Reviews and News:
Over 200 poets collaborate on haikus for Obama: "What big ears you have, / Mr. President! and heart / Big as big can be."
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Students at Duquesne say Chick-fil-A will make them feel unsafe.
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Is it time to rediscover Conrad Aiken?
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When it comes to innovation, Americans are all talk: "Americans have fallen in love with the idea of their entrepreneurial spirit. Silicon Valley seems to have replaced New York City as the country's metropolitan mascot of dynamism. Innovation is the unofficial buzzword of corporate America, and news organizations heap praise on the zillionaire startup heroes of the Millennial generation. But this is a mirage, according to the economist and popular writer Tyler Cowen, whose new book is The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. In fact, the nation's dynamism is in the dumps. Americans move less than they used to. They start fewer companies. Caught in the hypnotic undertow of TV and video games, they are less likely to go outside. Even the federal government itself has transformed from an investment vehicle, which once spent a large share of its money on infrastructure and research, to an insurance conglomerate, which spends more than half its money on health care and Social Security. A nation of risk-takers has become a nation of risk-mitigation experts."
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Where do pianists look when they play?
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Seven-year-old Syrian refugee signs book deal with Simon and Schuster.
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A campus novel for our identity-obsessed age.
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Essay of the Day:
What is the function of criticism? Denis Donoghue revisits T. S. Eliot's famous essay for a partial answer:
"By calling works of art 'autotelic,' he protected them from improper comment, but he did not say what form a proper comment would take. 'The Correction of Taste' is more intelligible. I take him to mean that if something is in bad taste it should be corrected by appeal to good taste. To pick up a phrase he used earlier, taste is the custom by which we like something with the right liking. That is the direction of good teaching. It is easy to like something for the wrong reason. Many of us like trash for no good or right reason. Trying again: the function of criticism—as of good teaching—is to lead our students, our readers—to like something for the right reason. What is the right reason? That is what we have to know and to be able to show."
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Photo: Stave churches
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Poem: James Matthew Wilson, "XII: Jesus Dies on the Cross"
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