Saturday, March 26, 2016

In Praise of Commercial Culture

Vishwas R Gaitonde is on top of NF's next great writer-to-watch-list. Read his magisterial, epic-in-scope, gloriously erudite essay that just takes your breath away: Viewing Narnia Through A Hindu Lens, in which he interprets the classic in terms of Advait Vedantic philosophy - biblical homilies sprinkled uniformly by the Christian apologist CS Lewis notwithstanding. An enviable achievement indeed - highly recommended! 

Praise be, to a host of new, exciting magazines that continue to feature such astonishingly high quality long form journalism, in particular, to the The Mantle and Inference. The latter for example, published an awe-inspiring essay by the mathematician Gregory Chaitin about his project of empirical mathematics, which essay he begins by way of Leibniz, followed by Popper, Imre Lakatos, Turing, Godel and others along the way to conclude that mathematicians should study mathematics with an empirical state of mind, and points to P ≠ NP, cryptography etc. as problems where this attitude has shown success. Among ye old reliable, The Caravan and The Believer continue to impress.

While the publishing business continues to adjust to the rude reality of the internet (though witness the continued success of The Economist and FT), for the readers-as-consumers group, times have never been better before! 

1 comment:

ankurpandey said...

thanks for inference-review!