshman Year for Free. The venture, being formally unveiled on Wednesday, includes a catalog of online courses in more than 40 subjects that were developed by academics affiliated with major universities across the country. Leaders of the Modern States Education Alliance, the New York City philanthropy behind the project, call it an ‘on ramp’ to college…‘If you have a mobile phone, you can get a full year of credit,’ said Steven B. Klinsky, founder and chief executive of Modern States.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Atlantic, Franklin Foer, former editor of The New Republic, writes about Chris Hughes’s brief ownership of the magazine and the threat social media poses to journalism:
“My first days working with Chris were exhilarating. As an outsider, he had no interest in blindly adhering to received wisdom. When we set out to rebuild the New Republic’s website, we talked ourselves into striking a reactionary stance. We would resist the impulse to chase traffic, to clutter our home page with an endless stream of clicky content. Our digital pages would prize beauty and finitude; they would brashly announce the import of our project—which he described as nothing less than the preservation of long-form journalism and cultural seriousness.
“Chris said he believed that he could turn the New Republic into a profitable enterprise. But his rhetoric about profit never seemed entirely sincere. “I hate selling ads,” he would tell me over and over. ‘It makes me feel seedy.’ And for more than a year, he was willing to spend with abandon. With the benefit of hindsight, I might have been more disciplined about the checks we, I mean he, wrote. But he had a weakness for leasing offices in prime locations and hiring top-shelf consultants. I had a weakness for handsomely paying writers to travel the globe. I moved quickly to hire a large staff, which included experienced writers and editors, who didn’t come cheap. Chris didn’t seem to mind. ‘I’ve never been so happy or fulfilled,’ he would tell me. ‘I’m working with friends.’
“Eventually, though, the numbers caught up with Chris. Money needed to come from somewhere—and that somewhere was the web. A dramatic increase in traffic would bring needed revenue. And so we found ourselves suddenly reliving recent media history, but in a time-compressed sequence that collapsed a decade of painful transition into a few tense months.”
Photo: The most beautiful soccer field in Europe
Poem: Ashley Anna McHugh, “Ever After”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
