I never thought much about the pragmatic value of the humanities either, to be honest. I just knew it was my world. When, with alacrity, I dropped out of a business certificate and picked up a philosophy major, it felt like a guilty hobby. An indulgence.
I was missing Walter Mosley, and I saw that “The Last Days” is now streaming—with Samuel L. Jackson, no less, as that ninety-one-year-old. No way was I going to disrespect Mosley, a consummate writer, by streaming before reading. I opened the book.
Maybe this is better. The human element is being removed. We no longer need a partner or best friend to say, “You look stressed, why not take a break?” Exes have less room to demonize one another, because their communications have been muted and massaged. Nobody can accuse the AI of being on the other person’s side, which has got to be the worst part of doing couples counseling. But I sense a flattening, as we lose some of the messiest, most instructive interactions and automate wisdom, negotiation, health, self-expression.
After putting the IBWA and the Hobo College system in place, James Eads How started a monthly magazine, the “Hobo News,” printed in St. Louis and later in Cincinnati. A forerunner of the now familiar street papers, it was bankrolled by his inheritance but written “by the hoboes, for the hoboes, of the hoboes.”
Watching “Turn Every Page,” you realize that Gottlieb managed to be editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker without screens. Caro managed to write “The Power Broker” and four volumes of a brilliant and definitive biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson without screens, and he is working on the fifth without a screen.
Halfway through this book, I find out that last summer, our own university library acquired the third print edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. There it waits, just through the glass doors I enter weekly.
Volcanoes can destroy our cities, burn away our flesh, suffocate us with toxic gases, crush us with flying boulders. Most volcanologists keep a safe distance from their subject. But they still emerge rapt.
Euphemisms let us dart away, pretend, avoid that absence the way we pull back from touching someone who frightens us or might be contagious. We are good at distancing death.
There was no privacy between the 1860s and 1880s; one learned from the newspaper exactly what ailed one’s neighbors.
What was not reported about anyone Black? Social events, trophies and feats, business news, births, deaths, marriages… Pretty much any news except crime.
Fairness was demanded, compassion urged. No one worried about HIPPA. Nor did the news need to be momentous.
Marriage in 1870s-era Missouri was a competitive but disorganized sport, each ceremony removing a potential rival from the fray.