This is also what makes it profoundly strange for Marriott to write that, while books “can even console us,” a smartphone “very rarely does”—engineered as smartphones are, as he understands them, to make reality seem incomprehensible. The advantage of books, he writes, is that they’re capable of rendering the world “as a comprehensible whole, not […]
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From his own perch on the proverbial fence, Mungiu tries to see the big picture. “If you have a mindset of fundamentalism, it’s not such a big difference between right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism,” he said at Cannes, implying a shared continuum of radicalization. The movie’s mindset is oh-so-equanimous; it’s just asking questions. Such as: whether […]
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