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“To Paradise is so unusually terrible that it is a sort of anti-accomplishment, the rare book that manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s tale with near unreadable feats of convolution. It is too juvenile to attract serious adult readers and too obtuse to aspire to popular appeal. […] There is nothing to recommend it to anyone. […] The fundamental problem is simple and devastating: the book does not make any sense … Aside from its sheer incoherence, its most notable feature is only its punishing length. On and on it goes, sprouting new subplots, amassing new contrivances. Anyone must have a brain of stone to finish it without shedding tears of relief.” From Lithub’s list of 2022’s most scathing book reviews.
Ezra Klein: “Think of the hopeful imaginings that accompanied the early days of social media: We would know one another across time and space; we would share with one another across cultures and generations; we would inform one another across borders and factions. Billions of people use these services. Their scale is truly civilizational. And what have they wrought? Is the world more democratic? Is G.D.P. growth higher? Is innovation faster? Do we seem wiser? Do we seem kinder? Are we happier? Shouldn’t something, anything, have gotten noticeably better in the short decades since these services fought their way into our lives?”
Harry Brighouse: “I spend a fair amount of time observing other people’s classes, usually from the back. Few of the teachers are bad, and many are pretty good. In classes which allow laptops anything from 1/3 to 2/3 of the students have them in front of them, and at any given time almost all the screens I can see are email, shopping sites, gaming sites, and television/movies. I’ve sat in numerous classrooms in which fewer than half of the students are paying any attention to what is happening in class.”
