Morally speaking, Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan should have been right. As long as I am better off, why should I begrudge your doing better still? Yet something was amiss with this consensus — something that goes far to explain why Reagan-Thatcher conservatism has caved in under pressure from the populisms of President Trump on the right and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the left.
In America (and also in other countries), an impressive postwar rise in material well-being has had zero effect on personal well-being. The divergence between economic growth and subjective satisfaction began decades ago. Real per capita income has more than tripled since the late 1950s, but the percentage of people saying they are very happy has, if anything, slightly declined.
In an increasingly digital age, Kroupa believes that the physical book has meaning, that holding a historic or unique book is different from viewing it on a screen. She’s concerned that our culture is moving from things to pictures of things. It’s like art, she says; you can spend years studying and looking at reproductions of paintings, and then you visit a museum and see the real thing. “You realized that what you’ve been seeing is just the skeleton, some kind of amorphous thing. It’s not the art — you have to have the art there. And I think books are exactly the same way.”
There’s nothing like political and economic upheaval to make boredom look good. An era like the 1950s, which used to be lampooned for its stifling conformity — all those organization men in their gray flannel suits — has since been revered for its stability. To the gig-economy worker who has no idea how many hours she’ll be putting in next week (much less whether she’ll make enough to pay her rent or her health insurance), the prospect of donning a fedora, taking the commuter train into the city, sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 while her ample pension benefits accrue — well, it sounds like a fantasy now.
Then again, it would have been a fantasy for her back then too. As Louis Hyman shows in his illuminating and often surprising new book, the midcentury idyll of steady employment and a regular paycheck wasn’t designed to include women and people of color. For them, today’s economic precariousness wouldn’t look entirely unfamiliar. The New Deal’s fair labor standards applied only to industrial jobs in factories and offices; agricultural and domestic work were deliberately excluded.
Bookstores have become cultural Rorschach tests. After the past decade or so, you’ve either been traumatized by watching your favorite store go dark, or you’re fine with the coffee and craft cocktails now served alongside exquisitely curated books.
This fall begins a new era, or maybe a retro one, marked by the reemergence of national bookstore chains and two prototype stores opening next month. In New York, Shakespeare & Co. is growing to three locations, laying the groundwork for its national expansion, while Indigo, Canada’s largest bookstore chain, is opening its first U.S. store in New Jersey, staking its claim before growing west. Both believe there’s big potential in general bookstore chains despite wildly different ideas about how we buy books.
Data. I know there's lot of it around. But do I really need it? Especially if I’m a literary scholar of the old-fashioned, ruminative type? Readers like me cling to artful, poetic texts as a refuge: an antidote to information overload, technological distraction, and the hegemony of instrumental reason. Can a database help me understand a book?
Daniel Shore’s new book says it can. On his (largely persuasive) account, even a traditional humanist critic can use new search tools and datasets to become better at interpreting literary forms and their cultural history. When used prosthetically and heuristically — as aids to discovery — these tools help deepen our appreciation of verbal artifacts. So data can serve our purposes even when statistics, bar charts, and scatterplots leave us cold, and when the spirit of our readings remains defiantly antique and analog.
About the resolution of the big question at the heart of Jessie Greengrass’s unusual and absorbing first novel—whether or not the unnamed narrator should become a parent—there is no suspense: we know from the first sentence that she is pregnant and from the second that she is already the mother of a little girl. Written mostly in the form of a memoir, “Sight” recounts the history of the narrator’s struggle to arrive at her decision, a process that goes beyond mere difficulty to something more like torture. She has a partner, Johannes, who is patient with her vacillations, though he does not share them. At one point, he suggests that to help make up her mind she go away from London, where they live, and seclude herself in a cottage in Wales. The narrator recalls of the stay, “I sat the week out, unhappy, and went home to tell him with defiance that I wouldn’t have a child; but two days later I cried and said that after all I might, because still I could feel nothing but how much I wanted to.”