On Jonathan Franzen and "What's Wrong with the Modern World"
Well, I’m late to the party again, but I finally backtracked the famous - or notorious - Franzen essay in which he attacks Twitter, Apple, Amazon, the Internet in general, and modern life pretty much as a whole… and all I can say is, hear, hear. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about cool-ness and its discontents, and I’ve been feeling, not angry, but mordant and irritable, and he wrapped the whole thing up and put it in a box neat as you please. (And good on Zoe Heller for being able to say so in print.) I missed out on the general hue and cry, which is probably a good thing as far as my mental health goes, but what I can say about that is that if the yakkers and gabbers and apostles of the digital frontier find the meat too strong for them it’s no surprise, and they’ll be first up against the wall. Emerson: “The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough.”