It is delicious to know that one reviewer called John Keats' poetry. Trivelling idiocy. Is he more pleasing to know that Virginia Woolf considered James Joyce's writing to be such tosh? And surely no one could be unchared to hear that when the critic Doris E. Parker read Winnie the Pooh, she found it so full of innocent childish whimsy that she, in her own moment of whimsical spelling, flowed up. But hatchet jobs like those are becoming less common. Read literary magazines today, and you're not going to get wonderful lines like those. Be kind is what Twitter says,. On the whole modern reviewers are starting to be. Open
Russia’s axeing of the Black Sea grain deal reveals a war machine running out of options. We explore how to get the deal back on track. A month-long mystery surrounding China’s absent foreign minister has grown deeper: now his memory is being scrubbed from official websites (10:15). And literary criticism has lost its claws—gaining a newfound civility that is bad for readers (16:37).
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