Zadie Smith makes 1860s London feel alive and recognizable | Hacker News Reader

Zadie Smith makes 1860s London feel alive and recognizable

nytimes.com

51 pointstintinnabula40 comments

Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/books/review/zadie-smith-...

I'd think that one thing praise books for is the ability to immerse yourself in other worlds, or to nurture a curious mind.

Here, the reviewer is praising the book for (seemingly) mapping some historical trial to present day politics, which he has some righteous feelings about (& doesn't indicate the book changed his mind about anything).

I guess it's a form of escape, but doesn't really tickle my curiosity all that much.

Classic literature so frequently uses a setting that was already archaic to its readership, to depict that readership's contemporary politics. Literature isn't exclusively escapism. For example, Arthur Miller's The Crucible is about the 17th-century Salem witch trials, but it was written to respond to the McCarthy trials of 1950s America.

Similarly Lawrence & Lee's 1955 Inherit the Wind which was a fictionalization of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" about a teacher being on trial for teaching evolution in the Deep South. Like with The Crucible, it was really talking about the current events of McCarthyism, as in the 1950s it was assumed that everybody accepted evolution by then. Although as later decades showed, creationism wasn't quite as dead as belief in witchcraft.

Reading Zadie Smith's non-fiction makes me convinced that she has one of the most first-class minds I've ever come across (in writing). I can typically devour books in hours, but hers make me feel my intellectual capacity for synthesis and understanding is being overloaded. Too many ideas, too many connections. too much goodness.

Obviously, YMMV (and this is a novel).

Weird that there is no discussion here relevant to the book or the author, though perhaps that's just because the book hasn't been released yet. I really enjoyed "White Teeth" so I suspect I will read this too.

Feel free to post the actual content that everyone is complaining they cannot see. I suspect people are interested.

https://archive.ph/x3s4a

infinite loop captcha?

Same

See other discussions, supposed to be cloudflare dns. If I use my tmobile phone as a hotspot I don't have that issue. My normal internet is comcast, archive.is just loops at captcha

Zadie Smith Makes 1860s London Feel Alive, and Recognizable https://justpaste.it/5sz5k

https://web.archive.org/web/20230831131550/https://www.nytim...

Whoever wrote that headline for the nytimes clearly hasn't heard the quote 'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.' I doubt it's historically accurate if it's 'recognizable'.

Just hearing my still alive g-grandparents when I was a kid talking about their youth (1880s-1910s) made me realise just how different the past was. I can hardly imagine how different 1860 would have been.

Wouldn't this make your Great Grand Parents between 120 and 150 years old (presuming the ability to talk about one's youth starts age ~10)?

I think OP is saying they talked about their youth when OP was a kid, not that they are still alive now.

Yes. My g-grandmother was born in 1880 and died in 1979.

Damedable thing about it is that there's always humans around so it's actually very much the same.

Regrettably little known is that she's a superb oral dramatizer of her own gently ironic social satires:

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-authors-voice/zadie-sm...

I wish I could read this article or even what it is about, but I first got a modal window "our privacy policy has changed" (as if I care, I'm on the Internet, trying to read an article!), so I dismiss it...

And then, half the screen, HALF(!), got covered with a white panel in what looks like "subscribe or vamos!", completely blocking the view.

If you don't want to be on the Internet, fine! Just sell paper or something /s. I'm sorry I'd like to support quality journalism and articles but this is not the way. You won't see a dime from me with those antics.

I actually wish HN would have a user filter for domains, so I could proactively remove links to this domain from the homepage, because I know it is abhorrently opposing the open web. There is enough interesting quality articles already shared in the open, I don't need this.

Sorry for the rant, I'm sure it is an interesting article, and I wish this author gets paid fairly for writing it. Just... this can't be the future. It's infuriating.

Give me a way that I can press a button on the screen after reading the slug, and I make a direct transaction of 5 cents to read the full article. Boom. Done. I'd do it for the stuff that probe my interest, because I'll never pay 50c a week. Everyone is saturated with subscriptions now.

You can try prepending the url with `archive.is/` which will get around annoyance-walls in some cases. e.g. https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/books/...

Is archive.is/today/ph working for anyone today? Yesterday .is and .today were giving me an eternal CAPTCHA but .ph worked. Today .today and .ph are giving me an eternal CAPTCHA while .is loads the website, but tries to redirect to .ph with an eternal CAPTCHA when I click on the snapshot link.

Makes me think whoever runs this is trying to fix something really annoying.

I get the looping CAPTCHA in my office, but not at home.

I've found this is because my ISP uses Cloudflare DNS; when I switch to mobile (on my phone or tethering) it's fine.

I have that problem too on my comcast home internet, looping captca for archive.is. I figured it was dns lookup. Is cloudflare blocking it somehow?

And I also noticed using my phone internet works for archive.is. I want to figure out how to avoid cloudflare or whatever blocking me. I need a simple dns rule I can put in my router or something.

My recollection is that it is the opposite: Cloudflare and archive.is have disagreements about DNS, and as a result archive.is blocks Cloudflare.

Enabling Reader mode in Safari works for me, FWIW.

In fact I set the preference in Safari to always enable Reader mode for that domain.

For some reason using reader mode in Chrome/Vanadium on my phone only shows the preview now. If I open it in Firefox/Mull which has JS disabled it shows up fine.

That said I've been trying to avoid NYT due to this anyway.

I was always curious about that. Reader mode on nytimes shows only 1-2 paragraphs from the actual article and then “subscribe” link.

How does it work for you?

In firefox at least, I see the same thing. But then if I refresh the page (with reader mode still enabled), I see the entire article.

i, too, wish that there were an actual way to pay per view on things like this.

i read a lot, but i read widely, and I have absolutely no desire to pay for the entirety of what tNYT is into (nor do i want to deal with their dark patterns around canceling).

Everyone keeps telling me there's no market for this, etc etc, and I suppose that must be true, but I can't help but think that there must be _dozens_ of us who want a different approach here...

I long held out hope Apple would solve the news micropayment problem, but I suppose that’s what Apple News+ is (give or take).

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Pretty sure this doesnt apply, as its not a common issue at all

It definitely does; the reason we have this rule in the first place is that this story about Zadie Smith is absolutely dominated by an off-topic thread about website presentation that nobody at the New York Times is ever going to read or care about.

I believe my semi-rant does provide valuable grounds for discussion, as I discuss the state of news subscriptions and offer ideas regarding micro-transactions for paywalled content on the Internet.

Since more people than not will be blocked by the paywall, it's a relevant discussion to this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37340061

If anyone at the Times is reading this... a case study for your consideration...

I dropped my subscription to the NYT a bit more than a year ago due to just this kind of blocking silliness. I like to be able to share articles I read with others, and if I have to get an archive.is/ph link anyway to do so, why should I be paying to read it first myself? If the value of eyeballs on articles is mainly to serve ads, and adblocking is an issue, then I'd say charging a subscription to try to make up for it (which it doesn't according to their own numbers) is kind of going in the wrong direction.

I gather that the NYT itself thinks that "News" as a product is a dying market and is why they are putting most of their time/effort/money into building up the Games and Recipes subscriptions. I wonder if that isn't a fatal case of mission creep.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37340061

Her new novel, “The Fraud,” is based on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial, but it keeps one eye focused clearly on today’s political populism.

Populism, that's code for the voters think the politicians work in their interests. I wager that if you mentioned any subject under the sun Mahajan would connect it with "Trumpism".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com