"One big question animates Thompson’s investigation: 'So what happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time?” That sounds like hyperbole — book publishing hasn’t exactly stood still since Gutenberg. A lot happens in 500 years, even without computers. But for an industry built on the time-tested format of print books, the internet understandably looked and felt like an existential threat as well as an opportunity." Read More at LARB »
Writing
“A paler shade of white”: HAVING AND BEING HAD by Eula Biss (review)
Given my interest in consumer culture and what it does to people, I was glad the TLS asked me to write about Eula Biss's new book about her own vexed relationship to things:
Having and Being Had dwells on Biss’s unease about her participation in a system whose values she does not embrace, even as she savours its rewards. No pleasure can be simple. She evokes the never-satisfied hunger that characterizes life as a consumer under late-stage capitalism: "In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing."Read More at The Times Literary Supplement »
“Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism?”
Kinda yes, as I argue in this CLUTTER excerpt that ran in LitHub:
“Victorian” has persisted as a convenient if imprecise shorthand for a style that’s heavy in every sense. “Victorian decor” invokes curtains-drawn houses where light goes to die and where rooms are filled with furniture dark, heavy, and overstuffed. Victorian rooms, as we imagine them, were temples (or mausoleums) of things, with every surface— mantels, tabletops, shelves, sideboards—obscured by ceramic figurines and keepsakes, and every inch of wall covered with paintings and portraits.Read the full essay. Read More at LitHub »
“The Complicated Role of the Modern Public Library”
It is no secret that libraries remain one of my favorite things to write about. In this feature for the NEH's Humanities magazine, I look at the astonishing variety of social-service roles that public libraries are called on to fill, and how they're responding to that call. Read More at Humanities magazine »
“Books have become the new ‘it’ fashion accessory. Is that such a bad thing?”
Supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid made a splash recently when they were photographed toting their current reads. They're hardly the first beautiful people to use books as attention-getters. Think of Eve Arnold's iconic 1955 photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. I say we should celebrate, not snark. Read More at The Washington Post »
