You Should Read - August 19
Just One Thing
Is Nothing Sacred? is the text of Salman Rushdie's Herbert Read Memorial Lecture. It was written in the wake of the 1989 Iranian fatwa calling for his death. Harold Pinter delivered the lecture on Rushdie's behalf at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London as Rushdie had gone into hiding.
What appears plain is that it will be a very long time before the peoples of Europe will accept any ideology that claims to have a complete, totalized explanation of the world. Religious faith, profound as it is, must surely remain a private matter. This rejection of totalized explanations is the modern condition. And this is where the novel, the form created to discuss the fragmentation of truth, comes in. The film director Luis Buñuel used to say: ‘I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks he has found the truth.’ (This is what we used to call a joke, before killing people for their ideas returned to the agenda.) The elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
Collected Ephemera
Collecting Candy Big League Chew – Retrospective of an American Original
Vice Motherboard Why Does Everything On Netflix Look Like That?: Even if you don’t know what to look for, you’ll probably be able to guess if something was created for Netflix just based on a few frames.
The Conversation The Rise of ‘Dr. Google’: The Risks of Self-Diagnosis and Searching Symptoms Online
Pew Research Center Why Pew Research Center Typically Can’t Report the Views of Smaller U.S. Religious Groups
As a Buddhist and, thus, a member of one of these smaller religions groups, I'm always interested to see how my tradition fits within the larger American religious landscape. But even in the large Pew studies, data is typically thin, and this is a reminder of how few American Buddhists there are, comparably.
Gurwinder The Perils of Audience Capture
See also: “fan service”.
Vox California Could Transform How Fast Food Workers Are Treated: The restaurant industry is fighting hard against a labor bill making its way through the California legislature.
Washington Post Virginia Episcopal Diocese to Spend $10 Million for Reparations. But How?: Advocates fear divisions will emerge over how to define reparations (paywall)
TechDirt Yet Another Study Finds Cable News Has A Much Bigger Effect On US Polarization Than Social Media
DOC Graphic Notation: A Brief History of Visualizing Music
Dissent Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire: American leftists need an internationalist vision that universally and effectively joins anti-imperial and anti-authoritarian ethics.
An interview w the author, Aziz Rana, on the American Prestige podcast.
Three Arrows/The Iron Dice America’s Coming Weimar Moment