Word: essay
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...fragment of poetry by the Greek Archilochus recorded these enigmatic lines: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing." In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin described Tolstoy as a fox who knew many things and Dostoyevsky as a hedgehog who knew one big thing. The Old Paradigm knew one big thing (centralized government, one organizing ideology, one big idea). The New Paradigm is a fox that accommodates many things -- it is decentralized, undoctrinaire, pragmatic, multifaceted...
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Susan Sontag, whose 1964 essay Notes on "Camp" broke new ground in interpreting American popular culture, expresses doubt that the vitality of European culture will be extinguished by America's onslaught. "The cultural infrastructure is still there," she says, noting that great bookstores , continue to proliferate in Europe. Rather than regarding Americans as cultural imperialists, she observes wryly, "many Europeans have an almost colonialist attitude toward us. We provide them with wonderful distractions, the feeling of diversion. Perhaps Europeans will eventually view us as a wonderfully advanced Third World country with a lot of rhythm -- a kind of pleasure country...
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