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September 21, 2010, 05:00 PM ET
My Daily Read: Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University.
Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
A: E-mail, alas. Then I look at The New York Times front page on the web and read some of the main stories. Next, I look at the Arts section in the print version that arrives at our door. I do the Sudoku and the crossword and move on from there. So I’m probably best informed about the arts, especially in New York City, followed by the main stories in the world and national news. I’m most likely to follow stories on international human rights, and especially free expression, because of my work as President of the PEN American Center. And I read about Ghana, Nigeria, and Namibia, where my three sisters live. I get a daily e-mail from 234next.com, which covers Nigeria, and less frequent blasts from thenewghanaian.com.
Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?
A: We subscribe to The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Time Out, The American Scholar, N+1 and the New York Review of Books. Gosh: listed like that, it looks like an awful lot of magazine reading. I often buy The Financial Times to read on the train between Princeton Junction and New York City. (It’s on sale at both stations!) Online, as I say, I look at the Times often, sometimes cnn.com and less often The Washington Post. I don’t read much on my iPhone, but the iPad is good for reading the papers on the train.
Q: What books have you recently read?
A: Last weekend I read Candia McWilliam's new memoir, What To Look For in Winter, which isn’t out in the US yet, and Robert Putnam’s forthcoming American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. (Both marvelous, by the way.) Now I’m reading W. E. B. Du Bois’s The World and Africa, in preparation for giving the Du Bois lectures at Harvard in the Fall. I try to read some poetry most days: at the moment I have Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi edited by Mahmood Jamal on the Kindle App on my iPad and I also dip into a Kindle volume of Thomas Hardy quite often. Oh, and I re-read Chekhov’s long short story "The Duel" last weekend, too. Great stuff. The best novel I’ve read in the last month was Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist. What a fine writer!
Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years? How so?
A: No, I don’t think so. I have read journals mostly by downloading PDFs from JSTOR or through Princeton’s library subscriptions for many years. But I have to confess that I’m not one for keeping up with the latest literature. Most of what I read is pointed to by friends or suggested by content alerts from PhilPapers.org.
Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?
Rarely. But I do look at Andrew Sullivan fairly often and at crookedtimber.com; and during elections I am devoted to FiveThirtyEight.com. But I’m often put off by the sheer nastiness of the comments on blog pages.
Q: Do you use Twitter? If so, who do you follow?
A: No. If I did, I’d perhaps follow Sarah Palin and dump my blood-pressure medicine.
Q: What are the guilty pleasures in your media diet?
A: Guilt and shame are different, of course. But making public what you’re guilty about is shaming. So, as the author of The Honor Code, which defends the importance of a concern for one’s honor, I’m disinclined to answer this question. Suffice it to say, that as a scholar I consider almost all my time free—in the sense that I get to decide how to spend it—so there are plenty of opportunities for mischief. —Evan R. Goldstein
Sketch by Ted Benson
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