The Case for Booksmaxxing: On Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?

We live in an unprecedented moment for booksmaxxing. I don’t know how I could otherwise make my way through authors like Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard — the latter of whom surely wrote not to be understood. With ChatGPT to help me sentence by sentence at times, Wikipedia, and the ungodly profusion of podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, and other internet rabbit holes, I feel that I could read almost anything.

Heil Hollywood: On Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director

There’s an unspoken rule that if you write a novel about Nazis, the point can’t simply be “the Nazis were evil” or “keeping company with Nazis is wrong.” But judging from the American reception of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director — which has been noted for its “unnerving timing” and described as “curiously prophetic” — you’d think that was exactly the book he’d written.