How newspapers die: Randall Smith buys newspapers, guts the staff, jacks up the price, and makes as much money as he can while subscribers dwindle. He’s the industry’s villain according to journalists. But he’s not really, writes Jack Shafer.
Cynthia Ozick on William Trevor’s style and stories: “Virtuosity’s sentence-making is thickened, intricate, imbricated, often dazzling. And eventually, because of the nihilist pressure of the unstoppable gush of language itself, cynical to the point of despair. All the foregoing is recognizably trite lit-crit sagacity. Trevor stands apart from all that. His stories are uncontaminated by principles of composition, or even by respectable generalities touching on how sentences ought to be made.”
Get rid of cash, get rid of bank robberies, right? Sure, but watch out for owl theft: As Sweden goes cashless, thieves are turning to stealing Apple products (from moving trucks), Chanel No. 5, and, yes, owls: “Of course, the shift from cash to digital currency was supposed to reduce crime. And in some ways, it has: Swedish bank robbers and light-fingered cashiers have gone the way of ABBA hit singles. But as paper money gets scarce, other types of crimes have flourished.”
How identity politics is hurting the sciences: “Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently ‘diverse.’ The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.”
Can’t remember that word? Maybe you need to work out. According to new research, “The more fit someone was, the less likely he or she was to go through a ‘what’s that word again?’ moment of mental choking.”
The end of Barnes and Noble: Turns out, replacing books with toys and building stores in malls were mistakes: “It’s not that Barnes and Noble hasn’t tried to innovate – ‘it’s been very creative in staying alive and surviving into today’s Walmart-and-Amazon dominated society,’ said one employee, pointing to games and toys as one area of expansion. The company also pushed into technology, spending heavily to launch and market the Nook e-reader to compete with Amazon’s Kindle. But arguably innovation is where Barnes & Noble went wrong. Other big booksellers have tackled Amazon’s onslaught by doing precisely the opposite – going back to basics and putting the books first. Take UK giant Waterstones, which was acquired last month for an undisclosed sum by the hedge fund Elliott Advisors. Chief executive James Daunt told the Guardian the company was succeeding by going back to ‘good old-fashioned bookselling’ and is ‘very much in expansion mode’.”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Allen C. Guelzo writes in praise of patriotism rightly understood:
“These days, the descendants of the modern Progressives pledge their loyalty to the apparatus of the state and scoff at their opponents—flag-wavers, gun-toters, and religion-huggers—as worshippers of some bygone national identity that, at best, has no relevance in our globalized economy and multicultural world, or, at worst, is nothing but a holdover of Romantic racism.
“I’m afraid the other side of our political divide has an equally exaggerated outlook. American conservatives never adopted a blood-and-soil mentality the way German, Italian, and French nationalism did in their heydays. When Lincoln delivered the funeral eulogy for his ‘beau ideal of a statesman,’ Henry Clay, in 1852, he described Clay’s patriotism as only partly a love of his country ‘because it was his own country.’ That reflected the usual patriotism of the tribe or the nation. The real engine of Clay’s patriotism, Lincoln argued, was that America ‘was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature.’ Much as Clay ‘desired the prosperity of his countrymen . . . because they were his countrymen,’ his fundamental desire was ‘to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.’ Clay was devoted to the ideals of America that are encoded into the founding documents that structure the American state. Eleven years later, Lincoln applied this kind of patriotism to himself when, at Gettysburg, he described the foundation of the American Republic resting ‘under God,’ not on family or language or ethnicity, but on ‘the proposition, that all men are created equal.’ This proposition animates a system of government, our system.
“Conservatives should love their country—but their country is the country of the Declaration, of universal natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with which they are endowed by their Creator, not merely of purple mountains’ majesty or amber waves of grain, and certainly not a particular bloodline or racial identity.
“Thus, it is not the state we should fear, if that state is the one praised by Crèvecoeur or Clay, since that is a state devoted to the fostering of the ‘prosperity’ of ‘freemen’ irrespective of any national or racial origin. The question is whether a state built on natural rights can foster trust in a society of individualism and suspicion. For certain it is that the Leviathan created by the Romantic revolt inspires no trust whatsoever. Our motto needs to be ‘I love my country and our system of government, but I fear their perversion and betrayal.’”
Photo: Lego cherry blossom tree
Poem: Alan Dixon, “Encounters with the Great”
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