DFW is such a S.N.O.O.T. A literature snob. The unapologetic kid who uses big words and knows too much for his own good (he even calls it a speech impairment not to be able to adjust to elementary vernacular). Only he could write 60 pages lauding Garner's Modern American Usage and the diplomatic line it walks between the usage war of Prescriptivists and Descriptivists; a half exposé, half journalist view on the AVN industry; then a run-around-the-ball polemic on Tracy Austin's autobiography and the paradoxical genius of athletic stars.

Many regard DFW to be one of the smartest authors. Thought-provoking for sure. Words don't do it justice, you'll just have to go read it. :)

This guy's a genius but the footnotes and near-constant asides and tangents make me feel like I'm driving a Porsche in stop-and-go traffic.

Разница между мной, читающей Дэвида Фостера Уоллеса, образца 2020-го, и сегодняшней, образца 2023-го, в том, что раньше мне в основном было больно и я плакала, а теперь мне дико смешно.

Я рада этой перемене, потому что перечитала несколько рассказов ДФУ сейчас в переводе, которые раньше читала в оригинале, и хохотала. А пару лет назад этого хохота не было. Инвестиции в здоровую психику, кажется, начали окупаться, и я способна сейчас воспринимать и выдерживать гораздо более широкий спектр эмоций.

У ДФУ отличное чувство юмора, и наконец-то я это оценила. А теперь я вас разочарую: я по прежнему не фанатею по ДФУ, отношусь к нему ровно и спокойно. Читать было интересно, забавно и увлекательно, но я не билась в фанатском экстазе ни разу.

Про работу переводчиков хочется сказать отдельно. Первое: они молодцы. Второе: разницу их стилей я лично чувствовала. У одного из них более плавный текст, у другого — более обрывочный, но придраться не к чему.

Ещё одна побочка работы с психикой. Я больше десятка лет не могла открыть никакой роман своего любимого Достоевского, так как его эмоции меня просто убивали сразу же. А теперь — могу. Рассказ ДФУ «Достоевский Джозефа Франка» — мой любимый в этом сборнике. И очень смешной!

В целом, мне было особенно интересно читать мысли ДФУ о литературе и кино, поэтому особенно впечатлили его эссе о Линче, Апдайке, Кафке, Достоевском, о Терминаторе-2, о церемонии награждения фильмов для взрослых, о Борхесе.

Ну и отдельно. Если вы пищущий человек и у вас нет времени читать весь сборник и все эссе Дэвида Фостера Уоллеса, прочтите только коротенькое эссе «Природа веселья» — о том, как сохранить первоначальный задор, вдохновение, как писать одновременно и так, чтобы кайфовать самому, и так, чтобы это нравилось публике. Но чтобы не было прогибаний под нее или отказа от себя. Очень круто для авторов!

A truly brilliant time capsule.

Outstanding. The closest one can get to triple penetration in essay form.

Each one is a stunner, from the grotesquerie of the Adult Video Awards in ‘Big Red Son,’ the magniloquent ass-handing of John Updike, the sublime pedantry of the modern classic ‘Authority and American Usage,’ the obsessive campaign chronicling of ‘Up, Simba,’ to the staggeringly researched meta-bubbling John Ziegler profile ‘Host.’

All the essays succeed at tying razor-sharp exegeses of American culture to a holy clarity of insight, showing how acutely attuned to the nuances of the human mind Mr. Wallace was. Even among the shorter pieces here: the Bergman-like silence of ‘The View From Mrs Thompson’s’ to the dazzling dissection of Dostoevsky, this is super-stellar belles-lettrism from outer space.

And to top it all, I now feel deeply for lobsters.

4.5*

Perhaps the most consistently satisfying book of non-fiction that DFW wrote?

Minus half a star for the final essay on right-wing talk radio, which I just could not get into and which caused me such delay in finishing this remarkable book, whose quidditas is that it could (almost always) interest me in things that are perhaps in themselves just uninteresting, or of interest only to those caught in the jaws of a particular subculture, viz.

1. 45pp on the pornography industry ("Big Red Son," what a way to start a book I mean really)

t2. 60pp on grammar geeks ("Authority and American Usage," fascinating multi-riffs occasioned by Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a serious crypto-prescriptivist updating of Fowler which I now simply have to own.

t3. Not quite 100pp (!) on the 2000 presidential primary campaign of a certain John S. McCain III ("R-AZ, USN, POW, USC…", RIP), which is certainly a minor miracle in the history of belles lettres

And it most assuredly did exactly that, reel me completely in. "Authority and American Usage" could have been the whole book, or stretched out to two volumes, in fact, and I'd've gladly kept hooked to his line of thought: DFW just makes all that learnin so gol-darn fun somehow (and oh, to have been a student in his classroom!)

Other essays were certainly interesting, and if anything too short: "Certainly the End of Something" (On John Updike), the view from Mrs. Thomson's (a meditation on community in the wake of 9/11), and "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" (By being one of the most compelling tennis players to write one of the worst memoirs ever)

But the title essay is just a punishingly beautiful way to become convinced not to eat anything with eyes, and "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" reveals DFW to be perhaps one of the best readers that Russian misanthropic weirdo genius ever had (like I feel Kundera is the best reader of Kafka ever). Almost always a continual delight, in other words.

This felt like eating a piece of dessert that was left out for too long yet still managed to taste decent. I enjoyed reading "Consider the Lobster" but it felt a bit loose at parts, almost disorienting. Although I understand this wasn't a completed novel I still urge any readers of Wallace to check this out. It's nicely packaged inside and is quite sentimental at points. Took me a while but good read.

I would suggest, dear reader, that when considering Consider the Lobster, that you consider it in the same light as David Foster Wallace's collection n  A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Againn. Use that book as your frame of reference for style and content and you can place this collection firmly into the category of "typical" DFW. That being said, if you thoroughly enjoyed A Supposedly Fun Thing... then you'll likely thoroughly enjoy this one as well; by that same coin, if you're on the fence, you're unlikely to be won over; and if you dislike DFW† then this collection will probably do you no favors.

So in this reviewer's opinion: Consider the Lobster is more of the same. But that's a good thing.

One thing that CtL has over ASFTINDA is that it reads like an essayist's equivalent to a DJ's mixtape. While the essays individually are more than capable of standing on their own (e.g., apart from each other; i.e., in their original printings) they are arranged in such a creative way here that they build upon each other. The essays are vaguely self-referential, perhaps purposefully so; "jokes" from a given essay may rely heavily on you properly "getting" and then retaining the thesis of a preceding essay. I submit as an example: "Authority and American Usage" contains several sections that are slightly humorous in their own respect but can only be truly appreciated as bracingly so when you recall Wallace's thesis on Franz Kafka's humor from the prior article and the accompanying explication of said humor and why it is thoroughly pointless to try and explain any joke anywhere, let alone Kafka's absurdly dark and probably pathological comedy††. In this way, CtL may be Wallace's finest collection to date; the interleaving of the essays, their strength when taken as a whole, an obscurely surreal recursion. It's really all quite expertly done.

Perhaps the highlight of this collection is the maturity that Wallace is showing. Previous collections have his tone and style coming off as a bit of an effete intellectual, a nerdy-but-hip smartest-kid-in-class tone that is simultaneously masterfully humorous and maddening. Like maybe he's just trying to make you feel dumb but then again maybe it's thesaurial sleight-of-hand to play into some particular joke. Which is not at all to suggest that he has discarded this completely. But maybe like he's toned it down a bit†††? His signature style is definitely still there but he seems to have grown into it, it's a better fit. Whereas before it may have felt borderline confrontational (see above), it comes across now as disarming. For example, in the midst of "Authority and American Usage", Wallace comes across (on the one hand) vaguely condescending of SNOOTs†††† and then on the other hand admits to being one; and then he takes a deeper dig on SNOOTs by eviscerating their essays and articles and other writings (e.g., the heavy-handed and jargon-laden "worst ever" publications of Comparative Lit profs) by using the very same over-the-top vocabulary to get to that point†††††. The whole routine can be a little jaw-clenched maddening but is for those same reasons endearing and worthwhile.

It is also seems worth mentioning that Wallace masterfully frames pretty grand subject matter in all kinds of tangential and frankly genius-like-a-mad-scientist ways that it's formidable and a bit frightening. Example: Wallace uses "Authority and American Usage" as a vehicle to discuss linguistic politics and the critical role of socialization, language learning, and regional dialects on individual growth and development††††††. Example: Wallace uses his coverage of McCain2000 in "Up, Simba!" to discuss the political brokerage through media outlets and the bizarre power dynamics at work between journalists, politicians, and their handlers†††††††. Example: how Wallace goes to work on the ethics of food in "Consider the Lobster", working through the logic rather elegantly and then stupefyingly relinquishing it all with the atavistic admission that that simply isn't enough to tear you away from the desire to enjoy something delicious. In light of all this, it's no wonder an aspiring author Such As continues to find himself enthralled and intimidated by this literary Cronus.

Parting shots? I have two: the first regarding my "four of five" rating and the second a mere sidebar.

First: though the tone in CtL shows a refreshing maturity and welcome evolution, and though every essay is engaging and timely and brilliant, there also seem to be moments of tedium. Perhaps this is expected and unavoidable. But an essay on a book on the life and times of Dostoevsky (e.g.) can disappoint. Abandoning the F.N. format for a n  House of Leavesn-esque series of drawn boxes is more distracting than textually informing (even if the essay's content is exhilarating and terrifying). And maybe it's just me but "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" seemed (via the text) a parody of itself as much as it was a parody and/or review of the book in question.

Second: while I don't believe that these kinds of things, should matter, I'm also of the opinion that Wallace should have fired the photographer. Or perhaps chosen a better photo from that particular shoot. I realize that folks may want their book jacket photos to be relatively current, and I realize that our bodies change over time, and all of that is fine; but I also wonder if his publisher could have perhaps insisted that they find a photo that did NOT make him look like a squinty-eyed and slightly slumped Jeffrey Lebowski. Seriously sir, that's your credibility at stake here.

------
† = If you truly and I mean honestly and passionately dislike DFW, well then I suggest some rigorous therapeutic interventions.

†† = Which is totally drained of its humor when you try to offer any kind of explanation. I offer as further evidence for this that (after a protracted bout of laughing) I read aloud (to A.) a passage from "Authority and American Usage" and how it's humor is underscored by the thesis of the Kafka essay to which A. offered scarcely an acknowledging chortle.

††† = Maybe?

†††† = Just read the essay.

††††† = I mean seriously: do you know anyone to drop "solecistic" in casual conversation?

†††††† = Compare/contrast with similar arguments posited in n  Freakonomicsn.

††††††† = Let it also be known that this becomes painfully apparent when the essay's title appears in the text. It's a real head-slapping moment with a kind of chilling aftershock.

"A strange and traumatic experience," David Foster Wallace wrote in an essay on attending the Annual Adult Video News Awards, "which one of yr. corrs. will not even try to describe consists of standing at a men's room urinal between professional woodmen [male porn stars] Alex Sanders and Dave Hardman. Suffice it to say that the urge to look over/down at their penises is powerful and the motives behind this urge so complex as to cause anuresis (which in turn ups the trauma)." Aside from hinting at the hilarious absurdity with which Wallace analyzes everything from porn galas to lobster festivals to John McCain's Straight Talk Express, this passage nicely captures my emotional approach to this book: I'd heard this Wallace guy had a pretty big brain. Now I know he had a pretty big brain. Way bigger than mine. We'll see if the disparity affects my ability to, uh, write.

So he was smart. Every essay had something new for me, like how dictionaries are, unlike phone books, ideological and rhetorical in nature and therefore worthy of criticism, or how modern American novelists are embarrassed by articulating morals, and how that's a problem. Like I said, he was also funny. Aggravate-your-fellow-airplane-prisoner/patrons-with-constant-laughter funny. On top of all this, he seemed genuine, which is both forehead-smackingly sensible *and* impressive given his repeated inquiries into authenticity. Reading around I guess Wallace was well-known for being anti-ironic, but the effect on this reader was essentially the same quality Wallace himself lauds in the cornerstone piece in this collection, "Authority and American Usage": Wallace is ever-present in his own writing, and he earns his authority with wit, compassion, and some endearing absurdities (borrowing a leather jacket to be cool enough to report for Rolling Stone being my fave).

I liked his way of analyzing a subject by hanging out with people of tertiary significance. He didn't talk to John McCain, or John McCain's advisors. He hung out with the camera crews. Same with the porn awards: he spends most of his time talking to professional porn journalists (apparently that's a thing). Maybe this was his way of avoiding BS, like he didn't believe there was any hope of deriving genuine meaning about a person by actually speaking with them directly, but meaning could be triangulated through the perceptions of technicians and professionals who were not directly responsible for considering semantics (but did so all the same). In the case of John McCain that's a bit odd since the whole piece concerns the question of whether McCain actually means what he says, unlike every other politician in history.

Anyway, the more I try to think about the book the more the aforementioned metaphorical anuresis is kicking in. The book was unexpectedly magnetic, intellectually consuming, and totally compelling from start to finish. If you can stomach footnotes that have their own footnotes that are themselves then referenced in the main text, suggesting they were not actually that ancillary after all, then you should probably pick this up.


n  Wordsn
Oh man, so many great words.

satyriasis (n): uncontrollable sexual obsession in men. (p. 53)
lallate (v): conventionally to replace your r's with l's, or to speak in a nonsensical baby fashion, but in the sense DFW intended here I guess it means calming, as in a lullaby, as described here. (p. 64)
sprachgefuhl (n): sensitivity to linguistic propriety (p. 69)
dysphemism (n): inserting an intentionally harsh word or phrase when a more neutral one would suffice, opposite of euphemism. Apparently never having encountered this word makes me NOT a SNOOT. (p. 70)
solecism (n): linguistic goof, incorrect use of language. (p. 71 and everywhere in this essay)
pertussion (n): coughing, though most dictionaries seem to list the word as "pertussis." (p. 71)
styptic (adj): confining or binding in this case, but also used to describe substances that stanch bleeding. I almost wrote "staunch." If there's one word I'm going to remember from this book it's "solecism." (p. 80)
spiriferous (adj): having spires. I hate words like this. (p. 42)
anapest (n): two short syllables followed by one long, in this case "where's it at." Is "anapest" itself an anapest? (p. 99)
trochee (n): long syllable followed by a short one. Why a "monosyllabic foot + trochee" is supposed to be uglier than a "strong anapest" is beyond me. (p. 99)
pleonasm (n): excessive use of words to express something, in this cases leveled as a criticism against academic writing, which is somewhat absurd coming from DFW who is pleonastic in the extreme. (p. 115)
immanent (adj): inherent, innate. (p. 151)
luxated (adj): dislocated. (p. 151)
prolegomenous (adj): introductory (p. 255)

Wish you kept writing, DFW

E’ sempre appassionante leggere le pagine di Foster Wallace, di qualunque cosa scriva: questa raccolta di saggi è eterogenea a dir poco - dai premi per i migliori porno ad una analisi di Dostoevskij, dal resoconto di una settimana al seguito della campagna per le primarie 2000 di John McCain alla recensione di un dizionario sull’uso dell’inglese, ogni tema sul quale il geniale autore USA diviene affascinante ed interessante. E quello che ne risulta è ancora una grande mente che scrive in modo unico e che sa condividere i dubbi, le domande più profonde, i sentimenti più umani che ogni esperienza suscita. Il motivo per cui lo ammiro tanto è però la verità dei suoi pensieri, la schiettezza del suo essere e la capacità di essere empatico verso tutti, senza maschere, conscio che il futuro sarà determinato da quanto saremo capaci di amare e di sentire, che sia la sofferenza di un’aragosta o il furore di un commentatore di una talk-radio. Resta da aggiungere l’ammirazione per le doti retoriche nello scrivere testi anche su temi astrusi come la critica linguistica, la comunicazione politica USA, il mondo rurale o le implicazioni politiche della lingua inglese - come sempre l’uso delle note è geniale, divertentissimo e usato al fine di mantenere il lettore agganciato allo scritto…

Opening essay "Big Red Son", an account of the Adult Video News Awards -- yes, the "porn Oscars" -- is one of the funniest pieces of writing I have read in ages. And informative! DFW's style seems well suited to the subject here, with footnotes serving as expansions into long verbatim anecdotes delivered to the author by the article's colorful supporting cast, and his prose is well up to the challenge of rendering the circus as lucidly as seems possible.

This was a good purchase so far.

...

It turns out that the collection was bookended by its best moments. The final "Host" was a fairly fascinating portrait of conservative talk radio and its meteoric rise in the last decade and a half or so, and reprises DFW's notable skills in rendering breathless, funny, and richly detailed eyewitness accounts. Actually, those same skills were also on display in the the nearly-as-good McCain 2000 campaign saga "Up Simba", which has recently been republished in its own book in light of the current campaign (as it should be, perhaps, though the essay seems more broadly to set its sights on politics and political journalism in general than to actual focus on McCain himself). The rest of the book was largely devoted to book reviews, which, though erudite and interesting, and often turned to larger questions than those concerning any single book, were still somewhat less gripping reading. But then, I rarely read essays at all, so it's sort of surprising that I enjoyed this even as much as I did.

What can I say? Another brilliant set of essays.

1. Big Red Son - at the AVN (Adult Video News) Awards. An insightful and amusing look at the porn industry.

For a regular civilian male, hanging out in a hotel suite with porn starlets is a tense and emotionally convolved affair. There is, first, the matter of having seen the various intimate activities and anatomical parts of these starlets in videos heretofore and thus (weirdly) feeling shy about meeting them. But there is also a complex erotic tension. Because porn films' worlds are so sexualized, with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse—a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake—to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there's a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/ hope that this is what might happen in Max Hardcore's hotel room. Yr. corresps. here find it impossible to overemphasize the fact that this is a delusion. In fact, of course, the unconscious expectation/dread/hope makes no more sense than it would make to be hanging out with doctors at a medical convention and to expect that at the slightest provocation everyone in the room would tumble into a frenzy of MRIs and epidurals.

2. Certainly the End Of Something Or Other, One Would Sort Of Have To Think - book review, John Updike's Toward the End of Time. Here is the upshot, although Wallace is a fan,

Toward the End of Time concerns an extremely erudite, successful, narcissistic, and sex-obsessed retired guy who's keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.Toward the End of Time is also, of the let's say two dozen Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

3. Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed

It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

4. Authority and American Usage
Love, and do what you will - as applied to grammar. This is a very complicated review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner.

Bryan Garner is a genius because he just about completely resolves the Usage Wars' problem of Authority. The book's solution is both semantic and rhetorical.

5. The View From Mrs. Thompson's

LOCATION: BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS
DATES: 11-13 SEPTEMBER 2001
SUBJECT: OBVIOUS

What these Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem to me, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room. It does not, for instance, occur to anyone here to remark on how it's maybe a little odd that all three network anchors are in shirtsleeves, or to consider the possibility that Dan Rather's hair's being mussed might not be wholly accidental, or that the constant rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn't seen it yet. None of the ladies seem to notice the president's odd little lightless eyes appear to get closer and closer together throughout his taped address, nor that some of his lines sound almost plagiaristically identical to those uttered by Bruce Willis (as a right-wing wacko, recall) in The Siege a couple years back. Nor that at least some of the sheer weirdness of watching the Horror unfold has been how closely various shots and scenes have mirrored the plots of everything from Die Hard I-III to Air Force One. Nobody's near hip enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We've Seen This Before. Instead, what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in Mrs. Thompson's crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they're all doing.

6. How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart
A review of the Tracy Austin autobiography, Beyond Center Court: My Story. The book is bad, but hey,

...maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it's just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn't really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant's glass jaw or Eliot's inability to hit the curve.

7. Up, Simba
With John McCain on his campaign bus in 2000. He gives a mini biography of McCain's experience as a POW with gruesome detail, and his refusal to be released without the other POWs,

This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. And yes, literally: "moral authority," that old cliché, like so many other clichés—"service," "honor," "duty"—that have become now just mostly words, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us.

8. Consider the Lobster
Wallace covers the Maine Lobster Festival, 2003. Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?

Lobsters don't have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace. "Thus it is," in the words of T. M. Prudden's industry classic About Lobster, "that although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin." And lobsters do have nociceptors, as well as invertebrate versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters via which our own brains register pain.

9. Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky - A review of Joseph Frank's five-volume Dostoevsky.

The thing about Dostoevsky's characters is that they are alive. By which I don't just mean that they're successfully realized or developed or "rounded." The best of them live inside us, forever, once we've met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot, the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P's ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all-too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive—retain what Frank calls their "immense vitality"—not because they're just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting within plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious—the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky's characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860s' intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death's inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth....

The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that's really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

10. Host - Read it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a... An article on John Ziegler and talk radio.

Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today's AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.

Wallace discusses Consider the Lobster with interviewer Michael Silverblatt.
http://youtu.be/IhCfHSVzTkI