I reviewed Blank Space, which is not a Taylor Swift song but the new “Cultural History of the 21st Century” from the insightful and ever-cranky W. David Marx (Status and Culture) for the Minnesota Star-Tribune:

The phrase “Time is a flat circle” often refers to how the manic post-pandemic news cycle makes comprehension of the recent past impossible. A similarly dazed bafflement is explored in W. David Marx’s lucid and entertaining —yet despairing — book about the new millennium’s flattening of culture…