Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“The New York Public Library Wars,” Scott Sherman
“Foster’s renovation called for the creation of new rooms for children and teenagers, more computer work stations, and the demolition of seven levels of historic book stacks—containing 98,000 adjustable shelves and built by Carrère & Hastings in the first decade of the 20th century. The three million books in the stacks were to be sent to an off-site storage facility near Princeton, N.J. Library officials insisted that the plan would cost $300 million and was essential to the institution’s fiscal health.”
“I learned to love doom metal. You can too,” Freddie deBoer
“As people discover a bigger and wider array of genres, fewer and fewer people identify themselves with one scene in particular. Few people stake firm stands for what they love, or against what they hate. One prominent exception: metalheads.”
“A Universal Jewishness,” Leon Wieseltier
“As we edit and shrink our patrimony to suit our tastes and our moods and our ideologies, we become masters of subtraction; but we must teach ourselves to add. Not Maimonides or Mendele, but Maimonides and Mendele: a universal Jewishness.”
“Troll Detective,” Katie J.M. Baker
“These people — who range from C-list conservative bloggers to gluten-free bakers from Montreal, boat enthusiasts from Florida, and grocery-coupon collectors from North Carolina — claim to want #JusticeForJessica above all. Instead, they’ve terrorized her formerly sleepy hometown with their relentless demands for answers to their specious theories.”
“Altruism Shrugged,” Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
“One of Ideal’s central anxieties seems to be that religion, with all its beauty and mystery and what Rand would surely dismiss as charlatan’s puffery, is nonetheless better at imparting meaning and ethics than Rand’s own overwrought didactics.”