The Mixing Links

Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky by John Carroll
The sixteen or so pages in this free preview of one of the few books to discuss at length the German egoist philosopher 'Max Stirner' (Johann Kaspar Schmidt; 1806-1856) are among its most suggestive

Children of the Storm: Education and Social Mobility
Widely-hailed book by Paul Tough on how character traits instilled in children - motivation, patience, persistence, self-restraint - best undergird purely instrumental, intellectual and cognitive aptitudes

The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire

The Dorothy Day Few of Us Know

Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century, by Eric Hobsbawm
Sam Leith on Eric Hobsbawm’s posthumous lament for a vanished world

The Future of History
The history lessons outlined in the draft National Curriculum are too prescriptive, Anglocentric and narrow – the only way to make the subject better, David Cannadine argues, is to give it more time in the classroom

Gardens of Stone: My Boyhood in the French Resistance by Stephen Grady

International Books of the Year - and the Millennium
Forty-six scholars in the TLS in 1999, from Al Alvarez to Eugen Weber, nominate Dante, Darwin, Gibbon, King James and his Bible, King Lear, Montaigne, Proust, Spinoza, &c., for ten-century honors

Karl Marx by Jonathan Sperber
"A new biography of Karl Marx emphasizes his responses to events, not his body of ideas." "If the Marx described by Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri specializing in European history, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein."

The Linked Recessions of the 1970s and Early Twenty-First Century
How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies

Lucky Hunter-Gatherers: Ice Age Art
A major exhibition

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach
George Steiner in 2003 on the 50th anniversary edition

One Thousand Words
The discipline of word limits in the age of the comment thread

     Scott Lahti 

Publishing three letters to the editor of the NYTBR in 2011, under a self-imposed desiderata of 200 words in the second and third cases (after the first was, instructively, cut by the editors by almost half), gave me an idea for a magazine. In general, whether the publication is a daily newspaper or the Reader's Digest, or the NYTBR/TLS/NYRoB/LRB, I've long found the reader-submission pages, broadly defined, my baseline of interest in its ideal blend of gatekeeper discrimination and egalitarian outreach, with the professional-journalist content as second-blade follow-up in my close two-track shave. So if we were still in the print age, I'd like to see a publication, illustrated or not, entirely furnished from reader submissions of any tenor whatever - short review, joke, poem, essay, memoir, historical episode, social-reform desiderata - all of 250 words or less. It is remarkable what can be done under the cameo condition and by people whose talents do not otherwise platform under that reigning star system afflicting the literary world no less than it does the precincts of cinepop.

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  Paul Dorell

  
  

  Scott, you have a good idea there. However, you need an entrepreneurial spirit to go anywhere with it. A printed magazine might be harder to pull off than an online magazine, while the latter could be invisible in the blogosphere unless handled correctly. Still, when you recognize the success of freeware, it seems feasible that some sort of online publication that involves no payments could do quite well.

  I fully agree that the hegemonic system of publishing, which is subject to all of the evils of capitalism, encourages a star system not unlike the golden age of Hollywood. The desire for money is often at odds with nobler ideals. I also agree that short pieces of writing can be as good as or better than long essays or fiction.

  Although I have come to appreciate the NYRblog in comparison to other blogs, it isn't completely immune to the familiar dysfunctions of our medieval publishing system. Thus we must choose between renowned writers A, B and C. Renowned writer A may be completely over the hill and filled with irascible opinions that no one cares about. Renowned writer B may be a creative writing program princess who hasn't written anything interesting in 30 years, and renowned writer C may be a hack writer of no particular knowledge or skill who has managed to stay well connected in literary circles. There is in principle no reason to assume that a properly executed "man-on-the-street" approach such as you suggest couldn't yield more satisfactory results.