Friday's Notes

In"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Three-Toed Sloth, 19 January, Cosma Shalizi contemplates why prints didn't"displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices?"

Edward Rothstein,"A Big Map That Shrank the World," NYT, 19 January, reviews an exhibition of the Matteo Ricci World Map at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Jeremy Harding,"Pavements Like Jelly," LRB, 28 January, reviews Jeffrey Jackson's Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 and"Paris Inondé 1910," an exhibit at the Galerie des Bibliothèques in Paris.

Michael Dirda reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic for the Washington Post, 21 January.

Perry Anderson,"Sinomania," LRB, 28 January, reviews Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, Yasheng Huang's Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, Ching Kwan Lee's Against the Law: Labour Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt.