“There wasn’t much to Morganza when Easy Rider filmed there, and there’s less now. The cafe and the building that housed it are gone. Two buildings in the same style sit in disrepair down the street. Of course, it’s not really Morganza we see in the film, just someplace the screenplay describes as “ext. Southern town—day.” It would be easy to dismiss the sequence as a stereotype of a racist backwater if the moment didn’t feel so real. And at least one member of the Easy Rider team knew how to conjure the troubled postwar American South: Terry Southern.”

by Keith Phipps

Slate (20 November 2009)

“Do books really need Hollywood-style trailers?... A company called Circle of Seven, which produces videos for an impressive array of trash, trademarked the term book trailer in 2002, but the phrase has caught on broadly, and there will be no turning back. A consideration of the form might begin, and even end, by dwelling on the word trailer itself, conventionally used to indicate a montage that, running in a movie theater before a feature, gives away too much of the plot of a film not yet released.”

by Troy Patterson

Slate (18 November 2009)

“Newspapers, newsmagazines, and broadcast-news outlets are drastically cutting staff members, bureaus, page counts, and news holes—that is, when they’re not simply going out of business. The Chronicle Review asked some prominent thinkers on issues of education, communications, and news and cultural literacy how the decline of those news media will affect higher education.”

by Kathleen Hall Jamieson

The Chronicle of Higher Education (15 November 2009)

“Some rumors grind to a halt, while others circle the world. Why some ideas spread and others die… At its core, a rumor is just an unverified scrap of information we pass among ourselves to make sense of the world. In one case study conducted at Ohio University by psychologist Mark Pezzo, students had heard that someone on campus had died of meningitis. The story spread because the anxious students were trying to find out what was going on: “Is the rumor true?” “How do you get meningitis?” “I heard that everyone on campus will need to have a painful spinal tap, did you hear that?” In the marketplace of misinformation, fit rumors survive and spread like epidemics, while unfit rumors die quick deaths. So what separates the fit from the unfit? What, in short, are the laws of effective rumors?”

by Taylor Clark

Psychology Today (16 September 2009)

“History: fact or fiction? Ronald Hutton’s early experience of discerning reality from fantasy has coloured his view of the subject since.”

by Ronald Hutton

Times Higher Education (12 November 2009)

“C’mon, admit it. Twitter is useless…. As a blogging, Facebooking, texting American who values the explosion of democratic user-generated Internet content and its contribution to intellectual debate, political activism, government transparency, entertainment, access to data, and community, I can safely say I still see no reason to tweet. ”

by David Harsanyi

Reason (14 November 2009)

“Cyberconsciousness implies techno-immortality. Immortality means living forever. This has never happened in the real world, so we think of immortality as a spiritual existence (as in heaven) or as a non-personal existence (as in ‘Bach’s music will live forever’). With cyberconsciousness it will be possible, for the first time, for a person to live forever in the real world. This unique, technologically empowered form of living forever is called techno-immortality.”

by Martine Rothblatt

Institute for Ethics and Emergine Technologies (24 October 2009)

“Will machines ever really feel, in the same sense that humans do?... This is a separate question from whether machines can be intelligent, or whether they can act like they feel. The question is whether machines — if suitably constructed and programmed — can have awareness, passion, subjective experience ... consciousness?”

by Ben Goertzel

H+ Magazine (29 September 2009)

“Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process. And yet, the future being as slippery as it is, there are as many visions for how this might occur as there are visionaries to guess at it. Computer scientists tend to have one transhumanism; genetic engineers, another. However, coherent themes emerge for those who have taken it upon themselves to make a sweeping survey of human inquiry, integrating a keen reading of the vectors of our technology with postmodern insight into the nature of mind.”

by Michael Garfield

H+ Magazine (29 September 2009)

“Amid the smoldering wreckage of the popular culture, the author blames Reality TV, which has not only ruined network values, destroyed the classic documentary, and debased the art of bad acting, but also fomented class warfare, antisocial behavior, and murder.”

by James Wolcott

Vanity Fair (December 2009)

“America has been flooded by a tsunami of cute–we’re drowning in puppies and kittens and bunnies and cupcakes–that is transforming marketing (the geico Gecko), automobiles (the Smart car), and movies (Up). But is the world bound to sour on all this sweetness?”

by Jim Windolf

Vanity Fair (December 2009)

“Everywhere you look, porn is suddenly inescapable… On a recent cross-country trip from Los Angeles, Jana Matthews thought she’d lucked out when her friendly seatmate cued up a cartoon on his laptop. Her four children were enthralled; she hoped listening in might keep them occupied. Then the cartoon characters started doing things that cartoon characters should not be doing. Naked things. Naked, noisy things, unfettered by the restraints of human anatomy because the participants were, after all, hand-drawn.”

by Monica Hesse

The Washington Post (12 November 2009)

“Fifty years ago, Holcomb, Kansas was devastated by the slaughter of a local family. And then Truman Capote arrived in town… Towards the end of the inscription it says that Herb, his wife Bonnie, and two of his four children Nancy and Kenyon, “were killed November 15 1959 by intruders who entered their home with the intent of robbery”. That is a very minimalist way of describing a multiple murder that devastated the town of Holcomb, inspired one of the great books of American 20th-century literature and spawned a stack of Hollywood films on that fateful night exactly 50 years ago this Sunday.”

by Ed Pilkington

The Guardian (16 November 2009)

“Dirt. Noise. Crowds. Delays. Scary smells. Even scarier fluids swirling on the floor. There are lots of reasons to loathe the New York City subway, but one very good reason to love it — Helvetica, the typeface that’s used on its signage.”

by Alice Rawsthorn

The New York Times (15 November 2009)

“A group of young designers is redefining what makes a video game a game… These game designers, a self-described indie scene, form a tightly knit group with a do-it-yourself culture and a rebellious spirit — something like a ’zine movement for video games. New and cheap technologies have enabled the movement’s rise. New tools for production and distribution — through smartphones, over the Web and via downloadable services on PlayStation, Wii and Xbox consoles — now make it possible for individuals to conceive, develop and publish their own games.”

by Joshuah Bearman

The New York Times Magazine (11 November 2009)

“The fantastic, trippy, playful, uncomfortably intimate art of Pipilotti Rist… In a dark, silo-shaped room in the upscale Jardim Europa neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil, last month, an impassioned aesthetic debate was underway, though it would have been tough for anyone walking into the room to tell. I was at a place called the Museum of Image and Sound, lying on my back with seven other people, all of us completely silent in brightly colored hammocks that had been hung around a circular scaffolding. Our feet angled together toward the center of the room and our heads radiated out like lotus petals. We were all staring up at the ceiling, where two video works were being projected, both featuring a pale, red-headed woman who looked like a Nereid sprung to life. In the first video, she navigates her way through a candy-colored world — a birch forest; a long airportlike corridor; a leaf-strewn sidewalk that the camera scuttles along low and fast, as if from the vantage point of a bug.”

by Randy Kennedy

The New York Times Magazine (11 November 2009)

“How America’s leading starlet made herself up for the multimedia age… Some of Fox’s comments may have been fiction (sadly, there was no Nikita), but most seemed startlingly honest and entirely quotable. Fox, who is 23, understood instinctively that noise plus naked equals celebrity. And after having appeared only in “Transformers” I and II, in which the true stars were giant robots, she created a rebellious, frankly sexual persona and talked her way into the limelight. The only problem is, having come so far so fast, how do you stay this year’s girl when the year is almost over?”

by Lynn Hirschberg

The New York Times Magazine (11 November 2009)

“It is commonplace, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to hear the events of that time described as miraculous, a dream come true, something one couldn’t have imagined even a couple of months beforehand. Free elections in Poland with Lech Walesa as president: who would have thought it possible? But an even greater miracle took place only a couple of years later: free democratic elections returned the ex-Communists to power, Walesa was marginalised and much less popular than General Jaruzelski himself.”

by Slavoj Žižek

London Review of Books (19 November 2009)

“It is one of the most perplexing mysteries of world cinema. In the early 1970s Dusan Makavejev was the brightest star in the avant-garde firmament. Makavejev still surfaces occasionally for retrospective interviews and stints on the film-school and festival circuit, but he has not released a film in fifteen years. ”

by Richard Byrne

The Nation (28 October 2009)

“It’s not Twitter or Facebook that’s reinventing the planet. Eighty years after the first commercial broadcast crackled to life, television still rules our world. And let’s hear it for the growing legions of couch potatoes: All those soap operas might be the ticket to a better future after all.”

by Charles Kenny

Foreign Policy (November 2009)

“If we really want to reconstruct American journalism, we need to look at more than the supply side; we need to explore the demand side, too. We need to start paying attention to the trail of clues in the new media ecosystem and follow those “breadcrumbs.” What ailing industry would look for a fix that only thinks of “us,” the news suppliers, and not “them,” the news consumers? I don’t hear from any of those consumers in this report.”

by Jan Schaffer

Columbia Journalism Review (19 October 2009)

“American journalism is at a transformational moment, in which the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving way to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed. As almost everyone knows, the economic foundation of the nation’s newspapers, long supported by advertising, is collapsing, and newspapers themselves, which have been the country’s chief source of independent reporting, are shrinking—literally. Fewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages, and the hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last third of the twentieth century, even as their primary audience eroded, is ending. Commercial television news, which was long the chief rival of printed newspapers, has also been losing its audience, its advertising revenue, and its reporting resources.”

by Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson

Columbia Journalism Review (19 October 2009)

“Ramparts magazine turned the 60’s on its head with a high-octane combination of avant-garde satire and gumshoe investigative reporting. KCRW’s own Robert Scheer served as its editor, and contributors included the likes of Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis and Susan Sontag. Peter Richardson has written about the largely untold story of this hugely influential magazine in his book A Bomb in Every Issue and he talks with KCRW’s Will Lewis about it.”

by Robert Scheer

KCRW (10 November 2009)

“Three Times Germany is an audio production of twenty-three monologues performed by eight actors. The monologues are based on interviews of East Germans, West Germans, and Germans living in New York. Retracing his own life journey from East Germany to West Germany in 1974 and on to New York in 1980, Uwe Mengel interviewed Germans who crossed his path along the way. The resulting monologues offer an unusual and often disconcerting view into the prejudices and reservations with which Germans view the “other Germans” after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

by Uwe Mengel

Words Without Borders (November 2009)

“When it started, Waterstone’s was a breath of fresh air. But as it got ever bigger, many say it lost its soul. What effect has that had on publishing?... Waterstone’s has embraced capitalism’s logic firmly. Even in this Gower Street branch, with its five miles of bookshelves at the heart of London’s university quarter and in an area denser with literary heritage than perhaps any in the world, discounted piles of Leona Lewis biographies and Frankie Boyle’s My Shit Life So Far sit on the tables with the latest JM Coetzee. This lunchtime, the three-for-two tables are ringed by shoppers clutching two books and wondering if they can find a freebie worth reading. Here on the ground floor, the discounting of book prices is so ferocious that if you leave having paid the RRP you feel a right mug.”

by Stuart Jeffries

The Guardian (10 November 2009)

“Remember the storyline about a new Iranian revolution after the elections this summer? The one fuelled by the internet generation? The one that got the state department to intervene to help Iranians Twitter? Not so much.”

by Ravi Somaiya

Valleywag (9 November 2009)

“Painting with a deliberately broad brush, an ideal type of 1989-style revolution, VR, might be contrasted with an ideal type of 1789-style revolution, as further developed in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Mao’s Chinese revolution. The 1789 ideal type is violent, utopian, professedly class-based, and characterized by a progressive radicalization, culminating in terror. A revolution is not a dinner party, Mao Zedong famously observed… The 1989 ideal type, by contrast, is nonviolent, anti-utopian, based not on a single class but on broad social coalitions, and characterized by the application of mass social pressure—“people power”—to bring the current powerholders to negotiate. It culminates not in terror but in compromise. If the totem of 1789-type revolution is the guillotine, that of 1989 is the round table.”

by Timothy Garton Ash

The New York Review of Books (3 December 2009)

“There are three kinds of fools: Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools. The professional, a staple of Shakespeare’s plays, is, in reality, nobody’s fool.”

by Michael Dirda

In Character (Fall 2009)

“In modern dance, the company typically exists to flesh out the concepts of one artist, who is also, at least at the beginning, the star dancer. In this respect, there’s a crucial difference of outlook between a ballet choreographer who provides a piece to a dance company (in much the same way as a composer does for an orchestra) and a modern dancer who treats her ensemble as an extension of herself. Temperamentally and artistically, Cunningham differed about as much as possible from Graham, his fellow titan in the domain of modern dance. For one thing, he was fascinated by fragmentations and dispersals, and she was always seeking grand unity. But in the way he conceived of his enterprise, Cunningham subscribed as fully as Graham to the organic, integral connection of the choreographer and the company.”

by Arthur Lubow

The New York Times Magazine (5 November 2009)

“Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.”

by David Dobbs

The Atlantic (December 2009)

“From the 16th to the 19th centuries, tens of thousands of male children were castrated before puberty to preserve their high voices, then subjected to a brutal and relentless program of vocal training. The first instruction, wrote an observer, “was inseparable from the whip.” As in all eras of musical education, the result was a few idolized stars like the celebrated Farinelli; a steady supply of well-trained singers for church, court, and opera; and myriad also-rans and nobodies. In this case, particularly tragic nobodies.”

by Jan Swafford

Slate (9 November 2009)

“Cassavetes’ movie not only anticipated Mean Streets, Stranger Than Paradise, She’s Gotta Have It, and Slacker, among countless others—it helped will them into being. As Martin Scorsese noted, after Shadows, there were “no more excuses” for aspiring filmmakers: “If he could do it, so could we!” And yet 50 years after its release, Shadows is a forgotten movie, revered by cultists, critics, and historians but neglected by a culture on which it has had a profound influence.”

by Elbert Ventura

Slate (11 November 2009)

“Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. They are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information… Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.”

by Ben Macintyre

The Times (5 November 2009)

“Not since CBGB’s heyday has New York produced so many exciting bands. At the center of a scene marked by wild inventiveness is one of the most risk-taking groups of all—Dirty Projectors.”

by New York

New York (8 November 2009)

“A new study demonstrates the power of music to alter our emotional perceptions of other people… The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown.  A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of music are “cross-modal,” and can easily spread from sensory system to another. Now I never sit down to my wife’s meals without first putting on a jolly Sousa march.”

by Mark Changizi

Scientific American (15 September 2009)

“CNN’s Fred Pleitgen on the art scene in Berlin 20 years after the Fall of the Wall.”

by Fred Pleitgen

CNN (4 November 2009)

“That success is in the eye of the unsuccessful would seem to be the great unspoken dilemma dogging critics asked to consider the work of the rich and famous author and inspirational speaker Malcolm Gladwell. No matter how well intentioned or intellectually honest their attempts to assess his ideas, the subtext of Gladwell’s perceived success, and its implications for their own aspirations in the competitive thought-generation business, obscures their judgment and sinks their morale…. Gladwell is no fad. He is a brand, a guru, a fixture at New York publishing parties and in the spiels of literary agents hoping to steer writers toward concepts that will strike publishers as “Gladwellian.””

by Maureen Tkacik

The Nation (4 November 2009)

“Four new Russian novels reveal flashes of fabulous writing, at times reminiscent of the wild imaginings of Mikhail Bulgakov, the dystopic visions of Yevgeny Zamyatin or the gentle humanity of Anton Chekhov. Russian literature has long ago left Socialist Realism panting behind – now it is striding out in the company of Capitalist Surrealism.”

by John Thornhill

Financial Times (30 October 2009)

“Counter-culture icon R. Crumb has produced an illustrated version of the Book of Genesis—sincere tribute, or sacrilege? Brad Jones adjudicates… To see R. Crumb’s name affixed to this venerable document stirs up a pot of images. Would the artist of Zap and Fritz the Cat merely pour the Genesis cast of characters into a blender of ‘full-figured’ women, and ‘Mr. Natural’-type men that would “keep on truckin’” all the way to the Euphrates?”

by Brad Jones

Open Letters Monthly (November 2009)

“Last year’s presidential election brought out a groundswell of political action by musicians. This year, the causes are lower in profile: Singer Will.i.Am is pushing for health care reform. Trent Reznor, R.E.M. and Pearl Jam are joining a movement to close Guantanamo. But can they effect any real change?”

by Dorian Lynskey and Katherine Mangu-Ward

WNYC Soundcheck (3 November 2009)

“With the holiday shopping season on the horizon, tech companies are rolling out new MP3 players, iPod accessories, mobile apps and more. New York Times technology columnist David Pogue recently asked his Twitter followers for ideas for gadgets that don’t exist. He joins us to share some of the results—and to field more ideas from our listeners.”

by David Pogue

WNYC Soundcheck (6 November 2009)

“Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall was torn down. Now, original segments of the wall are on display in front of 5900 Wilshire, across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While it stood, the wall served as a public art canvas for graffiti and protests. While in Los Angeles, artist Shepard Fairey and muralist Kent Twitchell will paint on these segments. Historian Steven Ross discusses the project with the founder of the Wende Museum, muralist Twitchel and others.”

by Justinian Jampol, Kent Twitchell, and Wayne Ratkovich

KCRW (3 November 2009)

“With more and more hotels, restaurants, and retailers adopting music as a branding device, T+L sounds off on how their choices speak volumes…. Some people are irked by bad lighting, excessive AC, the reek of European men’s cologne. I’m hopelessly particular about music. Background sound tracks can make or break my impression of a place—and these days every place has one, from wine bars to Williams-Sonoma. Too often it’s employed with alarming incompetence.”

by Peter Jon Lindberg

Travel and Leisure (November 2009)

“The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.””

by Marco Roth

n+1 (18 October 2009)

“Monsters are on the rise. People can’t seem to get enough of vampires lately, and zombies have a new lease on life. This year and next we have the release of the usual horror films like Saw VI and Halloween II; the campy mayhem of Zombieland; more-pensive forays like 9 (produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov), The Wolfman, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon; and, more playfully, Where the Wild Things Are (a Dave Eggers rewrite of the Maurice Sendak classic). The reasons for this increased monster culture are hard to pin down. Maybe it’s social anxiety in the post-9/11 decade, or the conflict in Iraq—some think there’s an uptick in such fare during wartime. Perhaps it’s the economic downturn. The monster proliferation can be explained, in part, by exploring the meaning of monsters. Popular culture is re-enchanted with meaningful monsters, and even the eggheads are stroking their chins—last month saw the seventh global conference on Monsters and the Monstrous at the University of Oxford.”

by Stephen T. Asma

The Chronicle of Higher Education (25 October 2009)

“When Dmitry Medvedev dined with the Obamas in July, the Russian president appeared both relaxed and powerful. He hit that elusive note by pairing his fine blazer, crisp buttoned shirt, and expensive-looking leather-soled shoes with dark, straight jeans. Power jeans are increasingly common in high-ranking business and political circles. Indeed, jeans are now a legitimate part of the global power-dress lexicon, worn to influential confabs where the wearers want to signal they’re serious—but not fussy—and innovative.”

by Christina Binkley

Wall Street Journal (28 October 2009)

“As right-wing protesters dominated the news this summer, it would have seemed the perfect opportunity for Obama’s much-touted organizers to drown out the conservatives with some coordinated agitation of their own. But they barely made a ripple. Where were they? And how could such a formidable grassroots operation—having just put Obama in office—fall quiet so quickly?”

by Lydia DePillis

The New Republic (29 October 2009)

“It should have died out with flexi discs and VHS, but now a new generation is embracing the DIY world of the fanzine. Jessica Bateman celebrates a timely resurgence…. Do you remember the fanzine? Those crude, photocopied bits of paper, lovingly cut’n'pasted together, thrust into your hands as you waited outside a gig or piled up high in the local record shop. Peppered with spelling mistakes, strewn with swear words and often loaded with egomaniacal rants, they were still the best way to find out about new bands and hear what other fans had to say about them. And they also held a strange energy – time and enthusiasm were poured into making them, and they provided a fleeting peek into strangers’ thoughts.”

by Jessica Bateman

The Independent (25 September 2009)

“Embedded journalism, armed security, and fortress-like compounds—along with very recent advances in field technology—have greatly changed the aesthetics and methods of war reporting. But have those of us who cover wars become more effective newsgatherers?”

by Marcus Wilford

World Affairs Journal (Fall 2009)

“As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world’s language being, say, Eyak.”

by John McWhorter

World Affairs Journal (Fall 2009)

“The globally available Kindle could mark as big a shift for reading as the printing press and the codex… On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text. The question is how. And the answer can be found in the history of earlier book forms.”

by Stephen Marche

Wall Street Journal (17 October 2009)

“Where the Wild Things Are is just 10 sentences long and almost 50 years old, but since the trailer for a Spike Jonze movie adaptation first leaked in March, the buzz has been tremendous.

Now, the snowballing excitement has led to an incredible whirlwind of Where the Wild Things Are activity surrounding the film’s Oct. 16 première. Dave Eggers, who collaborated with Jonze on the movie’s screenplay, just released his novelization, The Wild Things (McSweeney’s, Oct. 13), and Gregory Maguire, a personal friend of Sendak’s best known as the author of Wicked, explores connections throughout the illustrator’s body of work in Making Mischief: A Sendak Appreciation (William Morrow, Sept. 15).” (suggested by Dominic Umile)

by Lauren F. Friedman

Philadelphia Citypaper (14 October 2009)

“Ten years ago, an anonymous screed sparked a firestorm amongst music critics and rock nerds. DANIEL NESTER follows up with the targets of the Rock Critical List and reassesses the finger pointing.” (suggested by Dominic Umile)

by Daniel Nester

The Morning News (20 October 2009)

“Thanks partly to his miserable end 40 years ago, Kerouac has lost some of his lustre as a counterculture icon. But that was never what he wanted to be.”

by David Barnett

The Guardian (21 October 2009)

“E-books: Depending on your point of view, they’re either the savior or the destroyer of the publishing business. So far, Amazon has dominated the market. Its first Kindle electronic reading device debuted two years ago, and the company just announced that its third-quarter profits surged almost 70 percent, thanks largely to sales of new Kindle models.” (suggested by Lara Killian)

by All Things Considered

NPR (24 October 2009)

“And it was all down to Brian Epstein. It was his commercial flair that turned four musicians into a global phenomenon…Yet without Epstein there wouldn’t have been the Beatles. Not as we know them, anyway. It is as simple as that.”

by Daniel Finkelstein

The Times (9 September 2009)

“How the fathers of Critical Theory found their way to America… It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Frankfurt School in recent American thought. Philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer—to name just the best-known members of the group—helped to develop a subtle and powerful way of thinking about the problems of modern society. Critical Theory, as it is usually capitalized, adapted the revolutionary impulse of Marxism to 20th century conditions, in which mass culture and totalitarianism seemed to shut off any real possibility of social transformation. Especially appealing to academics is the way Critical Theory makes the analysis of culture feel like a revolutionary act in and of itself. Reading Adorno on modern music, or Benjamin on literature, it is momentarily possible to believe that criticism is a weapon of liberation, rather than simply a hermetic exercise for intellectuals.”

by Adam Kirsch

Tablet (18 August 2009)

“The concept of ‘spectacle’ entered the vocabulary of the social sciences with the publication of Debord’s classic Society of the Spectacle. Debord and company were concerned with art, aesthetics, urbanism, the city, architecture, and so on, but, as Lefebvre points out, as these multiple concerns fell by the wayside the Situationists were left with generally little more than an abstract critique of society and polemics (McDonough 2002: 275-76, 281) with the notion of spectacle at the center of it all. To the extent that Situationism still exerts an influence on critical theory it is apparently in just this notion of spectacle. But what does it mean, really? Once anyone evokes the S-word it typically unleashes a torrent: here a spectacle, there a spectacle, everywhere a spectacle.”

by Mark P. Worrell

Fast Capitalism (2009)

“Immigrants have been an important and creative force in U.S. history, as they are also today. Nearly 100 years after the 1848 German Revolution and the Frankfurt Assembly, Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941) brought the critical social theory of the twentieth century Frankfurt School to the USA, and with it, the spark that would become the New Left and student movements here during the 1960s and 1970s. In this essay I contend that some key aspects of the development of Marcuse’s critical theory, hitherto quite under-appreciated, can be illumined by focusing on the theme exile as educator, and by stressing Marcuse’s emphasis on the intellectual’s emancipatory role as outsider.”

by Charles Reitz

Fast Capitalism (2009)

“There is neither the money nor the space to sustain a career as a full-time book reviewer. D J Taylor mourns the slow death of the man of letters.”

by D J Taylor

New Statesman (8 October 2009)