Richard Hughes Gibson is professor of English at Wheaton College and the author of four books, including The Way of Dante (forthcoming, 2025).
The Amazon economy has unquestionably changed consumption.
The ultimate semantic receivers, selectors, and transmitters are still us.
The verbomania that compelled ordinary Russians to devour thousand-page books appears increasingly remote, even mythological.
An important part of his legacy is his criticism of the critics.
We can’t properly define the Enlightenment without making reference to happiness.
Government ties to Big Tech run deep.
If projects like E-Estonia mark a break with paper, they also represent the continuation of an administrative order made possible by the first paper revolution.
The interplay of friendship and technology has been far longer-running than we think.
Everybody read Erasmus. Like all the other Reformers, Luther included several Erasmus titles in his personal library.
What has been the fate of phatic communication in social media?
New books unleashed new projects, and new projects demanded new books, on and on, as if there were shelving without end.
Sven Birkerts’s picture of “literary reading,” meanwhile, is too narrow to encompass the experience of even the books he most treasures.
Only through regular injections of human writing can the models improve and the machines stay up to date.
The greatest characters possess an irrepressible vitality.
The historical novel strives to recreate not only the material dimensions of a past age but also its mindset.
An unfinished fiction is a memento mori.
Consider another problem of motivation in the house of fiction: why characters write.
When translation becomes a part of the art of fiction.
An abandoned—or abandoning—god might also reappear.
Austen’s sparing use of attributions is also a sign of her confidence in her art. She dispensed with unnecessary scaffolding.
The very short story can conjure a fiction out of almost nothing.
The answer cannot simply come in the form of another list of dos-and-don’ts.
Calvino recognized the digital age as an existential condition as well as a technological one.
Philosophers are not the only cultivators of wonder.
If there is a war between database and narrative in Cervantes and Sterne, it is a merry one.
Fiction writers are world builders.
A new, exclusive web series.
We all must adapt to a new textual culture made by GPT-3.
Making a new paragraph is as easy as drawing a thin line in the margin.
Ukraine has become the geography of vicious truths
Just as Mims worries now over the unfulfilling tedium of employment at Amazon, Smith worried over the deleterious effects of monotonous work.
The red vs. blue electoral map has contributed to the toxicity of our politics.
Facebook is free only in the most superficial sense.
I observed that the most effective communicators delivered the most histrionic performances.
Taking pleasure in a well-crafted sentence is a good in itself.
Everyone contributes to the pandemic, so all bear responsibility.
Self-knowledge and pleasure, the Idiosyncratics teach us, go hand in hand through the library.
Renewing your weaks social ties might make your closest ties stronger.
One thinks of identity whenever one is not sure of where one belongs.
To measure the Wealth of Nations, you had to inspect the shirts on people’s backs and the shoes on their feet.
It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.
Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.
Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.
The events of January 6 went off script.
Looking abroad provides some relief from the doomsday projections with which we began.
You don’t have to put on a rose-colored headset to see the upsides.
Can we salvage digital democracy?
Why read long books? Well, if you have to ask…
The Internet is a technical system that has reshaped social roles and relationships in ways that we are at this point far from fully understanding. We are living out the terms of the new social contract.
How might the pandemic alter civic engagement?
Any channel through which we can still communicate is good. It’s just not enough.
While the purgatorial “industries” of Transhumanism might not yet represent a counter-revolution on the order of the Reformation, they are already substantial enough to warrant our attention.