The entire fungus world is wild and unnatural.
In cottony growths on the forest floor, a few spores alight,
and, if moisture and food are available, swell and grow
into protuberances, with elongating stems and raised
caps, gills, and veils. It is not always possible to identify them…
Books
‘I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist’
Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It was almost universally disliked when it came out in 1967. It struck a chord of hostility in the mid-twentieth-century literary world that was out of all proportion to the literary sins it may or may not have committed. The reviews were not just negative, but mean. Even before the book was published it was an object of derision.
Watching & Waiting: Korea’s Border in 1979
In 1979 I took a United Service Organizations bus tour from Seoul to the DMZ. Once there, we were admitted to a conference room that straddled the border. North Korean soldiers peered in at the windows. My negatives from that day sat collecting dust on a shelf for nearly forty years. Seeing the images for the first time, I’m struck by the choreography of the soldiers on either side of the border; they seemed to be involved in an intricate dance of watching and being watched. There was a paradoxical intimacy to the encounter despite the great unknowing.
The Waste Land & Art: An Intriguing Jumble
The exhibition “Journeys with ‘The Waste Land'” tries, perhaps too hard, to embrace the poem’s multiplicity. This does not altogether work. There’s an air of clutter, of packing too much in, of a lack of direction that leaves visitors baffled. The clue to the problem lies in the exhibition’s slippery subtitle, “A visual response to T.S. Eliot’s poem.” The show, it turns out, is not the response of artists, but of the group itself. Some artworks here respond directly to The Waste Land, others to Eliot and Modernism more generally. Many more are included simply to conjure moods and themes.
Living Room Portraits: ‘They Betray Who You Are’
Lucy McKeon: You see photographs of living rooms as portraits of people’s interiors—both literally and as visual representations of who they are.
Dominique Nabokov: Yes, the living room is ultimately the vitrine, your vitrine, to the world. It’s where you want to show yourself to the world, consciously or unconsciously. And even if you use an interior decorator, it still will betray who you are. So, in a way, it’s like your clothes. It betrays who you are—not 100 percent, of course, but 75 percent.
The B&N Podcast: Steven Pinker
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
Harvard psychology professor and award-winning author Steven Pinker has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, and his specialty is books that challenge our preconceptions about human nature and human history. On this episode, the author of The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate joins Jim Mustich to talk about his new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and how the advances of the 18th century are still powerfully at work in the 21st.
If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.
Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking—which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.
With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
See more books by Steven Pinker.
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The Brands That Kowtow to China
The threats of economic retaliation, the mobilization of patriotic social-media fury, rigged protests, and demands for apology—for any activity involving Tibetan resistance to China’s repressive rule, any statement favorable to the Dalai Lama, or any expression of sympathy for the desire of democratic Taiwan not to become part of authoritarian China—are now well-established practices employed by China to enforce obedience to its dictates, beyond China’s borders as well as within them. Stellenbosch University resisted the pressure, but Daimler, Marriott, Delta Airlines, and other multinational corporations yielded to it.
Hearing Poland’s Ghosts
The past, in Poland, is not a foreign country; it is morality drama and passion play, combining high ideology and down-and-dirty politics. One recent manifestation of history’s significance has been the creation of several ambitious and architecturally inventive museums dedicated to central events and themes in the Polish past.
Good Old Gib
Nicholas Rankin’s sprawling book Defending the Rock: How Gibraltar Defeated Hitler spreads itself far and wide in trying to reconcile the details of Gibraltar’s own peculiar history with the world events in which it was frequently caught up. Describing the bloody progress of World War II from the vantage point of a tiny British colony is like trying to watch a battle from a badly placed rabbit hole, and to get closer to the action, Rankin often has to park his local narrative and make long detours to places such as Abyssinia and Berchtesgaden. The book frequently seems out of control. And yet for all its waywardness—not least in its deceitful subtitle—Rankin’s account is rewardingly informative and often delightful in the telling.
Josef K. in Washington
Erwin Chemerinsky is one of the country’s most distinguished legal scholars—the founding dean of the University of California–Irvine School of Law, the author of several books, and a frequent commentator on the Supreme Court who is able to explain legal complexities clearly. His subject in Closing the Courthouse Door is a dozen legal doctrines that make it difficult or impossible to vindicate our constitutional rights through the judicial system. A few were created by Congress, but mostly they are the work of the Supreme Court, which in his view goes to great lengths to stop Americans from getting their day in court.
Sig Nordal 