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December 16, 2017

From Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny:
Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. One advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.

From The TLS (Akhil Sharma on "​Is there any book, written by someone else, that you wish you’d written?"):
The only one I can imagine writing and feeling the satisfaction of it actually being mine is Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders. This is because the book is so weird that it doesn’t seem a human wrote it and so why not me instead of Smiley?

From The TLS (Akhil Sharma on "Which of your contemporaries will be read 100 years from now?"):
I can make the argument for individual works versus writers. The Greenlanders will be read. David Foster Wallace’s essays will be read. Alice Munro’s stories will be read.

From The Economist:
Web platforms care more about the amount of time their users spend on their sites than the quality of the experience or what they consume.

From The Guardian (Hilary Mantel on "The book that changed my life"):
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. Not that I’ve read it. I just like to mutter the title before I write a paragraph.
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