Daily Office:
Thursday, 14 October 2010
¶ We don’t have a problem with ebooks, probably because we’re sure that books will continue to be produced — just as, digital cameras notwithstanding, we’re living in a golden age of archaic film revivals (callotype, &c). But book production will probably be a top-of-the-line affair, though, something that Joe Moran perhaps inadvertently hits on in his low-key jeremiad against ebooks. Hint: we remember when station wagons still had real wooden panels — to simulate the coaches that they permanently and utterly displaced.
¶ We were just this minute shocked to read that there’s a critic out there who regards Eve Harrington and Addison deWitt as gay characters in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. Happily, this idea was immediately refuted by The House Next Door‘s Odienator.
¶ Adam Gopnik’s review of Nicholas Phillipson’s new biography of Adam Smith, in the current issue of The New Yorker, sums up the latest scholarly thinking about the father of Anglophone economy, and suggests how much better off we would all be if we had really paid attention to what Smith actually had to say about the role of government in commercial affairs, instead of taking the free market fanatics’ word for it. [P]
¶ BPA has been declared “toxic” by Canadian authories. It’s a great first step, in the face of commercial resistance to the ban, which has held back state action in the United States in Europe. (See Adam Gopnik, Prime) (NYT)
¶ Jan Freeman looks into the pressing mystery of why we don’t say “governatorial.” (Globe; via The Morning News)
¶ George Clooney, diplomat. (Washington Post; via Real Clear World)
¶ Laura Miller gives us Michel de Montaigne — the patron saint of ruminative, unreliable bloggers. (Salon)
¶ Roger Cohen talks to Christiane Lagarde, French minister for the economy, about the need for retirement reform. (NYT)
¶ The Procrastinators. (Brain Pickings)