Joseph Weidlein’s Reviews > Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business > Status Update

“I worry that my own business…helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs…We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years”

“Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship”

“…the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact…where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use”