A few things of possible interest from my reading.
From the Times Literary Supplement, Down the pub with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a review of Diana Pavlac Glyer's new book The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Among other things, she argues that the Inklings kept Tolkien from ruining the end of The Lord of the Rings.
Is the Web a Threat to Culture?, also from the TLS, reviews Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur. Among the interesting remarks:
. . . a naive, if fragile, faith in popular democracy endures among technological utopians, many of whom see digital technology as the means towards a more perfect polity (though recent setbacks in electronic voting have caused some to reconsider).
In 1990, computer programmers at a Xerox research centre developed an online “world”, where anyone could create characters and through them live out fantasy lives. (It was a forerunner of virtual worlds such as Web 2.0’s Second Life.) When some fantasies proved incompatible with others, the programmers assumed that plebiscites would settle the disputes.
They found instead that the disputes only escalated. As a result, the programmers were forced to transform themselves from benign returning officers reading off the ayes and the nays into little dictators issuing electronic ASBOs and expulsion orders.
From the English Catholic weekly magazine The Tablet, East Meets West — At a price by Jonathan Luxmoore. He writes:
"We're living an American-style liberal dream here, which compels people to fend for themselves and allows shoe-cleaners to become millionaires," explains Krzysztof Zgoda, a Solidarity union vice president. "The problem so far is we've produced a lot more of the first than the second. Most Poles assume this kind of system is the norm everywhere and don't even realise that they have rights. The media and the politicians don't even discuss it now - it's unfashionable and retrograde to question the free market."
When Zgoda and other Solidarity veterans celebrated their movement's twenty-seventh anniversary at the end of August, they may well have wondered if this was the kind of Poland that they struggled for. As Communist rule collapsed in 1989, a premium was placed on quick economic growth and it was widely assumed that Poland needed a phase of unhampered capitalism to unleash its population's acquisitive instincts. Regulations have since imposed a measure of accountability. But the notion that markets define their own morality remains deeply ingrained.
Also from The Tablet, Argument Not Always Angelic, a review of John Cornwell's Darwin's Angel, a response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in letters from his guardian angel, who was also Gregor Mendel's and Charles Darwin's guardian angel. The reviewer, the ex-Catholic philosopher Anthony Kenny, is hard on the book.
For you mystery fans, from the Daily Telegraph: Ian Rankin: Why Rebus could return.
And for those of you interested in Anglican life: Rwandan Politics Intrudes on American Church from the Christianity Today site.
And for those of you interested in Islam in America: An American Muslim in Cairo from the Los Angeles Times.
Finally, from Vanity Fair, an expose of a cultural hero, Arthur Miller's Missing Act.
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