Friday Notes

Patricia Cohen,"Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?" NYT, 14 February, interviews Susan Jacoby, the author of The Age of American Unreason, about our" culture of distraction."

Kelly Grovier,"Coleridge and Goethe, together at last," TLS, 13 February, reviews Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faustus (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, trans., Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick, eds.) Did Coleridge anonymously publish his own translation of Goethe's Faust and why anonymously? Hat tip.

Scott McLemee reviews Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World for Barnes & Noble Review, 11 February.