Wasteland of the MindIt’s not just that our captains of industry don’t read, they don’t want the rest of us doing it either—and they might soon get their way.
It’s not just that our captains of industry don’t read, they don’t want the rest of us doing it either—and they might soon get their way.
Deep literacy is in decline worldwide, and in our new issue, we bring together eight writers to examine the crisis in different corners of the globe. Nicolás Medina Mora, Zhang Yueran, Kim Hyesoon, Alain Mabanckou, Yassin Adnan, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, Valeria Villalobos Guízar, and Annette Hug each consider how an unholy alliance between capital and the state has degraded our ability to understand what we read.
On our site, Steve Macfarlane talks to Yasha Levine about the difficulties of critiquing such a system, which turns politics themselves into content and commodity—though Levine’s new documentary Pistachio Wars tries to resist such forces. Robert Rubsam describes another transmogrifying process: the one by which public ruins become private property, thus subject to new rules.
“Several generations have grown up in a denuded environment where mass die-offs have already happened, and they don’t even realize it. The New Deal was the engine of that. The beneficiaries of these state-centralized processes were big landowners.”
“When a world dies, much dies alongside it. Ways of thinking, ways of building, ways of living so mundane no one noticed their presence or their passing.”
“War—whether it takes place between societies or within them—has no heroes, only distributions of cruelty, debasement, and ruin, a fact that is routinely denied, ignored, or repressed by those most responsible for perpetuating it.”
“All his life, he rejoiced at deaths, misfortunes, and the blows of fate, and he grew despondent in those rare moments when something compelled him to tenderness and pity, or when he came across something beautiful or listened to music.”
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