Kevin Smokler, the author, critic and literary blogger, has recently edited a book of essays called “Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times.” Its aim is to remind the world of the relevance of reading, eh, books. Not just summaries of books, or book reviews, or headlines about books, but the real thing. No matter if the book is a bunch of cartoons, the latest supermarket bodice buster, or issued from the Apple PowerBook of yet another disaffected kid from Brooklyn — you know, the one with the rectangular glasses, pale skin and perfectly uncoiffed hair.
It’s all good to Kevin, and who can disagree with him. He spoke with ThoughtCast shortly before he took the mike at the Harvard Book Store.
Click here: 
(7:18 minutes) to listen to the interview.
And here’s Bookmark Now, the Talk! (34 minutes.)
It features Kevin, naturally, and also Paul Collins, the author of Sixpence House and Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism.
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David Weinberger is a fellow at the 
Stowe Boyd is president and chief operating officer of 
At a time when the country’s attention is focused on the ever-expanding list of American war dead, Carol Bundy’s biography of a Union officer who sacrifices his life in the Civil War is eerily apt.
Noted Cambridge poet David Ferry has recently translated Virgil’s Georgics, and on ThoughtCast he joins Virgil scholar Richard Thomas, the chair of Harvard’s Classics Dept., for a detailed examination of this beautiful and insufficiently known poem. It is said to have taken Virgil 7 years to write, from about 36 to 29 B.C.
As such, The Georgics was written during a period of political instability and chronic civil war, and inevitably reflects Virgil’s dark, often pessimistic outlook on human nature. But at the same time, The Georgics (which means “agriculture” in Greek), is a celebration of nature and its ceaseless beauty. As Virgil describes the cycles of crops, the seasons, the weather — the birth, death and rebirth that mark the natural world — he provides us with a complex, realistic, painful but enduringly uplifting poem.
Ilan Stavans, the renowned critic of Latino and Latin American literature and culture, and the author of the controversial dictionary, “Spanglish,” is also a perpetual outsider. A Mexican-Jewish-American, Ilan lives simultaneously in many cultures, while truly belonging to none. He calls himself a chameleon, and perhaps this status is just what it takes to be a true critic.