Larrybooks

Facebook, Twitter & Trump https://t.co/iey1MAXdN8

Facebook, Twitter & Trump What is missing from post-election analyses is a recognition of the outsized influence the Internet has had in this election, influence that may be less susceptible to fixing than, say, tweaking polling methods or replacing political consultants. Out of four million election-related tweets created b...

Autocracy: Rules for Survival https://t.co/7e4VeWl7dj

Autocracy: Rules for Survival However well-intentioned, talk presuming Trump's good faith assumes that he is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician.…

A World in Doubt https://t.co/fe3x50Uw2W

A World in Doubt Europe's most strident populists and chauvinists are thrilled by the Trump victory. But the overwhelming sentiment animating European and global responses to the US election is fear. In the chancelleries of Europe, it already has two distinct forms: fear over what Trump will do and fear over what hi...

Can We Escape from Time? https://t.co/T1RNdeFyEP

Can We Escape from Time? We have grown very used to the idea of time travel, as explored and exploited in so many movies and TV series and so much fiction. Although it feels like it’s been around forever, it isn’t an ancient archetypal story but a newborn myth, created by H.G. Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine. To pu...

Abstract Expressionism: The View from the Top https://t.co/hDix6d0Tg2

Abstract Expressionism: The View from the Top Unlike Impressionism or Cubism, Abstract Expressionism was not a style or a movement. What the five pioneers had in common was not a shared aesthetic, a painting technique, or a manifesto but a sense of the overwhelming importance of art, a bedrock belief in the power of painting to address ideas an...

Why You Won’t Get Your Day in Court https://t.co/nsIh18CgGj

Why You Won’t Get Your Day in Court Over the past few decades, ordinary US citizens have increasingly been denied effective access to their courts. There are many reasons for this. One is the ever greater cost of hiring a lawyer. A second factor is the increased expense, apart from legal fees, that a litigant must pay to pursue a laws...

When Not to Translate https://t.co/IU3hEBfyXb

When Not to Translate We live in a time of retranslation. The logic behind this phenomenon is clear enough. A translation inevitably reflects the language and style of its time. Are new translations always better, or always feasible, even?

Our Driverless Future https://t.co/1IaKv6We3o

Our Driverless Future For generations of Americans, driving and the open road promised a kind of freedom: the ability to light out for the territory, even if the territory was only the mall one town over. Autonomous vehicles also come with the promise of freedom, the freedom of getting places without having to pay attent...

Disciples of Distrust https://t.co/Jm8ZKQqvoj

Disciples of Distrust I think a deeper crisis underlies Trump's following: the shuddering distrust of every kind of authority—a contempt for the whole political system, its "establishment," the Congress, its institutions (like the Fed), its "mainstream” media, the international arrangements it has made (not only the trad...

Next Stop, Valhalla https://t.co/zyUE2rDXih

Next Stop, Valhalla Rossini’s Guillaume Tell—now being staged at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since 1931, and for the first time ever there in its original French—is as powerful a piece of operatic machinery as Parisian opera had to offer in 1829. The opera is stirring in the most deliberate and efficient…

The Beautiful, Magical World of Rajput Art https://t.co/wsBJzqVKZB

The Beautiful, Magical World of Rajput Art Rajput art used to be looked upon as a dim, provincial reflection of the sophisticated masterpieces produced by the Mughals in Delhi. The recent small but superb, jewel-like Metropolitan Museum exhibition “Divine Pleasures: Paintings from India’s Rajput Courts” demonstrated once and for all that tha...

The Comey Morass https://t.co/if9QLO3D8Z

The Comey Morass One can only conclude that James Comey’s serial acts in the by now wildly inflated case of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server—there’s been no indication that national security was compromised—were those of a man who lacked the courage to stick with his own convictions. From what we know...