Daily Media Diet

From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book I wish I’d written"): Samuel Beckett’s exquisite and deeply moving late text, Ill Seen Ill Said. But of course I couldn’t have written it, not in an eternity of Sundays. From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book that had the greatest influence on my writing"): The Oxford English Dictionary. With Roget’s Thesaurus in a support role. The latter, by the way, for finding words I can’t bring to mind, not for learning fancy new ones. From The Economist : In 2015 two-fifths of all American babies were born to unwed mothers. In France the proportion is 59%; in Colombia it is 84%. Just 21% of Britons aged between 15 and 24 now agree that people who want children should get married, half the share in 1989. From  Child Development : The uncanny valley posits that very human-like robots are unsettling, a phenomenon amply demonstrated in adults but unexplored in children. Two hundred forty 3- to 18-year-olds viewe...

From Harper's : Racists in the United States support free-speech rights for racist speech, but not for speech critical of their co-workers or the police. From The Economist : Affluent parents intensively nurture their children for success; the offspring of less fortunate homes fall far behind before they ever set foot in a school. From The Economist : Helpfully, some European countries have begun to offer civil unions for heterosexuals. (Gay couples already had that option.) They confer nearly all the rights of marriage but entail less of the intimidating hoopla. These now account for a fifth of new formal unions in the Netherlands, and more in some working-class districts. They have not undermined marriage so far. It is a small fix for a huge problem, but it might help. From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book that changed my life/the world"): The Catechism of the Catholic Church. It had all the answers; it told you what simony is, and why you will go...

From The New York Times (Daniel Gilbert on Nostalgia): Nostalgia has all the hallmarks of a universal emotion, and it is only natural to assume that the yearning for “auld lang syne” that was shared by our grandparents will someday be shared by our grandchildren. But maybe we’ve reached nostalgia’s end. “Nostalgia” — made up of the Greek roots for “suffering” and “return” — is literally a longing for the places of one’s past. And lately, it has become harder and harder to find things to miss about America’s places. Downtowns were once collections of local businesses that lured us with claims of uniqueness: “Try our homemade pies,” their signs read, or “Best jazz selection in town.” Today, those signs have been replaced by familiar corporate logos that make precisely the opposite claim, promising us the same goods arranged in the same way as they are in every other place. The banks and burritos and baristas on one city block are replicated on the next — and in all the malls, in a...

From The Economist : Among the college-educated in America, only 12% of births are to unmarried mothers; among those who dropped out of high school, the rate is 70%, up from 43% in the early 1980s. Similar trends can be seen across the wealthy world: the average out-of-wedlock birth rate for OECD countries is 40%. From The Economist : Although a wedding cannot turn a flimsy relationship into a strong one, it adds scaffolding that can save one that is in between. Making a public, lifelong commitment to another person is not the same as drifting into cohabitation to share the rent. From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book I am currently reading"): The Invented Part, by Rodrigo Fresán. A wonderfully inventive, intricate and entertaining novel on what it means to be a writer, and a reader. From  Journal of Consumer Research : Nine studies find that people believe their money has greater purchasing power than the same quantity of others’ money. Using a variety ...

From The Paris Review (Jeffrey Gleaves on Favorite Books of 2017): I like my reading to be as ironic as possible, that’s why Robert Coover’s Huck Out West was my favorite novel this year. Coover’s sequel to Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to the edge of “sivilization,” through the Civl War up to the centennial year of 1876. Huck Out West is hilarious and pointed in the way only Coover can be. If you’re left wanting to stay in that era, then Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870 is an impressive history. I’ve long appreciated Ulrich’s view of history as a chorus of singular stories. A House Full of Females isn’t your typical history pulled from headlines, memoirs of “important white men,” or official records; it’s a history gleaned from individual journals, personal stories, and heirlooms, putting us as close to the real story as possible. From The Paris Rev...

From The New York Times : In 2014, the economy was 2.5 times larger than it was in 1980, but the bottom half of the population made only 21 percent more, on average, even after including government benefits. America’s middle — families earning more than the bottom 30 percent but less than the top 30 percent — gained only 50 percent in those 34 years. By contrast, the after-tax incomes of Americans in the top 1 percent — families like President Trump’s or Senator Bob Corker’s — tripled. From Harper's : Being visited by a rival male causes male fruit flies to defer sleep until later, but being visited by a virgin female eliminates the need for sleep altogether. From The Economist : Marriage idealises permanence, and yet it is changing more rapidly than at any time in its history. Almost everywhere it is becoming freer, more equal and more satisfying. From The Economist : As women earn more and the stigma of divorce fades, more men are finding that they cannot treat thei...

From The Paris Review (Nadja Spiegelman on Favorite Books of 2017): This year, I found myself swept away by Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. The jealousy-inducing story behind the book (Rooney wrote the first draft in three months, at the the age of twenty-six) is difficult to reconcile with the tight grace of this novel, though all of the volatility and speed is there. Rooney so expertly captures what it’s like to be young today: the conversations that flow seamlessly from email to text message to unspoken glance, the sexual and creative confidence, the admiration for older men who write emails written in all lowercase. Her first-person narrator, the twenty-one-year-old Frances, is a constant, careful observer, and yet Rooney leaves room for the reader to see all the things Frances herself does not. Frances’s deceptively deadpan tone encases moments of revelation; among the many sentences I underlined: “She made us all laugh a lot, but in the same way you might make someo...