Frances Burney’s Birthday and a Very Strange Week in Reading
June 12 marks the birth of Frances Burney in 1752 – and the literary internet, as it does, used the occasion to sprawl across topics ranging from forged Renaissance documents to chatbots inventing lighthouse keepers named Elias Thorne.
The Week’s Big Ideas
Michael Tomasky’s piece in The New Republic arrived with considerable force. His argument: the New York Times, through what he describes as broad-mindedness, has functioned as a vehicle advancing a narrow-minded agenda while dismantling the country’s most venerated television news operation. It’s a blunt charge about institutional complicity, and Tomasky doesn’t dress it softly. The framing is less about media criticism as a genre and more about what happens when a publication mistakes access for neutrality.
Separately, Equator published a newly translated Thomas Mann essay – translation by Pankaj Mishra – in which Mann, writing in 1949, describes America’s “terrifying moral decline.” The editors flagged it as still relevant, which functions either as a pointed observation or a small act of exhaustion. Both, probably. Mann’s essay lands differently when you know it was buried in a language most American readers couldn’t access for three-quarters of a century.
At The Nation, Erik Baker reads Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, as a deliberate position taken within the arguments fracturing Catholicism since the mid-20th century. Baker’s framework treats the document not as pastoral statement but as faction signal – a way of reading religious texts that tends to irritate the faithful and interest everyone else.
Lauren Oyler’s account of meeting her AI boyfriend, published in The Yale Review, pivots on a line worth sitting with: “The threat of loss, the inability to ever truly know another person or be known, is not a problem; it is part of what makes love exciting, meaningful, and even fun.” Whether Oyler is talking about the AI or something else entirely is left productively open.
Celan, Chantal Akerman, and COVID Novels That Missed the Point
Mitchell Abidor’s essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books considers three new books by and about Paul Celan – a grouping that raises the question of what biography can actually do with a poet whose work resists paraphrase so completely. Celan’s life and legacy have attracted sustained scholarly attention for decades, and yet something about his work keeps generating new approaches, as though readers keep hoping the next book will be the one that finally explains what the poems mean to feel so permanent.
Ria Banerjee’s piece in Public Books examines what she calls the “Woolfian” aspects of Chantal Akerman’s films. The comparison isn’t decorative – Banerjee is tracking something structural about interiority, duration, and the way both Woolf and Akerman treat domestic space as philosophically loaded rather than merely scenic. Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway share more than a surface resemblance to the rhythms of a single day.
Morgan Leigh Davies, writing in Current Affairs, makes a case that COVID novels have largely gotten it wrong – which, given how many were written, is a statistical probability as much as a critical judgment. Davies doesn’t appear to be arguing that writers failed to capture the pandemic’s facts, but that they missed its texture: the specific psychological deformation of living inside an event that had no legible shape while you were inside it.
At 404 Media, a report on how stories about a lighthouse keeper named Elias Thorne escaped chatbot containment. The detail that sticks is the name – specific enough to feel real, generic enough to have been invented wholesale. That’s the AI fiction problem in miniature: the stories are plausible until they aren’t, and by then they’ve circulated.
Wired ran a piece arguing that AI should leave serif fonts alone. This is, on its surface, a typographic complaint. The underlying anxiety is about what happens to visual culture when generative systems start making aesthetic decisions based on pattern-matching rather than intention. Serif fonts – with their centuries of association with print, authority, and literary seriousness – become a proxy for a larger argument about what gets flattened when machines optimize for familiarity.
Lavinia Spalding on Grief, Travel Writing, and the Labor Buried in the Digital Revolution
Lavinia Spalding, speaking to Cheri Lucas Rowlands at Longreads about editing the Best Women’s Travel Writing series, offered one of the week’s more memorable observations: “I think grief turns us more porous, and so everything we experience when we’re traveling – all the unexpected beauty and tenderness that accompanies travel – can feel heightened.” It’s a description of how loss changes perception rather than paralyzes it, and it reframes what travel writing is actually for.
At The Baffler, a piece on the human labor embedded in the digital revolution draws a direct line between the push to computerize American workplaces and a sustained depression of wages: “In their rush to computerize, American companies inaugurated a race to the bottom, paying workers ever lower wages to ensure their computers would bring a return on investment.” The argument isn’t new, but the framing locates the cost precisely – not in the technology itself, but in the economic logic that justified adopting it. Meanwhile, JSTOR Daily‘s Matthew Wills traces the history of a Galileo forgery, and over at Slate, Nadira Goffe digs into the initial hostility toward the film adaptation of The Color Purple and what the decades since have done to that reception. The 2024 Columbia student protests get a comparative read in Defector, placed alongside Madison Square Garden’s security theater: “What started as an extravagant use of force became a normal part of student life.” Dave Eggers, meanwhile, talked to Jane Ciabattari about writing a novel that tries to understand visual artists – and does so, he notes, as a visual artist himself. Lit Hub’s Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge is in round two, with 50 of the greatest summer novels in competition. Which raises the obvious problem: the list exists, and now someone has to actually read them.
