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“The literalist certitude that fact-checking and labeling Trump a ‘liar’ are unassailable tactics for resisting Trump demands reconsideration. Undertaken in isolation, the ‘Truth-O-Meter’ approach not only plays into the dichotomy of truth and falsity that energizes Trump’s cries of ‘fake news,’ but places him and his words at the center of the story where what is needed is his and their decentering, or contextualization.” Wynn Coates views Donald Trump’s lies through the lens of linguistic anthropology.
“At 98, James Lovelock is a very old man. His thinking is all the more important in that it avoids the academic, and he was the first to theorize what in ecology and Earth sciences is called the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, which I can provisionally summarize at this stage of my inquiry: the Earth is a totality of living beings and materials that were made together, that cannot live apart, and from which humans can’t extract themselves.” Bruno Latour tracks down Gaia, in a piece translated by Stephen Muecke.
“Can you live? Is it possible? I don’t know, it shouldn’t still be a question, but it is. Is it possible for a woman trying to be a mother and a wife or partner to also be an artist? A writer. Is that possible? That isn’t meant to be an obvious question in the book but I think it undergirds some of what the poems are approaching, at least in talking about these women’s lives.” Dana Goodyear interviews Carol Muske-Dukes, whose latest collection of poems is Blue Rose.
On BLARB, Rebecca Linde wonders why, in this era of so-called “peak TV,” networks continue to turn to the nostalgic, mediocre reboot.
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Morten Høi Jensen pores over The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, “an epic undertaking” by translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson and “a major literary event.”
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Bryan Wisch appreciates the cautiously optimistic message of Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.
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