【The Exotic Time Machine】

2025-06-25 23:17:27 156 views 415 comments

Prizes Make Books Less Popular,The Exotic Time Machine and Other News

By Dan Piepenbring

On the Shelf

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  • “Is the goal so far away? / Far, how far no tongue can say, / Let us dream our dream today.” The worst poems by canonical writers. (Those lines are Tennyson’s—not his finest hour.)
  • On the commercialization of nostalgia: “The memorial-industrial complex ensures that our past—our collective past—permeates our present.”
  • How did Jeopardy!get its strange the-question-is-the-answer format? It was Merv Griffin’s doing.
  • Aspiring writers: better to toil in obscurity. Studies show that literary prizes make books less popular. “Winning a prestigious prize in the literary world seems to go hand-in-hand with a particularly sharp reduction in ratings of perceived quality.”
  • New behind-the-scenes footage from Full Metal Jacketshows Kubrick’s perfectionism in full force; “He labors to get just the right spacing between lime-covered actors playing corpses in an open grave.”
  • Blunders—they’re a good thing!

 

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