December 13, 2017

From The Economist:

[Even] stories from the news sites that formed part of the study, which were small compared with, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post, increased Twitter discussion of the issues in those stories by about 60%. They also shifted the nature of the views expressed in those tweets towards those of the published pieces.

From Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny:

In politics, being deceived is no excuse (quote from Leszek Kołakowski).

From Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny:

History can familiarize, and it can warn. In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress. In the early twentieth century, as in the early twenty-first, these hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people.

From The New Yorker:

[Younger] writers take the world as a living principle within their work. They go places, without eventfulness. The crises that stir them tend to be imagined on planetary rather than patriotic terms, and are no worse for that. Though often placed—who now knows the American novel who does not Brooklyn know?—they seem less obsessed by one place, by the Newarks and Shillingtons of the world. Their Newarks and Shillingtons are more often the genre fiction on which they were raised—comic books and sci-fi and indie cinema—and to which they return again and again with the same mixture of nostalgia, longing, rancor, and mockery that the older novelists devoted to their home towns.

From The New York Times (Richard Lloyd Parry on "What’s the last great book you read?"):

There are Great Books, and then there are great books. My last Great Book was “Nostromo,” by Joseph Conrad, which is admirable in all kinds of ways, but not as great as “Austerlitz,” by W. G. Sebald, which I seem to reread every two years.