What happened to literary studies? If professionalization was the flaw in the construction of the bridge, making it unstable, it turns out there’s a meteor heading for the bridge anyway: the steady diminution of literature’s role in a culture where electronic, networked media is dominant. […] By lowering the barrier to entry, the Internet encouraged an early 21st-century efflorescence of occasional criticism and spontaneous theorizing that fostered vibrant subcultural readerships.

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Just because we don’t believe in aesthetic standards as a culture doesn’t mean we aren’t making constant aesthetic judgments that rely on a wide range of hierarchies: [Study authors] found that writers ‘with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.’ They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.

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Rowan Williams reviews Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things. A masterful and appreciative review, unsurprisingly. Williams points out that so many criticisms of McGilchrist’s work reflect exactly the tendencies that McGilchrist traces and decries in his work. He also rearticulates McGilchrist’s exceptionally helpful descriptions of thinking, truth, science, and objectivity: Thought takes time; encountering a limit suggests new questions — including the question of whether we have thus far been asking the right questions.

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