What else I've been reading in April 2026
Plus, the Seoul-loving Chris Arnade interviews me about life in Korea
This is one in a series of monthly posts that round up the (mostly non-city-related) books and essays that also figure into my reading life.
Chris Arnade, author of the popular travel and culture Substack Chris Arnade Walks the World, interviewed me earlier this month on one of his many visits to Seoul. We covered Korean dining culture, the lack of interesting writing on Korea by foreigners, the ostensibly Korean emotions of han, jeong, and heung, and much else besides.
Essays
“Exceptionalists will balk at the extrapolation of widely accepted methodological standards to human thought across the board. They will think of everyday cognition as an exception to the rule. But then they would, wouldn’t they?”
“Why would we use A.I. in ways that ultimately make work more draining? My suspicion is that we often deploy these tools not because they make us better at our jobs but because they help us to avoid moments of sustained concentration.”
“Grazie a chiese, sinagoghe, moschee, Botta ha spesso l’occasione di allontanarsi dai centri urbani e ritrovare l’amato rapporto esclusivo tra oggetto architettonico e luogo.”
“Counterculture magazines heralded them as prophets. ‘You’re going to be confronted with these guys a lot in the years ahead,’ a Rolling Stone critic wrote in 1969, ‘and you’d better start getting used to them now so you won’t feel obsolete.’”
“By my teen years, dutifully following Christgau’s lead, I was scoffing at my parents’ effete James Taylor appreciation and their parochial Little River Band fandom.”
“Gli uomini, interamente asserviti a un linguaggio che credono di dominare, sono diventati a tal punto incapaci di pensare, che preferiscono delegare il pensiero a una macchina linguistica esterna.”
“Neither greed nor selfless devotion to client service is the engine of McKinsey’s dominance. You’ll find plenty of both in the corridors of McKinsey, but the real driver of the firm’s success is the desire for approval and recognition.”
“Air, earth, water, stone, sky — and dissolution. I am not sure if these are universally recognised as Cather’s themes, but so it is.”
“Los intelectuales y escritores en esta novela son seres 'exquisitos', para los que la literatura es algo 'excepcional'. No pueden identificarse con el pueblo, ni con la burguesía, porque no comparten sus valores.”
“Love, loyalty and faith are admirable values. But to a liberal eye, it is deeply weird to see them enshrined in a constitution.”
“Mann might have argued that there is not only a moral but also an artistic virtue in being outwardly boring and banal. It is a hedge against mania.”
“자신이 아는 것만 좋아하거나 요즘 달이 이상하게 크다는 점을 모른 채 살아가는 사람은 가끔 촌스럽고, 다른 이들의 취향을 좇는 것도 촌스럽다. 다른 사람과 보폭을 맞춰서밖에 대화를 하지 못하는 사람도 그렇다.”
“By definition, a classic finds many different uses in many different hands. Every classic has survived the process of decontexualisation. Coetzee’s case is striking for how much in his writing changes if one approaches it without the premise of context.”
“Something about Brian Wilson attracts a certain kind of man, prone to a pop culture equivalent of theological hair-splitting.”
“Una città abbia sempre in altre città la sua origine e spesso il suo destino. Milano, dunque, è stata per Rossi ciò che Venezia è stata per Marco Polo secondo Calvino: il modello e la misura attraverso cui leggere il mondo.”
“After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones.”
“Paradoxically, it was probably the road’s decommissioning that really allowed 66 to take root in the American imagination.”