LRB · Vol. 33 No. 5 · 3 March 2011 Books News and Opinion on The Huffington Post 23 Things The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick – review | Books | The Observer Too much information: the complaint du jour, but also toujours. Alexander Pope quipped that the printing press, "a scourge for the sins of the learned", would lead to "a deluge of Authors [that] covered the land". Robert Burton, the Oxford anatomist of melancholy, confessed in 1621 that he was drowning in books, pamphlets, news and opinions. All the twittering and tweeting today, the blogs and wikis and apparent determination to archive even the most ephemeral and trivial thought has, as James Gleick observes in this magisterial survey, something of the Borgesian about it. Nothing is forgotten; the world imprints itself on the informatosphere at a scale approaching 1:1, each moment of reality creating an indelible replica. But do we gain from it, or was TS Eliot right to say that "all our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance"? This is not, however, a book that merely charts the rising tide of information, from the invention of writing to the age of Google.
Brain Pickings Lost Films Table of Contents - Magazine The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Crops stretch to the horizon. Black bodies pepper the landscape, hunched over as they work the fields. Officers on horseback, armed, oversee the workers. To the untrained eye, the scenes in Angola for Life: Rehabilitation and Reform Inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, an Atlantic documentary filmed on an old Southern slave-plantation-turned-prison, could have been shot 150 years ago. The film tells two overlapping stories: One is of accomplishment against incredible odds, of a man who stepped into the most violent maximum-security prison in the nation and gave the men there—discarded and damned—what society didn’t: hope, education, and a moral compass.
Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 by Gary Gutting – review | Books | The Observer Are the theory wars over? Twenty-five years ago you couldn't cocoa your cappuccino without someone accusing you of floating a signifier, much less close down the, ahem, discourse with a simple "I prefer my coffee that way". Who is this mythic "I", the theorists wanted to know, and how could he presume to know what he prefers? Has he forgotten he's as fictional as Oliver Twist or Mrs Dalloway? Doesn't he know that his likes and dislikes are as ideologically determined as the medium-term financial strategy? College life these days looks rather less fraught. Which doesn't mean there was nothing to theory. What did they get from their studies? Because, so the theory goes, you don't speak language. But was there anything inside the texts of Derrida and his fellow deconstructionists? Fair enough, though I dare say I'm not the only one who finds Foucault and Derrida's coiling, arrhythmic stodge anything but poetic. Christopher Bray is working on a history of 1960s culture and politics
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