Tomorrow I will complete a 12-month literary “fasting” with almost no reading at all outside mathematics (and some, very very few classic texts, plus this page and a few links). RESULT: The BS detector is oversensitized. I don’t know if the effect will go away soon; for now things I used to find mildly BS are now totally repellent, but things that I used to enjoy reading (like Italo Calvino’s Folk Tales) are just as pleasant.
But modern literature, and the very notion of “public intellectual” I can no longer stand. It feels largely like hype and fashion-magazine discourse. I am scheduled to go to Jaipur festival in January and can’t bear the idea of listening to writers, talking to them… I am in trouble.

Tomorrow I will complete a 12-month literary… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.