Sublime

essay “The Delta Factor,” “Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?” Why are we “lost in the cosmos?” Why do we feel so deeply, if unconsciously, disconnected?

Je conseille de lire L’Attrape-cœurs à New York. Ce livre est un pur produit de cette ville – comme Central Park et Center Rockefeller le sont à leur manière. Il est à New York ce que Paris est une fête d’Hemingway est à Paris. Il faudra attendre Manhattan, le film de Woody Allen, pour retrouver une telle magie dans la description de cette ville. Q

He conducts an ongoing interrogation about what it all means. What’s black culture? What’s hip-hop? What are the responsibilities of a society and the people in it? And his inquiry isn’t bloodlessly academic, either; there’s something very consequential about his approach.

Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works.

twenty pages in length during the entire year.

Both collectively and individually, the experience of watching TV in 2016 already feels totally disconnected from the experience of watching TV in 1996.