Celebrity Industrial Complex

This is one of the best neologisms I have come across in a long time. Taken from Ron Rosenbaum's article in Slate about the "worst celebrity profile ever written." You have to read it to believe it. It is hilarious, and sad too in a way.

For serious minded readers an old article by Ron Rosenbaum about Nabokov's Pale Fire and its "authorship problem". It is a very fanboyish article. (He says for example that the John Shade poem in the book is the "poem of the century.") More serious stuff from Slate: a bunch of philosophers speak about Richard Rorty. I found this comment by Daniel Dennett particularly interesting:

Quine saw philosophy as continuous with science, and Rorty saw philosophy as continuous with art. I think they were both right. Anglophone philosophy certainly needs its poets, but only if they can bring to their efforts the level of insight, scholarship, and—yes—rigor that Dick Rorty brought to everything he did.