Reviews and News:
That Katie Roiphe article for Harper’s that was denounced—pre-publication—for supposedly revealing the creator of the Media Men List (it didn’t) has been published.
Micah Meadowcroft reviews Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. Peterson, Meadowcroft writes, is a sort of secular C. S. Lewis, and “12 Rules for Life is a grim book. It’s no stretch to apply a theological gloss: It is full of Peterson’s exegesis of the Bible, a book of wisdom and archetypal myth to him only distinguished by its status as providing the ‘fundamental substructure of Western civilization.’ Adam is an example of human weakness; Christ merely an exemplar of human strength. No one has come to save you; you will have to save yourself. The ideal of a noble freedom of the soul to choose vice or virtue drove Pelagius to reject a divine first movement of grace in humanity’s salvation in the 5th century. For Peterson today that freedom is equally essential and drives him to the same conclusion. His world is suspended between order and chaos and our choices and responsibility allow us to navigate that tension, to walk the narrow way between them in our fullest participation in Being.”
30 publishers call on the Man Booker to close the prize to American authors: “The letter, which was intended to be private and has been seen by the Guardian, argues that the rule change to allow any writer writing in English and published in the UK to enter has restricted the diversity of the prize and led to the domination of American authors since it came into effect in 2014. Previously, the prize only allowed citizens from Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland to enter.”
Why are we so fascinated by lost books?
The finalists for the latest Book Illustration Competition for a new edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes have been announced. Look at the images here and vote for your favorite.
In Aeon, Deborah M Gordon explains how networks work and why they change by looking at the example of ants: “Networks in nature show how, for the networks that we engineer and those that tie us to each other, the pattern of links at the local scale sets the options for stability and transformation. Almost everything that happens in life is the result of a network. Making, or breaking, local links is the way to change.”
In praise of suburbia: “If you’ve grown up in an environment that could in some sense be called “suburban” – and we shall have to take the many different senses the term can accommodate as read for a moment – it’s all too easy to buy into the party line which holds such places to be zones of deprivation and constraint, places you have to leave if you’re ever going to have sex, or get to listen to music you enjoy, or embrace a politics of kindness and tolerance, or ever have anything remotely interesting happen to you and be, like, truly understood. Setting aside the obvious point that constraints and deprivations can be the grit in all kinds of creative oyster – behind these net curtains simmered the punk evangelists of the 1970s, within that ugly loft conversion a game-changing tech whizz of tomorrow is coding away furiously, deaf to all parental declarations of suppertime – to sneer at suburbia is to overlook what an extravagantly rich environment it can be. Maybe you’ve got to leave and then go back to see it.”
Essay of the Day:
Dominic Green considers the style of English and two new books on style in The New Criterion:
“Written English is at what the euphemists would call an inflection point. The nineteenth-century ideal of a democratic mass culture is a bizarre historical dream. The twentieth-century empire of “Mid-Cult” is gone. The departments of English got the theoretical barbarians for whom they were waiting. Standards of literacy are declining, even though the tests are getting easier. Knowledge of a foreign language, even Spanish, is rare among those without immigrant parents. Young Americans, like Romans among the British tribes, struggle to understand the language of their servants.”
Photo: An illuminated Niagara Falls
Poem: Ann M. Thompson, “The Bath”
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