Hurricane Hélène Is Back!

Our Contested Status as a “Magazine”; Miscellaneous Announcements, Not Least of JSR’s Forthcoming Appearances; What We’re Reading, &c.; Plus, Introducing Our New Feature, “A.I. Kills Me!”

Just like my recently diminished meteorological namesake, The Hinternet is breaking records! Ever since we upgraded ourselves to the status of a “magazine”, subscriptions are surging like the banks of the Chattahoochee.

1. Is This a “Magazine”?

There have been a few hitches, we concede. Notably, some readers seem to doubt that we have merited our new appellation, on the grounds, they say, that magazines, in the words of one critic, “typically contain several different features appearing at the same time in what is called an ‘issue’, written by several different contributors with different areas of expertise, all of whose respective existences may be independently confirmed by a quick Google search.” But at the Hinternet offices here in Saint C****, we are of the unanimous view that our critic’s definition is overly restrictive, and we would simply point him to the plain proof established by our upgraded display settings — upgraded, that is, to the elegant “Magazine” header style:

Quod erat demonstrandum, doubters!

We would also offer a brief etymological reflection to this and other critics, noting that in the earliest borrowing of the Arabic maḵzin in the Italian Renaissance, all that was implied in this term was the idea of a “storehouse” or “repository”,¹ which over the following two centuries gradually took on the added meaning of a repository with several discrete compartments. And it is in virtue of this meaning that the term migrated into the realms of commerce (French magasin, Russian магазин, etc.) and of artillery science (as in the storage and feeding device of a repeating firearm) no less than of media. It was, we contend, one and the same process, whereby the merchants of goods and the merchants of death determined they should like to have “magazines” in their respective endeavors, that the merchants of ideas decided to get in on the action too.

It was in the 1890s that the Tsarist régime in Moscow green-lighted the construction of the iconic ГУМ department store, following no doubt the fashion first set by Aristide Boucicaut with the opening of Le Bon Marché in Paris in 1853, which was then given its literary treatment as “la cathédrale du commerce moderne” in Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames of 1883. ГУМ, transliterated as GUM and pronounced as GOOM, stands for “State Universal Magazine”, and by the time our Founding Editor first visited it in 1991, most of its discrete compartments or departments were either entirely empty, or stocked with exactly the same matryoshka dolls —some featuring a big Gorbachev with a smaller Chernenko, an even smaller Andropov, a Brezhnev smaller still, all the way back to a tadpole-sized Lenin— as the neighboring booths and nooks. If in its very darkest years even GUM did not have its “magazine” status revoked for such dull and paltry homogeneity as this, we maintain that The Hinternet —which admittedly is something of a top-down command-economy in its own right, but is never, we hope, dull and paltry— deserves to hold onto this status too. You can think of us, if you like, as the “Stateless Universal Magazine”, and as it were the “SUM” of all previous innovations in the past six centuries of artisanal magazinery.

What might we expect such a summa to do? In a draft of a press release we ultimately decided to scrap, JSR himself wrote: “I have been asked whether we are aiming here to pick up where Lingua Franca left off, for a readership of clever and well-read Americans who are at least adjacent to, but not necessarily part of, the academic world. To this I say: the only true successor to Lingua Franca is AARP: The Magazine. We intend to be so much more than that, as uncompromising as Minotaure, yet as influential for the broader culture as the anticommunist pabulum of Reader’s Digest circa 1961. How are we going to pull that off? Well, hide and watch, as my Dad used to say.” That’s JSR’s vision, anyhow, and while I don’t have the authority to contradict him outright, I can at least say that each of us is guided by somewhat different ideas of what it means, precisely, to start calling ourselves a “magazine”.

Has our launch been perfect? We concede, again, it has not been. For one thing, we are still looking into the security breach that appears to have enabled JSR to sneak back on here and write a few reckless pieces of his own (here, and here), when he had previously agreed, like Ulysses in anticipation of the sirens’ call, to be locked out of this platform for the duration of the present academic semester. We say “appears” because we are not yet entirely certain whether it was in fact JSR himself, or only one of those phantom digital “echoes” that have been plaguing this and other sites in recent months. A full report will be provided once our investigation is complete.

2. Miscellanea

That said, we are happy to report that with the help of various networked prosthetic “nudge” devices, JSR’s progress towards a healthy work/life balance has been more rapid than we could possibly have hoped a month or so ago. He has even been able to respond, without all too much irritation, to the queries we have sent him by text and e-mail for the present edition of “Adequate Housekeeping”.

Thus he informs us, for example, upon solicitation of a summary of his upcoming public appearances, that, Oyez! JSR will be hosting the “Critical Conversations” series at the American Library in Paris this year, leading ten sessions on the AI revolution and the prospects of human thriving in an algorithm-dominated world. The first session will take place on October 10, 2024, and registration is now open. If you are also based in Paris, we’re sure he’d be thrilled to see you there!

Oyez oyez! JSR likewise informs us that on October 17, 2024, the same legendary trio that brought you In Search of the Third Bird will be reuniting for a one-time lecture-performance at the Art History Institute in Florence, a branch of the German Max Planck Institute. He says he is hoping his academic disciplinary peers will find their German sufficiently rusty to read Kunstgeschichte mistakenly as Wissenschaftsgeschichte, both of which are anyhow inordinately long words, the key part of which, in JSR’s own view, really only begins with the antepenultimate syllable. For, he contends, “history is history”, and art and science “have always been two sides of the same coin”. Whatever the case may be, if you’re in or around Florence next month, do not miss this rare event!