Benjamin Books

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What we gain from keeping books – and why it doesn’t need to be ‘joy’ | Anakana Schofield Tidying guru Marie Kondo advises us to ditch reading we don’t find joyful. But one’s personal library should do much more than anthologise warm feelings

Blisteringly ironic review of a pile of nonsense!

“There’s a rich irony at the heart of the old radical campus cliché. During the postwar period, conservatives feared that higher education was fomenting leftist revolution. In reality, elite institutions like Berkeley and Yale were enshrining meritocracy as the official rule of American life, while more quietly preserving the advantages that come with money. Higher education prepares students to succeed within a competitive, stratified American society, not change it. The fear is always that today’s radicals will implement their ideas tomorrow. Or, in Mac Donald’s words, “a pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media.” But will those who attain “the highest reaches of government and media” really be interested in tearing the heights down? It didn’t happen in the 1960s. It didn’t happen in the 1990s. Don’t count on it this time, either.
“So why does Mac Donald insist otherwise? Why are conservatives still so afraid of higher education after all these years? Most obviously, demagoging higher education works political wonders. It’s not only Buckley and Mac Donald who sell books against higher education; politicians from Nixon and Reagan to Scott Walker and Donald Trump have sold their campaigns that way, too. While lambasting egg-headed professors, they can both pose as populists and promise tax cuts for the rich.”

Why Are Conservatives So Afraid of Higher Education? - Los Angeles Review of Books A book predicting the imminent threat to American civilization from its own universities is only the latest rewrite of an old falsehood.

Happy New Year!

New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out Works by Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie and Robert Frost are entering the public domain on Jan. 1. And that’s just the first wave.