But consider a similar Cold War-era comment by the CIA’s then-chief of covert action: “Books differ from all other propaganda media primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium.” He also used a military metaphor for culture, calling books “the most important weapon of strategic propaganda.”
.. The Soviet authorities forged his signature and sent letters to the Italian publisher demanding the return of the manuscript, but Pasternak whispered his actual intentions to visiting Italians and sent special notes in French, telling his publisher to disregard communication in any other language.
.. Given its literary culture, some CIA staff probably realized the irony of a powerful and well-funded government agency using clandestine methods to distribute novels by George Orwell. The American government was trying to manipulate the culture of the Soviet Union to help Soviet citizens recognize the dangers of a powerful government manipulating their culture.
.. Had they found and bribed a Russian author to write a book with anti-Soviet themes, it likely would never have become an international literary and media sensation. Authentic literary productions are far more powerful than the best government efforts at cultural engineering.
It seems, then, that spotting and supporting those cultural artifacts that promote national interests is a more effective strategy
As Barbara Walters Retires, the Big TV Interview Signs Off, Too
Ms. Walters’s peers can’t help but see her departure as more than the end of one woman’s career. “With Barbara’s retirement, so goes TV news,” said Connie Chung, a longtime television news anchor. “There’s no big payoff for an exclusive television interview with someone for an hour. No one is going to watch it, anyway.”
.. But the power of the Big Three networks has faded. The demise of appointment viewing and the proliferation of alternatives to network news have obviated the need for a correspondent with great hair to come into a celebrity’s living room to take a confession. And how much value is there in an “exclusive” when people can follow the interview in real time on their phones via Twitter, or watch the highlights later on YouTube?
.. “It almost doesn’t matter where you go now,” said Howard Bragman, a Hollywood publicist who represents the gay football player, Michael Sam. “If you’ve got a big enough story, you can give it to The Poughkeepsie Journal, and it will get picked up everywhere.”
.. The very notion of a celebrity choosing to break news in an interview could soon become outdated. A lot of younger stars simply keep their fans updated on their ups and downs via social media.
The false promise of the digital humanities
Fundamental to this kind of persuasion is the undertone of menace, the threat of historical illegitimacy and obsolescence. Here is the future, we are made to understand: we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over.
.. Franco Moretti, the pioneering scholar of the history of the novel, gives a name to the kind of encounter with texts that machines facilitate: “distant reading,” he calls it.
The New Critics gave us close reading, the engagement with the minute verbal nuances of a text, and the mode still thrives—Helen Vendler’s studies of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Dickinson’s poems are classic contemporary examples. But as Moretti argues in “Conjectures on World Literature,” one of the essays in his new collection, Distant Reading, close reading implies that certain texts are especially worthy of this kind of scrutiny—that is, it implies a canon. “If you want to look beyond the canon … close reading will not do it,” he observes; you can closely read two hundred poems, but not twenty thousand poems. To analyze such a large quantity of texts, you need to “focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.” And this is the kind of concrete pattern-finding that computers specialize in. Distant reading is reading like a computer, not like a human being
.. Humanistic thinking does not proceed by experiments that yield results; it is a matter of mental experiences, provoked by works of art and history, that expand the range of one’s understanding and sympathy. It makes no sense to accelerate the work of thinking by delegating it to a computer when it is precisely the experience of thought that constitutes the substance of a humanistic education.
Is Reading Too Much Bad For Kids
Clinging to print can isolate kids and alienate them from the digital world of multitasking