more than 95 theses

Nadal, though? He plays like he’s fighting giants. It’s not just the sneer, or the muscles, or the hair, or that forehand — you know, the one where he swoops the racket all the way around his head like he’s whipping the team pulling his chariot. It’s also that frantic tenacity that used to drive me so nuts. Federer seems devastated when he loses but he also seems to sense losses coming and accept them before they arrive. When Nadal falls behind, he turns the match into life and death. He gets mad. He hesitates less. He hits the ball harder. He doesn’t look sad or scared. He looks defiant, and he plays like he’s possessed.

As a result, he carries matches to a higher plane than they have any business reaching. Djokovic could and should have won the Australian final in four sets, but Nadal refused to surrender, played lethal tennis, and took Djokovic to a place he’d never been. Instead of notching a routine victory, Djokovic had to tap into the same well of inspiration that Nadal was already drawing from. You could say that all these guys have learned what it means to fight on the plains of Troy because Nadal does it in every match. And we see him do it, so we know what it means, too.

Such people are strictly amateur compared to, say, Harold Williams, a New Zealander who attended the League of Nations and is said to have spoken comfortably to each delegate in the delegate’s native tongue, or the American Kenneth Hale, who learned passable Finnish (one of about fifty languages he was reputed to speak convincingly) on a flight to Helsinki and allegedly learned Japanese after a single viewing of the Shogun miniseries.

The most famous hyperpolyglot is Giuseppe Mezzofanti, the nineteenth-century Bolognese cardinal who was reputed to speak between thirty and seventy languages, ranging from Chaldaean to Algonquin. He spoke them so well, and with such a feather-light foreign accent, according to his Irish biographer, that English visitors mistook him for their countryman Cardinal Charles Acton. (They also said he spoke as if reading from The Spectator.) His ability to learn a language in a matter of days or hours was so devilishly impressive that one suspects Mezzofanti pursued the cardinalate in part to shelter himself from accusations that he had bought the talent from Satan himself.

But what if you could re-define books’ value proposition? What if book-buying became less about one-off salesmanship, and more about ongoing membership? What if you didn’t buy books so much as join them?

It’s that kind of wholesale, psychic reframing that Audiobooks’ model is hinting at. And while audiobooks are a special case in that, being audiobooks, they’re especially suited to streaming, it’s easy to see a membership model proving effective for all kinds of digital content, “traditional” e-books very much included. It’s easy to envision a kind of iTunes-in-reverse subscription framework that charges customers not per book, but per month — or, hey, per minute or week or year. Time over tome.

And it’s easy to imagine, furthermore, that shift bringing a new life to books both as consumer goods and as epistemic objects. Book-buying, made blissfully brainless! Reading, unlimited! Netflix’s streaming model — which Amazon, the rumor goes, might soon be imitating — changed the way we relate to movies. Spotify’s streaming changed the way we relate to songs. The cloud is a powerful thing. And the revolution that’s taking place in computing overall — the computer as an object giving way to the computer as a service — is changing our approach to content consumption, as well. As more and more of our stuff moves to the cloud, and as the mechanism of stuff-storage shifts from the download to the stream, the membership-driven library seems more and more feasible. And more and more sensible. And more and more exciting.

If you have read several books by Don DeLillo, sooner or later you will have a Don DeLillo moment. Mine occurred in May 2010, in the Museum of Modern Art, at the Marina Abramović exhibition “The Artist Is Present.” I was fascinated, but not by the particulars of her performance art, although they were interesting enough. Her manner of sitting utterly still for hours and staring at one volunteer after another positioned a few feet across from her compelled the attention of the crowd, as did the naked (and often jarringly beautiful), immobilized, blank-faced models and dancers who were also part of the exhibition.

What made me think of DeLillo at MoMA was not the art, however, but the spectators. They were all transfixed. They stared at Abramović and her collaborators as if the performers’ trance states were contagious. A kind of communal hypnosis seemed to be at work. I had never seen anything like it. On the day I was there, the usually noisy galleries had settled down into a low murmur, though I did hear nervous laughter coming from unhip oldsters. An intriguing collective project was going on, but no one seemed to know exactly what it was. I half-expected to spot DeLillo somewhere in the crowd, patiently watching the spectators who were watching the immobilized performers who, like pretty narcissists, were staring off into space at nothing. You could glance at anything, but your glance would never be acknowledged by anybody. Something importantly autistic was in the air.

In a companion survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Twitter users, the Portland-Tweetminster team found that the vast majority of those users — roughly 80 percent — use the service primarily for communicating with friends. But, fascinatingly, 68 percent of those polled said they also use Twitter to monitor the news, making Twitter a potentially effective, if still nascent, way to circumvent African nations’ generally highly restricted media institutions. And more than a quarter of the survey respondents said they use Twitter to keep track of job opportunities.

Also worth noting: Just over half — 57 percent — of tweets, the analysis found, are sent from mobile devices. Which is actually a surprisingly low number, considering that, per a recent report, 433 million people in Africa — 53 percent of the overall population — currently have a mobile cellular subscription, while only 1 million (0.2 percent) subscribe to fixed broadband.

The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate…. When I proposed at a meeting of EU mayors the idea of also introducing Erasmus for craftsmen and professionals, a Welsh mayor said: ‘My citizens would never accept this!’ And when I spoke about this a few days ago on English television, I was slapped down by the anchorman, who was worried about the euro crisis, about a supranational Europe and about the technical governments of Papademos in Greece and Monti in Italy who were not ‘elected’, and are therefore ‘undemocratic’….

Back when Pope Wojtyla was still alive, there was much discussion on whether they should accept the European constitution and the continent’s Christian roots. Secular people predominated and they did nothing about it. The church protested. There was however a third way, more difficult, but one that would give us strength today.

And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them. That is precisely how I see its future.

Desperate for help [with his failing vision], Huxley was persuaded to pursue the Bates Method, a controversial theory (now largely debunked) suggesting, among other things, that glasses shouldn’t be worn, natural sunlight could be beneficial and a series of exercises and techniques could help improve vision. He claimed impressive results: ‘Within a couple of months I was reading without spectacles and, what was better still, without strain and fatigue … At the present time, my vision, though very far from normal, is about twice as good as it used to be when I wore spectacles.’

That quote comes from The Art Of Seeing, the book he published about his experiences with The Bates Method in 1942. Reviews, were mixed at best. The British Medical Journal review declared: ‘For the simple neurotic who has abundance of time to play with, Huxley’s antics of palming, shifting, flashing, and the rest are probably as good treatment as any other system of Yogi or Couéism. To these the book may be of value. It is hardly possible that it will impress anyone endowed with common sense and a critical faculty.’

In the same article the author suggested that Huxley’s vision may actually have improved naturally with time as some conditions move in cycles. Others, meanwhile, doubted that he could see much at all. Wikipedia cites a Saturday Review column from Bennett Cerf published in 1952, just two years before The Doors Of Perception, describes Huxley speaking at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and seemingly reading from his notes with ease: ‘Then suddenly he faltered — and the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn’t reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn’t read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment.’

On December 10, 1810, in a muddy field around 25 miles from London, a fight took place that was so dramatic, controversial, and ferocious that it continues to haunt the imagination of boxing more than 200 years later. One of the fighters was the greatest champion of his age, a bareknuckle boxer so tough he reportedly trained by punching the bark off trees. The other was a freed slave, an illiterate African-American who had made the voyage across the Atlantic to seek glory in the ring. Rumors about the match had circulated for weeks, transfixing England. Thousands of fans braved a pounding rain to watch the bout. Some of the first professional sportswriters were on hand to record it.

It was the greatest fight of its era. But its significance went beyond that. Even at the time, it seemed to be about more than boxing, more than sport itself. More than anything, the contest between a white English champion and a black American upstart seemed be about an urgent question of identity: whether character could be determined in the boxing ring, whether sport could confirm a set of virtues by which a nation defined itself.