Everyone is dreaming about snakes, how podcasts are killing non-fiction, pre-industrial death, did Candy Crush Saga topple Assad?
Plus more links and quotes
Hello!
Welcome to Cultural Capital!
In The Times this week I wrote about how the Epstein files offer a window into the ghastly vacuousness of the international business elite who it turns out are constantly emailing each other inane “ideas” and “insights”:
Epstein belonged to an international elite that displayed its status through “big ideas” and “thought leadership”. In ideology (if not in practice) our society is a meritocracy and to feel comfortable at the top, the wealthy need to believe they’ve earned their position through their creativity and brilliance. Contemplating their ranches, private islands and jets the Epstein set managed to convince themselves that all this wealth was not evidence of anything as prosaic as birth or luck or even hard work — rather, these were the rewards of intellect, “super-forecasting” and “pattern reading”.
The non-fiction crisis
This is a very interesting piece in The Times about the collapse of non-fiction — something anyone who works in the vicinity of publishing has heard rumours about for a while now. The numbers are stark: sales of non-fiction books have fallen by seventeen million in the last six years. “There were only four non-fiction titles among last year’s Top 20 bestsellers. They were Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember, Mel Robbins’s The Let Them Theory, Jamie Oliver’s Eat Yourself Healthy and — as always — the Guinness Book of World Records”. What happened was probably podcasts:
Mark Richards, a co-founder of the independent publisher Swift Press, is keeping a beady eye on the podcast threat. “Until very recently,” he says, “if you wanted to hear about a subject in any kind of depth, a book was the place to go. It was a monopoly format. Once the internet started, yes, you could go and research online, discover the history of the Tudors or whatever, but you’d probably spend ages. Whereas now I do think, with podcasts, there’s a format that for the first time ever is a viable competitor to the book.”
What’s also striking is how low quality best selling books are nowadays. The big story a decade ago was the hollowing out of literary fiction. This has now pretty much happened and almost all best selling fiction is romantasy slop. Now the same thing is happening to non-fiction and all that remains is Charlie Mackesy and The Guinness Book of World Records. The enshittification of publishing?
The death of book world
On the same gloomy theme, this is a beautiful piece by Becca Rothfeld — one of the very best literary critics currently writing — on the recent abolition of the Washington Post’s book section where she worked (she’s now moved to the New Yorker). I love her description of what a newspaper should be for. Americans are much better at being idealistic about journalism than we are in Britain:
Unlike the specialized literary magazine and its informal cousin, the literary blog, the general-interest newspaper has a kind of noble rapacity, an encyclopedic ambition to wrap its arms around the whole of the world. The Times insists that it strains to publish “all the news that’s fit to print,” and the Washington Post’s own principles, written by Eugene Meyer in 1935, when he became the paper’s publisher, proclaim that it “shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it.” (They also promise that “the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good,” something that the paper’s present owner appears to have forgotten, if he ever knew it.)
Pre-industrial death
On a more positive note, this is interesting on falling mortality rates. If you’re in your thirties your everyday chance of dying is minuscule compared to what it was two and a half centuries ago when there was a non-trivial chance you could just die at some point in the next year:
Since the eighteenth century, life expectancy has more than doubled in most countries. What has driven this? A common misconception is that it’s overwhelmingly about lower childhood mortality – that if you survived to adulthood, your life expectancy was close to today’s. But that’s not true at all. People faced a much higher risk of dying throughout life. In the 1780s, the risk that a 30-year-old Swedish woman would die within the next year was one percent – 33 times higher than the risk a woman of that age faces today.
In any given year, there was a realistic risk you wouldn’t live to see your next birthday. When annual mortality was at its lowest – around age ten – it was what 65-year-olds have now.
Socialising alone
An interesting new study about how our interactions change when we socialise via technology as opposed to in person. When we socialise through a screen we are less productive, think less and work less well:
People don’t process the information as thoroughly when it comes in via technology, as opposed to getting it in person. They don’t think about it as much. Of course, these are broad averages, and some email messages can prompt high arousal, serious thinking, and more. Still, in general there is less thinking.
Unsurprisingly technology removes our social inhibitions and makes us more likely to criticise each other:
Technology seems to reduce some inhibitions, for better and for worse. People are more willing to criticize each other via technology than in person. They are more willing to bring up alternative ideas, perspectives, and approaches. One study on ‘virtual brainstorming’ found that groups who were tasked with generating creative ideas produced more of them if they were interacting via technology rather than in person. Unfortunately, most of these were poor quality ideas.
The most common dream in every country
Via Jörgen Löwenfeldt. Ah those universal human concerns: “snake”, “teeth falling out” and “pregnancy”. The nice outlier is Iceland where the most popular dream is “snow”.
Realism and the novel
I have raved about the LRB’s Close Readings podcast before. I forgot to mention it at the time but Seamus Perry and Mark Ford’s recent analysis of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem ‘Felix Randal’ is unexpectedly one of the most charming and moving podcast episodes I’ve heard in ages.
Anyway as the rest of the podcast industry dissolves into celebrity slop the LRB is going ever more unrepentantly high brow. In the latest Close Readings venture the critic James Wood (one of my heroes) is delivering a series of hour-long lectures on realism and the novel. In the first one he walks you through Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary:
Nobody else in the world is making podcasts like this. Highly recommended. (Even though you have to pay and it’s fiddly to sign up to).
Fall of Assad
I was amused to learn that the fall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad was apparently partly caused by his addiction to the iPhone game Candy Crush saga. I don’t think any of the optimistic commentary about the ways technology could overturn dictators around the time of the Arab Spring anticipated it could happen quite like this:
The Axis of Resistance was falling apart. That should have worried Assad, especially in light of the fact that Russia, his other protector, was bogged down in Ukraine. But the atmosphere at the palace was not conducive to clear thinking. Assad was spending much of his time playing Candy Crush and other video games on his phone, according to the former Hezbollah operative I spoke with.
Should have got a dumbphone.
The Swerve
Continuing my streak of good books: last week I read and loved Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve about the rediscovery of Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura and the origins of the Renaissance. I don’t think any book has given me such a sense of the excitement people in the Renaissance felt about the idea that there was a lost highly-sophisticated civilisation in the distant pass waiting to be rediscovered. It’s a thrilling narrative too.
It’s worth saying that Greenblatt’s book has come in for some fairly intense criticism. He is accused of perpetuating the Enlightenment myth that the “dark ages” were a dreadful time of bigotry, superstition and ignorance when everyone just sat in monasteries in the rain burning rare classical texts to keep themselves warm. I do get some of the criticisms but I also feel that some people are attacking a caricature of the book.
And though I’m a fan of late antiquity I also can’t help feeling that the idea that the dark ages were “a time of light and reason akshully” has become just as much of an annoying cliché as the idea that the dark ages were incredibly dark and that nobody had a single worthwhile thought for five hundred years.
Call me Edward Gibbon but I continue to think the Dark Ages were clearly culturally inferior to the Renaissance in lots of ways. Shoot me. Or complain in the comments. And also let me know what you’re reading this week.
Until next time,
James
"And though I’m a fan of late antiquity I also can’t help feeling that the idea that the dark ages were “a time of light and reason akshully” has become just as much of an annoying cliché as the idea that the dark ages were incredibly dark and that nobody had a single worthwhile thought for five hundred years."
I think a lot depends here on what you call "the dark ages". If you think that everything between Constantine and the Renaissance was a cultural desert, then you are obviously wrong - late antiquity (let's say, the 4th and 5th centuries AD) has incredible cultural and intellectual riches, and so do the high Middle Ages (let's say, late 11th-early 14th centuries). But if - which is more plausible - you narrow it down to Western Europe between (let's say) the fall of the Western Empire in 476 and the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor in 800, then one has a much fairer point - there is a massive diminution in intellectual and cultural life in those centuries.
My experience is that a lot of the arguments on these questions are at cross purposes, because one person says "The Dark Ages were a miserable cultural desert", and another says - "No they weren't - what about Ausonius? what about Dante?", not realizing that they're actually talking about different periods. There is also the question of place: Islamic culture flourished in North Africa and the Middle East while Western Europe was languishing; Byzantium also had a much richer cultural life at that time. But I don't think Procopius or al-Kwarizmi should count as proofs that there was no Dark Ages in Western Europe!
But in that case, one has to accept that, while there was an obvious qualitative difference between the Renaissance and what went before, someone like Greenblatt arguably overstates the difference Poggio's rediscovery of Lucretius made to the general culture - we shouldn't be contrasting the 15th century with the 8th century, but with what went immediately before.
I wonder if some of the nonfiction sales decline is also due to the shrinking of the midlist, which in turn leads to lower advances for nonfiction writers, which — in theory — could lead to nonfiction writers having less time & fewer resources for research, which makes for books that aren't as satisfying as they might be.