a/ Thesis:
I saw a Washington Post headline the other day, “Who’s No. 2? Obama Keeps Everybody Guessing.” No—the “everybody” in that construction is you. Imagine if you were covering the baseball playoffs and you wrote that there was massive speculation about who was going to win. It’s manifestly moronic because you’re writing about a scheduled event that is going to take place on a known timeline. You’re contributing nothing. It’s the opposite of news; any useful public information is entirely missing.
(Chris Lehmann, in an interview with Ken Silverstein at Harper’s)
b/ Proof:
This week’s New York Times Book Review features a number of books that have appeared hereabouts in the last couple of months:
+ Guy Martin reviews Patrick Symmes’s The Boys from Dolores, calling it “a masterly account of Cuba’s pathology” and “a rich, personal, meticulous, deeply layered work of narrative journalism.” Follow the linked title for more reviews.
+ Benjamin M. Friedman reviews Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Arms. Friedman seems attracted to Clark’s genetic hypothesis even though he can’t find much evidence for it:
One frustrating aspect of Clark’s argument is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mechanism by which the survival of the richest fostered new human attributes and insists on the Darwinian nature of this process, he repeatedly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actually genetic…. Nor does he introduce any evidence, of the kind that normally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capacity for hard work are heritable in the sense in which biologists use the term.
Click here for my preliminary take on Clark’s argument, which Ken Silverstein mentioned favorably on his Harper’s blog.
+ David Orr reviews Michael O’Brien’s Sleeping and Waking, which he describes as “a quietly startling collection that ought to earn O’Brien not only poetry-world attention, but actual readers.”
[Read more]
