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Hunting John Wilkes Booth’s Diary, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
June 11, 2014
On the Shelf
Booth ca. 1865. His diary may be in an abandoned tunnel in Brooklyn.
Knausgaard
responds to his newfound celebrity
…
… and the French
shrug at that celebrity
. “Knausgaard gives us one striking example of what looks again like a very French phenomenon … The list of French books in the same vein of meticulous self-analysis is nearly infinite … Let’s hope that Knausgaard’s unexpected success will make them rethink their hasty judgment and consider the French production with fresh eyes.”
Is John Wilkes Booth’s diary in
a forgotten Brooklyn subway tunnel
?
The complex, semitragic history of
Entertainment Weekly
and
ent-fo
, i.e., “entertainment information”: “The plan was highly digestible reviews intended to keep the bourgeoisie in touch … They wanted to assist ‘the aging baby boomer who still wants to be plugged in,’ using a scale (A to F) that reflected the ‘universal experience’ of school grades. If you read
EW
, the logic went, you were saving yourself from your own bad decisions: The magazine’s pitch for subscribers even asked potential readers to weigh the $50-dollar yearly rate against ‘the cost of a bad evening’s entertainment.’”
Commentators in the nineteenth century argued that
chess, being so addictive, would turn our nation’s youths into bloodthirsty maniacs
: “The great interest taken in this warlike game—the importance attached to a victory—and the disgrace attending defeat, are exemplified in numerous instances … It is said, that the Devil, in order to make poor Job lose his patience, had only to engage him at a game at Chess.”
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