The first book sold at a brand-new bookstore — one that is also, The Paris Review reports, a skate shop — was a used copy of Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School . Seven dollars. It's a joke title doing serious work. The subtitle is an accusation: the Franklin most of us met was an edition, trimmed until he fit the shelf marked Founding Father. The rest of him had to be sold back to us later, under a rude cover.
This week's literary news keeps circling that same uncomfortable idea from different directions: the label a work arrives in has a way of shrinking the work inside it.
Open Culture takes up Epicureanism — billed, fairly, as the most controversial ancient philosophy — and notes how far the word has fallen. Today, calling yourself an Epicurean can mean as little as enjoying the occasional expensive restaurant meal. In the second century, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in a new video, the bar was considerably higher: this was a demanding, argued-over way of life, not a dining preference.