I admire Niall Ferguson, as I believe I've indicated in this blog in the past. I reviewed the first volume of his two-volume work on the life of Henry Kissinger three years back. In understand the second volume is expected to make an appearance at the end of this year and I look forward to it. This, however, looks bad for him: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/148653/niall-ferguson-wanted-opposition-research-student
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An exchange of letters in the January 2016 issue of Harper's reminds me that back in the 1990s, when Stephen Glass was notoriously making stuff up for The New Republic, he also made stuff up in other publications as well. An article of his ran in the Harper's for February 1998, titled "Prophets and Losses." It concerned telephone psychics, portraying a business in which phony psychics try to keep callers on the line as long as possible in order to sock them with astronomical charges. As was often the case with Glass' frauds, it is easy to believe the broad outlines of what he was saying, which is precisely why people weren't necessarily vigilant about the details, which he invented. In the latest issue, Glass provides a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of what he fabricated for that story, a breakdown that will be unreadable for anyone who doesn't have the actual text of the story n front of them. Fortunately, this is 2016, and you can find that he...
A personal letter, sent on July 1, 1925, from Burguete, Navarra: Dear Scott -- We are going to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda? I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt—havent drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be—A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably [be] an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows. To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I wo...
The latest issue of Harper's has a round-up, by Joshua Cohen, of new books. The one that catches my eye is a comment on a collection of the writings of art critic Jed Perl. I've probably read a good chunk of that book, as I'm a fan of Perl's work as it appears in The New Republic. Unfortunately, Perl's new book, Magicians and Charlatans , looks a little pricey for me. So I'll confine myself to just quoting here what Cohen writes about it: "[T]his miscellany's greatest recommending stretches are its critiques of what is essentially unreal: the art market. Shock, that old weapon of Dada and Surrealism, concussing sensibilities since World War I, has become a marketing manifesto licensing a Christ soaked in human urine (Andres Serrano's Piss Christ ) and a Mary slathered in elephant dung (Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary ) not as expressions of rage but as provocations of PR ....The museum is converted into its architectural double, t...