Tag: Arms race
The Dirty Secrets of Book Blurbs
If there’s one thing authors love more than procrastinating, it’s praising one another. During the Renaissance, Thomas More’s Utopia got a proto-blurb from Erasmus (“divine wit”), while Shakespeare’s First Folio got one from Ben Johnson (“The wonder of our stage!”). By the 18th century, the practice of selling a book based on some other author’s endorsement was so well established that Henry Fielding’s spoof novel Shamela even came with fake blurbs, including one from “John Puff Esq.”
Blurbs have always
Oppenheimer’s Cry of Despair in The Atlantic
In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor. But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly
The US and Europe Aren’t Interested in Diplomacy
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.