Reviews and News:
America’s only culture is boomer culture, or so says Ross Douthat: “The boomers were the last generation to come of age with some traditional edifices still standing, the old bourgeois norms and Christian(ish) religion and patriotic history, which gave them something powerful to wrestle with, to rework and react against and attempt to overthrow. And because they came of age within a stable-seeming (though not for long) common culture, their revolution was experienced as a communal experience itself, something that united millions of people simply by virtue of their being young and Western in 1965 or 1969 or 1975… And so we just keep returning to boomer culture — revisiting its glorious victories or simply replaying its greatest hits.”
Let’s continue with the generalizations, shall we? What the hell, it’s Thursday. America is also obsessed with advice, and we are apparently moving again (now that the Great Recession has sort of ended). And we all also love a good stowaway story. Here’s why.
Andrew Crumey on Carlo Rovelli’s theory of time: “The quest to reconcile quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity has challenged the world’s finest theoretical physicists for decades. While no one has yet succeeded, a possible path is via the theory of ‘loop quantum gravity’. It is the option favoured by Carlo Rovelli, and it provides the backdrop to the broader thoughts he offers here on the nature of time in this book, the brevity and elegance of which belie its depth.”
Handwriting is dying, but that’s not a bad thing says Anne Trubek.
Revisiting comics from the Golden Age.
Essay of the Day:
In Spectator, Elizabeth Frood writes about the enduring enigma of Nefertiti:
“Often dubbed the Mona Lisa of the ancient world, the bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti is as immediately recognisable as the pyramids and the Rosetta Stone. Yet almost everything about this sculpture is mysterious at best, or bitterly controversial at worst, from the context of its creation to questions surrounding its acquisition by the Berlin Museum. The cultural and political capital of ancient culture is sharply in our awareness — think of the Elgin marbles or Palmyra — so writing a biography of Nefertiti’s bust requires the author to navigate hotly competing opinions.”
Photo: Cherry blossoms
Poem: Michael Cadnum, “Otter”
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