In Harper’s, Barry C. Lynn argues that the activities of large tech corporations like Google and Amazon should be regulated by the government. They are, he writes, “the most powerful middlemen in history. Each guards the gate to innumerable sources of essential information, services, and products. Yet thus far no governmental entity in the United States has signaled any intention of limiting the license these corporations enjoy to serve only the customers they choose to, at whatever price they decide.”

Speaking of tech corporations, Zach Baron talks to Jaron Lanier about why Twitter and Facebook are so bad for us and what to do about it.

In other news: In the second volume of his forthcoming Faulkner biography, Carl Rollyson writes about a William Faulkner screenplay that has been “hiding in plain sight” until now: “Although catalogued correctly, it had been overlooked, partly because other biographers ‘simply didn’t look at Faulkner’s screen work with any seriousness at all’, he added. ‘They bought what Faulkner said in interviews, that he wasn’t good at it.’ Rollyson, who has written biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath and Norman Mailer among more than 40 books, will include the discovery in his forthcoming biography, The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962, to be published by the University of Virginia Press in September.”

A history of New York English: “You know how to have a polite conversation, right? You listen, wait for a pause, say your bit, then shut up so someone else can speak. In other words, you take your turn. You’re obviously not from New York.”

This 400-year-old “friendship book” contains the signatures of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, among others.

Chinese president Xi Jinping is a fan of Thomas Piketty’s work, but he may never get to read his latest book, at least not in Mandarin. “Piketty told the Guardian the Chinese publisher Citic Press had sent his French publisher a list of 10 pages of requested cuts in June from the French edition of the book, and a further list in August related to the English edition. ‘I refused these conditions and told them that I would only accept a translation with no cut of any sort. They basically wanted to cut almost all parts referring to contemporary China, and in particular to inequality and opacity in China,’ he said.” I am not a fan of Piketty’s work, but good for him for this principled stand.

Is this small portrait on a wood panel a Rembrandt after all? “A tiny painting of a weary, melancholic old man long rejected as a fake and consigned to a museum basement has been revealed as one from Rembrandt’s workshop, and possibly by the man himself.” 

Photo: Sisteron  

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