The New Republic

Ross Douthat replies to TNR’s review of his book Bad Religion:

“But such unfairnesses are typical of hostile book reviews, and I don’t begrudge Winters the right to be obnoxious to someone he considers—wrongly, in my view, but obviously not in his—to be his political and theological antagonist on every front.

The license afforded by the genre of polemic, however, does not grant him the right to be explicitly mendacious. He clearly has a vendetta, of sorts, against Michael Novak and George Weigel and the style of Catholic neoconservatism that they represent. But they are not me, their writings are not mine, and he has done his readers a disservice by reviewing Bad Religion through the lens of that vendetta, and ignoring the book I actually wrote.”

- Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: A Response

Photo courtesy of Dawgs By Nature

Check out TNR’s newest issue, featuring Charles Homans on the 2012 campaign’s biggest donor, Noam Scheiber on how Barack Obama became Bill Clinton, Alec MacGillis on the future of labor’s relationship with the Democratic Party, and the editors on the moral dimension of the health care ruling.

Read TNR’s Books and Arts section for Stanley Kauffmann on films and see excellent pieces by David Hajdu on Adele, Paul Starr on compromise, and Leon Wieseltier on the necessity of both defending and criticizing Israel. The issue also features poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips and the late Wislawa Szymborska.

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Is the place of women in the literary world still an urgent issue?

“Watching the outpouring of grief and reflection over the death of Adrienne Rich last week, I admit, to my shame, that I was surprised. Surprised not because of any judgment about Rich’s poetry, which I barely know, but because I had thought of her as an icon of another era. That era, of course, was the era of the women’s movement, of which Rich was a brash troubadour, asserting the value and distinctiveness of women’s experience and lamenting their—our—submission to patriarchy. But when I came of age intellectually, in the 1990s, this mode of expression had fallen out of fashion. In my undergraduate and graduate studies, I was mentored by male and female professors alike who encouraged me to take my place as a student of the literary canon. But I was never directed to read a poem by Adrienne Rich.”

- Ruth Franklin, Why the Literary Landscape Continues to Disadvantage Women

Photo courtesy of The New York Times

Did Oprah’s book club help or hurt literature?

“The bad news is that the profits that help support publication of less lucrative, more high-minded books depend on the sale of a lot of crap. And at least when it came to fiction, Garthwaite found that the net result of Oprah’s endorsements was to reduce aggregate sales. The reason was the one Franzen articulated back in 2001: Winfrey often selected books that posed a challenge for her TV audience. In practical terms, that meant that Oprah Book Club books took longer to read than the crap her viewers would otherwise read. That, in turn, meant that publishers ended up not only selling less crap, but also, in the aggregate, selling fewer books overall. Which probably meant (and I’m extrapolating here from Garthwaite’s findings) that these same publishers were correspondingly less able to publish literary fiction.”

- Timothy Noah, “Was Oprah Bad For Literature?”

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Encyclopedia Britannica is ceasing print publication. What are we really losing in going digital?

“Encyclopedias, along with other reference works, would seem particularly obvious candidates for digitization. Paper encyclopedias are large, heavy, and expensive ($1,395 for the final print edition of Britannica). They are nowhere near as easily and thoroughly searchable as their digital counterparts. They cannot be easily updated, still less constantly updated. And they are far more limited in size. The 2002 Britannica contained 65,000 articles and 44 million words. Wikipedia currently contains close to four million articles and over two billion words (this information comes, of course, from Wikipedia).Yet with the disappearance of paper encyclopedias, a part of the Western intellectual tradition is disappearing as well.

- David A. Bell, “What We’ve Lost With the Demise of Print Encyclopedias”

Check out TNR’s newest issue, featuring Alec MacGillis on how Obama lost support from hedge funds, Jesse Zwick on Russia TV, Noam Scheiber on how Mitt Romney’s opponents missed their shot on health care, and Timothy Noah’s TRB column on the surprising non-embarassment that is Joe Biden.

Read TNR’s Books and Arts section for Stanley Kauffmann on films and see excellent pieces by Paul Berman on blasphemy codes, Justin Driver on constitutional law, and Leon Wieseltier on fashioning force. Be sure to check out tnr.com for access to these pieces and much more!

What’s your favorite Tarkovsky movie?

“The rich, problematic delight with Geoff Dyer’s new book, Zona is that it’s so much more fun than the film it addresses, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979).”

-David Thomson, Stalking Geoff Dyer

Will the advent of digital books bring about the end of the romance and character of personal libraries?

“but even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.”

—Leon Wieseltier, “Voluminous”

Does Chris Matthews’ new biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, tell readers more about today’s pundits than about JFK? 

“Thus, in addition to all its other faults, Jack Kennedy is at bottom deeply unreliable, because it projects onto its subject a politics that just isn’t true to the historical record. Matthews wants John F. Kennedy to be an Irish machine brawler, a Joe McCarthy-like street-fighter, but he was not such a figure, even if he came to learn horse-trading and coalition-building well enough to get elected president at the age of forty-three.”

- David Greenberg, “It’s A Man’s World”

Photo courtesy of salon.com

In any political uprising, the books are always the first things to go.

After assuring protesters that their collection would be stored safely, witnesses claim that the NYPD and the New York Sanitation Department have thrown over 5,000 books belonging to the Occupy Wall Street Library in the trash. Many of the books (as well as the tent that housed them) were donated at the start of the protests.

Courtesy of blogs.villagevoice.com.