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December 05, 2017

From The Economist:
Everyone who has scrolled through Facebook knows how, instead of imparting wisdom, the system dishes out compulsive stuff that tends to reinforce people’s biases.

From The New Yorker:
One of my skills was making models for other architects’ projects. I was in far greater demand for these models than I was for my own designs. In fact, they pretty well ate my career.

From The Guardian (Nicola Barker on Best books of 2017):
Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir (Piatkus) by Irvin D Yalom. When Yalom publishes something – anything – I buy it, and he never disappoints. He’s an amazing storyteller, a gorgeous writer, a great, generous, compassionate thinker, and – quite rightly – one of the world’s most influential mental healthcare practitioners. All Things Remembered (Faber) by Goldie. A fabulous, whirling kaleidoscope of music, memory and trauma. Top highlights: when Goldie’s boa constrictor decides to try to eat him after he staggers home from the pub smelling like a kebab; and when his favourite piece of custom-made jewellery is stolen – right from under his nose – by dodgy Russian airport officials. Magical and cautionary. Navid Kermani’s Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity (Polity). Iranian-born, German-bred, Muslim novelist/intellectual Kermani travels the globe looking at significant (and not so significant) Christian artworks. This truly is one of the best books I’ve read in years: funny, outrageous, touching, intimate, glorious.

From The TLS (Minoo Dinshaw on "Which of your contemporaries will be read 100 years from now?"):
If allowed my elders by three-quarters of a generation or so, I might put flutters on Paul Kingsnorth and Gwendoline Riley. I found Claire Lowdon’s debut novel very compelling and frustrating with a sometimes provocative sense of zeitgeist. I think the most enthralling writer with whose lifespan I happen to have overlapped is Javier Marías.

From The Economist:
Because different sides see different facts, they share no empirical basis for reaching a compromise.
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