From The Paris Review:
- The National Magazine Awards have announced that they’re suspending their fiction category next year. You can probably guess why: “Only fourteen magazines submitted entries in the category in 2016—a fraction of the number of participants in other categories,” Sid Holt, the chief executive of the American Society of Magazine Editors, wrote last week. “Compounding the problem, few ASME members say they are competent to judge the category.” It’s sort of like how the Olympics canceled team equestrian dressage this summer because it’s the least popular sport—it’s just a bunch of people on horses, who cares, aren’t there women in spandex we can watch instead? Except, wait, they didn’t cancel it. They did it anyway. Yes: even the Rio Olympics, which received more attention this year than ever for their corruption and dishonesty, saw that some areas of human achievement deserve recognition even if they’re increasingly unpopular. By the way, Sid Holt’s email address is sholt@magazine.org.
- I’m not saying this is related or anything, but have you noticed how relevant the Frankfurt School seems to be all of a sudden? It’s as if their critiques of capitalism have found new footing in a world where, say, the judges of the National Magazine Awards can no longer be bothered to read short fiction. Stuart Jeffries writes, “If Adorno were alive today, he might well have argued that that cultural apocalypse has already happened, but that we are too uncritical to notice it. His fondest fears have been realized … The leading lights of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, never lived to develop social media profiles, but they would have seen much of what the internet offers as confirmation of their view that the culture industry allows the ‘freedom to choose what is always the same"....MORE
