Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“Art for All of Us?,” Sarah Ruden
“From my own long observation of fashionable efforts to deal with traumatic memories in post-apartheid South Africa, I have to say that the storytelling-as-therapy premise has got nothing better to recommend it than its convenience.”
“Bloom and Bust,” Phillip Longman
“Inequality, an issue politicians talked about hesitantly, if at all, a decade ago, is now a central focus of candidates in both parties. The terms of the debate, however, are about individuals and classes: the elite versus the middle, the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. That’s fair enough. But the language we currently use to describe inequality doesn’t capture the way it is manifest geographically.”
“Worlds in Waiting: The Promise of Little Magazines,” David Marcus
“In the background to all of this is the question of money.”
“Lucky Jim Bond: Inside Kingsley Amis’s Quietly Subversive 007,” David B. Hobbs
“Now, we tend to think about James Bond as biennial film appointment—another chance to sell explosions and Omega watches to 13-year-old boys, even though today’s Bond fans are typically men over 35. Fair enough. MGM estimates that over half the world has seen a Bond film. But the character was a literary ‘phenomenon’ before Sean Connery sipped his first celluloid martini.”
“Forensic Pseudoscience,” Nathan J. Robinson
“It would be unreasonable to expect any human endeavor to be completely without error, and one might wonder just how systemic the problems of forensic science truly are.”