Even the critics can see the books are dying. Only 76.5 percent of book critics think it’s never ethical to review a book without reading the whole thing. We would have hoped that 100 percent of them would think reading the whole thing is important.
Then we tried to get through the National Book Critics Circle???s blog post about ethics in book criticism and we saw where the other 23.5 percent was coming from.
Last night we finally picked up the New Yorker. Jonathan Lethem???s story was weird, and frankly if the New Yorker didn???t run an excerpted version of Fortress of Solitude, which admittedly made us cry back then, there???s no way, no way, it would have gotten into this issue.
Lizzie Widdicombe had another classic Talk of the Town piece. Just because she???s good doesn???t mean we resent her any less for regularly publishing in the New Yorker 18 months after graduating Harvard.
And Malcolm Gladwell was back to his pre-Tipping Point days in his piece on I.Q. tests. In other words, we enjoyed him again. But apparently we were mistaken.
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So, like everybody else with a basic understanding of the internet, we understand that convenience is often more important than privacy. In the case of Gmail, all that storage is worth the fact that Google reads our email for ads. It???s a bit awkward when relationship advice ads pop up on the side of emails with boyfriends, but whatever.
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