ThirstyFish

Stumbled upon this scene at a DUMBO photo shoot.

Cicero wrote: "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book". He wrote that circa, 50 BC. If "times were bad" then...

I relate to Cicero's frustration. I was looking through books on display at a hypermarket the other day - almost all bookstores are out of business - and it seemed like everyone was into writing books. Biographies of sports figures and socialites, all sorts of diet, exercise and self-help books, books on politics, romance novels, film based novels...

We are lead to believe that "choice is good". We're even told that Capitalism is about choice, and not about profit. But we're finding out that too much choice leads to confusion and agony and results in information overload. And books are just one example. Bad writers, bad writing bad ideas; Not much substance. In fact, we would have to unlearn most of the garbage we read in most books just to maintain a sense of reality. Television and TV news is another example. Unlearn, unlearn, unlearn.

Most people are not qualified to write books. And qualification does not come with titles like "Professor", "Doctor" or "Judge" etc. So we don't exactly know who to believe and how to separate myth and fad from what is real. Indeed, times are bad.

N.B. Someone suggested that I was exaggerating. Two quick examples: Everyone's beloved Dr. Oz, and a guy I wrote about recently, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker.