Reviews and News:
Did Steven Spielberg ruin the movies? No, but what he “can be blamed for, and what the Freud-fuelled Haskell inexplicably skates around, is having infantilised movies and their audiences. If you ever glance at the cinema listings and wonder why there’s nothing the even vaguely mature might want to see, blame Spielberg. Terror of adulthood is his primal theme.”
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New form of matter created: time crystals.
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All must have prizes: “There are prizes for first novels, second novels, crime novels, science fiction, simply the best novels, single poems, collections of poems, children’s books, biographies, histories – any genre you care to name, apparently.”
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The surprising rising popularity of board games: “Blenkharn is one of many new designers making careers out of the current boom in tabletop gaming. He founded his company, Inside the Box Board Games, with Matthew Usher, a friend from school and Oxford University, and raised £18,000 on the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter to make their chemistry-themed puzzle game, Molecular. It was manufactured in China and shipped to Blenkharn’s mother’s house, where his family helped to send copies to the game’s backers. Last year, a second Kickstarter campaign for Statecraft made more than twice as much money, prompting Blenkharn to go into the business full-time.”
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Franz Kafka’s posthumous short stories.
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What are the best Sinclair Lewis novels for these crazy times? Start with Babbitt, go from there.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Lewis tells the story of one of the most fruitful modern academic partnerships and how it fell apart:
“Amos Tversky was in Israel on a visit in 1984 when he received the phone call telling him that he’d been given a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant. The award came with $250,000, plus $50,000 for research, a fancy health-care plan, and a press release celebrating Amos as one of the thinkers who had exhibited ‘extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.’ The only work of Amos’s cited in the press release was the work he’d done with Daniel Kahneman. It didn’t mention Danny.”
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Image of the Day: Gaztelugatxe
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Poem: Bill Coyle, “On a Phrase of Thomas Merton’s”
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