Experts now consider disinformation and misinformation to be the world’s top risks, ahead of climate change and extreme weather, economic crises, armed conflict, everything. How we communicate with one another and prove our points is more important than ever. The Chicago Manual of Style has been a beacon on a hill for more than a century. What do we do if—or as—people start to get all their information from TikTok? Is TikTok news? Is it information? Do we argue on it now, Tik for Tok? Or is it, like X, like Instagram, random snippets of media, sets of statistics, and examples from history and other pieces of future evidentiary arguments that may or may not be true, may or may not have been prepared and vetted by reporters and journalists and editors and fact-checkers of the kind that book publishers, newspapers, magazines, and television networks have been building as part of their epistemic architecture for centuries?
Do I think that every copy sold in the last two weeks has been print-on-demand? No. But I am willing to guess that most of them, ordered in the rush of excitement that follows the Nobel announcement every year, were printed at Ingram after the orders came in.
The movement toward repertory, however, isn’t only because of sudden changes in taste or just a case of people wanting to get out of their homes after being trapped in them. On a grander scale, it’s a Darwinian adaptation to a grim landscape largely created by the cynicism and miscalculations of the major Hollywood studio system. Nearly every decision the studios have made since the turn of the century has inadvertently supported and strengthened the position of repertory cinema as a counterbalance in the industry.
When rollercoaster fans speak of creativity, they speak of the old, the retired or the dead. They speak of Anton Schwarzkopf, late pioneer of the loop, and Ron Toomer, who became the first engineer to haul people up more than 200ft before sending them into a drop. They speak of Alan Schilke and Jeff Pike, both slowing down now, both admired for their structures that marry timber with steel. They speak of Werner Stengel, a living legend at 88, one of whose many new ideas was to send passengers hurtling around corners while tilted at 90 degrees. Because the work of rollercoaster creation asks for confidence of vision, the staying power to see through long projects, as well as an encyclopaedic grasp of which manoeuvres have and haven’t been tried yet, it is not a conspicuously youthful game. John Burton – a self-effacing aficionado of theme parks and musical theatre from Staffordshire – is an anomaly. He was only a few years on from working as a crab feeder at an English aquarium when he was invited to create his first rollercoaster. He was given an £18m budget, a patch of damp ground, and told: make it big. He was 27.
Sacks is an endearing and entertaining prose stylist – inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse – and the organisation of Letters, separated into broadly thematic, chronological chapters with concise editorial introductions, provides narrative momentum. The resulting book is far more engaging than the unwieldy reference text for Sacks specialists it could have been. It might, in fact, serve as a more affecting autobiography than his On the Move (2015), which occasionally slides into sentimentality.