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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Lapham, along with Gore Vidal (who died in 2012) were really some of the last public intellectuals that were intelligent and qualified enough to have nuanced, insightful takes on 90% of issues. Lapham in particular is relevant to HN because he was from the old money of San Francisco, long before tech happened. The SF he grew up in doesn’t exist anymore.

Unfortunately one of the consequences of the ad and attention-based technocratic economy is that people like them aren’t valued anymore. Making silly memes or offensive jokes gets you about 10x the attention, and as far as I can tell, every platform is optimized for this. Even the better ones like Substack end up being dominated by loud people with narrow viewpoints.

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> Making silly memes or offensive jokes gets you about 10x the attention

Ironically, the front section of Harper's featuring short tidbits and excerpts from random sources had a social-media-esque ADD vibe to it that made it feel edgy to aspiring and enlightened 20 year-olds. E.g. post 9-11 there was a list of songs banned from the radio ("it's raining men" etc.) sharing a page with a court transcript of a wiretapped conversation between a Mafia don to one of his stooges that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of the Sopranos.

Lapham Quarterly also had that vibe -- I seem to remember a tongue-in-cheek visual on how many people Rambo killed in every Rambo movie.

Now and then I see some people with thousands of followers on twitter mimic that style to great effect.

The main difference is obviously how far down the rabbit hole they went with connecting two bits of random information, e.g being able to juxtapose a Don't Play list for the radio during modern times to a Don't Eat list from an edict in the Roman Empire during some plague.

You make a great point. Harper's own website acknowledges Lapham's contributions were done to add some breezier reads to the magazine:

In 1984, Harper’s Magazine was completely redesigned by editor Lewis H. Lapham and MacArthur...Recognizing the time constraints of the modern reader, the revived magazine introduced such original journalistic forms as the Harper’s Index, Readings, and the Annotation to complement its acclaimed fiction, essays, and reporting.

I worked around it by moving the focus from online to printed press. Highly recommend. There's very little left online worth reading apart from niche indie websites that simply don't have enough audience to make them worthy of ensittifying.

What printed publications do you recommend?

Of course, that's individual, they have to fit one's worldview to be palatable. We are long past the time when a singular "objective truth" existed at all. For me for example, The Economist feels legit.

That’s a weird take.

A singular "objective truth" never existed. That’s the basis of historiography.

Publications can be "palatable" while not fitting one’s "worldview". The goal of reading should be to be challenged. You can find interesting things anchored in many theoretical frameworks and I encourage people to read editorials spanning different political leanings.

To answer the original comment, I personally read and enjoy The New Yorker and grab the LRB and the Economist from time to time on top of what I read in my native language.

There has never been an "objective truth". I suspect most people look back and think the news was cleaner when it reality it was not. There are still many publications worthy of a read.

And of course the Economist was literally created to promote free-market ideology:

PROSPECTUS of a weekly paper, to be published every Saturday, and to be called THE ECONOMIST, which will contain — First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day ...

<https://web.archive.org/web/20181105190846/https://www.econo...>

That's what i mean. Read something that aligns with your personal world. TIME feels too left-wing vs my own views, after reading half an issue i usually start feeling irritated. The Economist has same bias as myself so i find stuff there very logical and fitting my world.

Fair enough, though it wasn't clear to me on first read (and still isn't even after reading your clarification) on your initial comment.

I'll also note that I find the Economist to be among the better sources I read, and its (broadly-advertised) advocacy isn't as obnoxious as in some other pubs or institutions which come to mind.

I recently found https://thebaffler.com/ after watching an interview with its publisher, Thomas Frank, which resonated with me (left-leaning but anti-woke). I haven't read much of it to evaluate yet, though.

Harpers

If you live in the UK, Private Eye

If you like soccer, The Blizzard

New York Review of Books is excellent.

https://www.nybooks.com

I'm losing my faith in online documents. There seems to be entirely too much editing of the past to fit shifting narratives, filtered search results, and tweaked AI output.

How long will it be before we can't believe any of it?

And with books going obsolete, then what?

Personally I’ve started collecting old encyclopedias. Especially ones from the early 20th century or so, before public relations/propaganda really developed into a dominant field.

Paper encyclopedias are a joy of discovery. It was important to have a set on the shelf so as a kid I had a playing field where I could randomly open one up and find nothing but good content.

The internet has slop, distractions, and pernicious falsehoods.

We are going "full-circle" back to printing press-discovery days, and then, further backwards, beyond.-

Wikipedia is miles above the 80s encyclopedia collection my family had. There was only a single volume out of about 24, on things like science and mechanisms and STEM in general. The description of how heat pumps work, which included an entire page of diagrams that were straight up nonsensical, was so bad it took me until after college to undo the damage enough to actually understand the physics behind it.

If you remember encyclopedias from before computers, 99% of the time you attempted to look something up, you found a singular paragraph, with no sources, barely introducing you to a topic. Even Microsoft Encarta on a bunch of CDs was that barren.

Wikipedia has expanded the expected content and coverage of encyclopedias 10x, and has not significantly reduced accuracy despite a supposed "anyone can contribute" model.

It's no coincidence in my life that I was constantly starving for knowledge until Wikipedia was created. Not that stumbling down wikipedia rabbit holes for hours on end made me a brilliant person or whatever, but it did give me a love for computing history and enough surface level knowledge to hang out around TheDailyWTF since I was 12, and that led to learning that I liked programming and a career in it that I definitely would not have found without wikipedia.

For breadth and content, there's no beating Wikipedia. There are some issues with one-sided moderation, but that's true of the paper encyclopedias as well.

But having a non-internet reference is very good because it encourages learning and curiosity in a way that a website just doesn't. The main thing that's wrong with Wikipedia is that every other distraction online is just a click away.

early 20th century dictionary: useful, enriching.

early 20th century encyclopedia: useless, source of confusion.

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