Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

What Roger Ebert said about films – that no bad film is short enough, and no good film is long enough – probably applies to books as well. Still, the prospect of reading a good book often comes attached with a sense of dread if you have to spend weeks, rather than days, in finishing it. In the world of fiction, excessive length is not so daunting a challenge, as anyone who has whipped through the Harry Potter or Game of Thrones books will tell you. A well-told story will have anyone hooked regardless of its size. This also goes for literary classics, like War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time . As for serious non-fiction however, questions often go begging about whether the length of books is justified. Ideas that float around the humanities and social sciences can often be expressed economically, but nonetheless find their most consistent publication in long, dense tomes. For the most part, this phenomenon can be addressed with two responses. One is that big subjects – the S...

Enlightenment 2.0 by Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath is an almost chauvinistically ambitious book, aiming for nothing less than the restoration of reason into the world of politics.  Published in 2014, this book has by any measure taken on extra relevance given the events of 2016. The election of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum and the increasing likelihood that anti-immigrant parties in Europe will make further electoral gains in the future has moved me to make a few remarks about some of Heath’s ideas. Heath should be well-known to readers as the co-author with Andrew Potter of The Rebel Sell , a polemical attack on the sort of counter-cultural left criticism associated with  Adbusters and Herbert Marcuse; and Filthy Lucre , a similarly polemical jeremiad directed against both left and right assumptions about economics. People familiar with both books who are also broadly receptive to Heath’s style of combative intellectual gameplay, will relish ...

The New Republic began circulation in 1914, and continues to be published as of 2016. In the context of American periodicals that focus on politics and culture, however, this impressive longevity is not the benchmark: The Atlantic was first published in 1857, The Nation in 1865, and Harpers in 1850. TNR is marginally older than The New Yorker , which was founded in 1925, and a senior cousin to various post-WWII magazines such as Dissent (1954), Commentary (1945) and The New York Review of Books (1963).  So far there has not been a detailed, comparative historical account of the rarefied milieu of American political magazines. Such a study would be of great interest. The existing literature that comes close to filling this gap comes in the form of the memoirs of editors and contributors of these various periodicals. From these reflections we gain a mixture of historical fact and historical myth. Intellectual but non-academic, published either weekly, bi-weekly or mont...