Books for the News

More on the horseman of the academic apocalypse

MCT2On Monday we alerted you to Mark C. Taylor’s op-ed in the Sunday New York Times. Since then, it has been the number one most emailed story at nytimes.com for three days running. And, as we noted on Monday, reaction has been shift and vocal. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a rebuttal of Taylor’s call to action by mid-morning Monday (which engendered a lively debate that played out in the comments), and Michael Bérubé chimed in on Crooked Timber yesterday afternoon. Elsewhere in the blogosphere, responses have been sprouting up hourly.
Whether you are with him or against him, Taylor has long been known for his provocative approach to emerging network culture. Over a long career, Taylor has argued that everything from art to religion can be viewed through and better understood through this lens. The University of Chicago Press has long published Taylor‘s interdisciplinary works, and there is no better place to begin to understand Taylor’s philosophy and criticism than with these primary resources. If his New York Times piece got you thinking, imagine what his books can offer!