Micah Mattix

In a recent article in Science, Mike Kestemont and Folgert Karsdorp employ the “unseen species model,” which is taken from ecology, to estimate the number of medieval manuscripts that have been lost over the years. They estimate that we have lost a whopping 90% of medieval manuscripts containing heroic narratives. In the Guardian, Laura Spinney notes that it isn’t only medieval manuscripts we’ve lost. We have 543 early modern plays produced between 1576 and 1642, but these likely “represent a fraction of all those produced”: Another 744 that certainly existed have been lost, and hundreds more were probably written to fill the repertory calendar, of which no trace remains.

My wife and I bought our first IKEA Billy bookshelf twenty years ago. We now have fourteen in various shades of sun-bleached faux yellow pine. Whenever we needed more book space, we could make a trip to IKEA, whether that was in Allaman in Switzerland, New Haven, Houston, Charlotte or Virginia Beach. Not anymore. IKEA is apparently changing the design and materials of the cheapo shelf. Gone are the annoying finishing nails that might nick the shelves as you try to secure the flappy back. Gone, too, is the thin wood veneer glued to the medium density fiberboards (MDFs). Instead, IKEA will now use foil paper. There are other changes, but the point of the redesign is to make the shelves sturdier, easier to move and more ecologically “friendly.” Fine.

I have some thoughts on poetry and morality coming soon to a publication near you, but in the meantime, let me direct you to Alice Gribben’s wonderfully gripey piece in Tablet on how the contemporary art world is ruining art: Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of its audience. Paintings are their images; physically encountering an original is nice, yes, but it’s not as if any essence resides there. Even a verbal description of a painting provides enough information for its message to be clear.

Jill Lepore reviews three new books on the bicycle in the New Yorker. I know this because she mentions the titles in between long passages about the first bike she learned to ride, how many bikes she has owned, and how many times she’s been hit by a car. She also tells us that bicycles are machines of the left, though for some reason this hasn’t stopped them from being used in the service of war and colonialism: Bicycles and bicyclists veer to the political left. Environmentalists ride bicycles. American suffragists rode bicycles. So did English socialists, who called the bicycle “the people’s nag.” Animal-welfare activists, who opposed the whipping of horses, favored bicycles...

Ward Farnsworth’s writing guides  I am a big fan of Ward Farnsworth’s guides to writing. He has published three of them: Ward Farnsworth’s Guide to Classical English Metaphor, Ward Farnsworth’s Guide to Classical English Rhetoric, and Ward Farnsworth’s Guide to Classical English Style. Each is beautifully designed and printed by the publisher David R. Godine (whom I wrote about here). In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Colin Marshall surveys Farnsworth’s guides and his two books on philosophy. In the guides to writing, Farnsworth provides hundreds of sample sentences to illustrate his points. Almost all of these are from the nineteenth century.

The crisis in American higher ed It’s not quite right to say that American higher ed is in crisis. It does a lot of things very well and has, as Nick Burns points out in his history of the institution, a huge influence not just on American culture (for better and worse) but also the American economy: Expanding at breakneck speed after the Second World War, the American university has transformed from an institution accessible only to a small elite to the site of personal, professional, and political for­mation for vast swaths of the middle classes. Bachelor’s degree recipients made up just 5 percent of the U.S. adult population in 1940.

Tallying race in post-war American fiction In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mordechai Levy-Eichel and Daniel Scheinerman have a doozy of a review of Jean So’s Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction. Many people think, So argues, that fiction has become more diverse since World War Two, both in terms of novels published by minorities and women and prizes won. But that is not the case. Here are Levy-Eichel and Scheinerman: According to So, the underlying feature of postwar American literature was the "inertia of whiteness" — by which he means the predominance of white, male writers like John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow in terms of awards, reviews, and prestige.

The Atlantic’s expanded books section  The Atlantic has announced it is expanding its books section. Reading can be revelatory, Jane Yong Kim writes in her note on the news. “Reading about books can have a similarly revelatory effect.” Do tell. Kim goes on. She trots out all the clichés about reading today as reasons for, well, reading — not a particularly auspicious start. Reading “has a unique quality of slowing us down even as it widens our horizons,” she writes. Books are a “vehicle for the free expression of ideas,” and free expression, in case you haven’t noticed, is under attack. But the expanded books section at the Atlantic, Kim tells us, is going to be a place where unpopular ideas will finally be given a hearing.

In the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien reviews the complete Richard Wilbur verse translations of Molière, published in a new two-volume set by the Library of America. O’Brien doesn’t say so, but it’s a little odd for the Library of America to choose these volumes to republish. There are other works in translation in the catalogue, which focuses on “great American literature,” but those works either concern America herself (Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) or, as with Ezra Pound’s translations, are rendered so loosely as to constitute new works. According to Wilbur, however, the task of the translator is to replicate the original as much as possible in the translated text.

Conservative editor and writer Midge Decter has died. She was 94. She was an executive editor at Harper’s and an editor at Basic Books, as well as the founder of the Independent Women’s Forum, co-chair of the Committee for the Free World, a board member of the Heritage Foundation, and one-time president of the Philadelphia Society. She married Norman Podhoretz in 1956 and is the mother John Podhoretz, current editor of Commentary, and journalist Ruthie Blum. In National Review, Yuval Levin remembers her as a “powerful and penetrating writer.” He writes: Her essays could see right to the core of the failures of the modern left — often long before those failures become apparent as a practical matter to everyone with eyes to see.

The New York Times reports on a minor dust-up in the world of medieval scholarship. Mary Rambaran-Olm, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, wrote a largely negative review for the Los Angeles Review of Books in which she accused Matthew Gabriele and David Perry of “whitewashing” medieval history in their new book, The Bright Ages, in which (I have read the book) they attempt very much to do the opposite. They include the stories of figures (women and minorities) who are usually not included in trade histories covering over 1,000 years. The editors at the Los Angeles Review of Books requested edits to the review. Rambaran-Olm apparently refused most of them, so the editors killed the review.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Aaron Snyder reviews a new book on free speech in higher education that argues that the idea of free speech has been used to protect racists from being punished for their racist ideas. The book is called It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. The authors — Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth — argue that the academy is full of white supremacists.

If you haven’t read Jean Rhys’s Wide Saragossa Sea, you should. It’s a “prequel” to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and while Rhys’s 1966 take on Mr. Rochester’s marriage to his first wife (who goes insane and is kept in the attic in Jane Eyre) is a tad heavy-handed, it is still an excellent if depressing read. Rhys’s life, it turns out, also makes for depressing reading. In the latest issue of Literary Review, Claudia Fitzherbert reviews Miranda Seymour’s biography of the novelist, I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys: “In 1974, at the age of eighty-four, Jean Rhys was asked in a television interview whether she would prefer to write or be happy were she to live her life over again. ‘Oh, happiness!

In Aeon, Mara van der Lugt writes in defense of pessimism — sort of — by way of revisiting Voltaire’s response to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Candide: The question concerning these philosophers, then, is not just the theoretical one about whether life in general is good or bad, but also a more concrete one: face to face with one who suffers, what can philosophy bring to the table? What can philosophy offer in the way of hope and consolation? Both strands of thought have the same aim, but they plot different routes to get there: the pessimists offer consolation by emphasising our fragility, by recognising that no matter how hard we try, we may fail to achieve happiness, for no fault of our own.

If you haven’t read James Pogue’s essay in Vanity Fair on the New Right, as he calls them, do so. It is that rare thing today — a balanced and informative piece in a legacy publication. One thing that caught my eye was Curtis Yarvin’s interest in art and poetry. Yarvin is a forty-eight-year-old ex-programmer and blogger “who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique and popularize the key terms of the New Right,” Pogue writes. He likes to write poetry, usually under the name of Mencius Moldbug, and is the poetry judge for the Passage Prize, a new arts award with $15,000 in prize money for poetry, fiction, nonfiction and visual art. Yarvin published the winners of the poetry contest on his Substack, Imperial Melodies.