Reader's Digest: October 21, 2023

Recent reading spans the antique past, the televisual present, and everything in between.

Alexandra Gold has a brilliant, perceptive piece on “Every Second Counts,” the contronymic catchphrase of The Bear, in the LA Review of Books.

In the TLS, Nick Lowe writes beautifully, and rigorously, about the Iliad. He adapts from Robin Lane Fox “a stunning, perhaps stunningly obvious, thought: what if the Iliad is able to be all these things for us precisely because we have lost the power to understand the processes of mind and world that made it possible?”—which reminds me of Stephen Greenblatt on the “strategic opacity” of Shakespeare, a more deliberate exploitation of the literary power of incomprehension.

I can neither endorse nor refute Lowe’s critique of the line breaks in Emily Wilson’s Iliad, but I enjoyed the brief illusion of inside knowledge.¹

Also beyond my expertise to judge is David Samuels’ contribution to an established genre: essays on how the internet is changing us. Samuels goe…