culture

Her discovery may have been crucial to creating the atomic bomb, but she wanted nothing to do with it nor wanted to be depicted in films about it. And I believe Meitner’s refusal to participate in the weaponization of her work on moral grounds makes her more worthy of commemoration than Oppenheimer. She chose humanity over notoriety.

Spotify has already learned that there’s no money to be made with exclusive rights to superstar offerings. “After pouring billions into podcasts and audiobooks to little effect,” explains tech journalist David Pierce, “it seems to have largely given up on the idea that exclusive content is the path to riches.”

The more profitable move is to... See more

I know plenty of literate adults who can decode words, but who also appear to be lousy readers.

The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse. There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge .

The inhabitants of /lit/ see themselves as the victim of anti-canon efforts, as the academy has sought to “decolonise” and expand the curriculum over the past decade. And /lit/’s reaction is hardly unreasonable: there’s a difference between great books (well-written, perhaps undiscovered) and Great Books, which stay in the accepted canon because... See more