1. What Kinds of Books Were Published Last Year - A List... The book industry published almost 115,000 titles last year. Fiction was by far the biggest genre - accounting for almost 16,000 of those titles. But the next biggest category is a bit of a surprise - Sociology and Economics - accounting for almost 13,000 titles. Here's a chart that breaks down what was published... Bookwire 12/02
   
   
2. Classical Gas - Stuck In The Past? Why do people constantly dump on classical music? Justin Davidson writes that "those who are most passionate about the art are also people with a strong allegiance to the past - often stronger, in fact, than their affection for the present. Connoisseurs believe in a golden age, when composers really knew how to write, performers knew how to play and music lovers knew how to listen. To members of this cult of bygones, John Adams is a puny figure hopping alongside the colossus of Beethoven, and the violinist Maxim Vengerov a flickering shade in the brilliance of Nathan Milstein. The present is degraded precisely because it can never be the past." Chicago Tribune (Newsday) 12/24/02
   
   
3. Why Philosophy Has Lost Its Grip On The World There was a time philosophy was thought a lofty pursuit - a calling that tried to explain the world. But "despite important developments in recent decades in philosophical accounts of thought and meaning, law and ethics, and knowledge and consciousness, the enterprise of philosophy is no longer taken very seriously nor accorded any special status in the broader culture." Why? "Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of the democratic res publica. Boston Review 12/02
   
   
4. Where Rudeness Is A Status Symbol? Bad behavior among Hollywood execs who have any power, is rarely punished. "This is Hollywood, the only business in the world where people seem to confuse rudeness with power. People think that being rude and demeaning is somehow a show of importance when, to me, it just suggests that you're dealing with a lot of spoiled brats whose mommies didn't give them enough time-outs." Los Angeles Times 12/23/02
   
   
5. Explaining The Glenn Gould Phenomenon Glenn Gould was (and remains) a phenomenon of the music world - a figure taken up in the broader culture to a remarkable degree. Why?"What made Gould’s Goldbergs so popular that they could be plausibly incorporated into the cultural décor of The Silence of the Lambs? Why are they still so popular today? The answers, not surprisingly, have almost as much to do with extra-musical factors as with purely musical ones." Commentary 12/02