Alberto Toscano (Goldsmith): Liberation Technology: Marcuse's Communist Individualism. 10 reading revolutions before e-books: The Kindle and the iPad may be the latest gadgets, but reading has already undergone many transformations. From First Things, Joseph Bottum on the freeloader’s culture. This space intentionally left blank: Dwayne A. Day on the limits of Chinese military power. Public Intellectuals: Sam Vaknin on the rise of the librarians and the decline of the author. From shock and awe to a slow exit: It is still far too early to fill out the scorecard in Iraq. In the contemporary digital world, where it seems everything has been said, done, and made instantly available, one word might prove to be a useful corrective: Dada — the volumes here are recently published (or translated) doses of Dada's frenzy; small salvos aimed to disrupt the pervasive data of everyday life. Howard Kurtz on how a thinner Time magazine still manages to stand out. Dennis Baron on the gender-neutral pronoun: 150 years later, still an epic fail. The height of unfairness: Does the presidency come down to one meaningless factor? From Fine Books magazine, an article on the greatest book collector you never heard of; and an article on book collecting for posterity. Crime (Sex) and Punishment (Stoning): A particularly hard-to-grasp form of execution speaks to the distance between societies — and why we may see more of it. An old-style print war: Despite the many pressures on print media, the San Francisco weeklies The Bay Guardian and SF Weekly have been fighting for years over anticompetitive ad pricing. Plato's pop culture problem, and ours: Scratch the surface of any attack on the popular arts and you will find Plato's criticisms of poetry. From Psychiatric Times, a review of books on electroconvulsive therapy (reg. req.)
