Opinion | In Praise of Bookstores, a Reader’s Refuge

To the Editor:

Re “The Unlikely Bookstore of My Dreams,” by Ezra Klein (column, Jan. 30):

I second Mr. Klein’s reward for his — and my — lifelong refuge: the bookstore, particularly Barnes & Noble, whose survival was one of the few actually good issues to return out of the pandemic.

Yes, Amazon carries all the pieces and at decrease costs, however there has all the time been one thing particular about being inside a bookstore — be it a Barnes & Noble or an impartial retailer — and taking time to browse the cabinets in numerous departments and maintain the books in my fingers.

Sometimes I’m within the temper to have a look at each guide within the historical past part; different occasions it’s baseball or pictures or biography. Once in a whereas, I’ll spot a traditional novel I’ve averted for many years and provides it a attempt.

I confess that I’ve taken a guide off a bookstore’s shelf and spent hours within the retailer studying it from begin to end. Why? As Mr. Klein wrote, what makes a bookstore nice is that it’s a place not simply to purchase books, “but to be among them.”

And all these books on the half-dozen bookshelves at my house function continuous reminders to me of all of the issues which have piqued my curiosity through the years.

Fred T. Rossi
Scotch Plains, N.J.

To the Editor:

I simply completed studying Ezra Klein’s earnest effort to appoint Barnes & Noble for sainthood. Doesn’t he learn about Barnes & Noble’s historical past of devouring small, impartial bookstores, that the chain was as soon as the bane of all impartial bookstores? (The film “You’ve Got Mail” was about such predatory habits.)

I used to be the supervisor of the previous and uncommon books division at a Shakespeare & Company bookstore on the Upper West Side in Manhattan when Barnes & Noble appeared in our neighborhood like a hungry Tyrannosaurus, devouring our retailer and a couple of others, just like the a lot treasured kids’s bookstore Eeyore’s.

I utterly share Mr. Klein’s love of brick-and-mortar bookstores (I as soon as owned one myself), however a little bit of company and group historical past could be appreciated.

Mike Feder
New York

To the Editor:

Kudos to Ezra Klein for the great news celebrating bodily books and bookstores and explaining the resurgence of Barnes & Noble.

During the pandemic some of the independents supplied writer interviews on Zoom — a actual present to the homebound. We logged on to Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Ore., and met fantastic books unknown to us and had the pleasure of watching an hourlong interview with the authors.

Yes, we pay extra for our books on the brick-and-mortar bookstores, however there are lots of advantages not obtainable from on-line sources. Long dwell bookstores!

Barbara Sentovich
Los Alamitos, Calif.

The Kafka Diaries

To the Editor:

Ross Benjamin fortunately locations himself on the fitting facet of historical past in “The Search for the Real Franz Kafka Continues” (Opinion visitor essay, Feb. 5). As grateful as I’m to Mr. Benjamin for his current completist translation of Kafka’s diaries, I don’t suppose it’s essential to trash Max Brod, Kafka’s pal and literary executor, for his much less full model.

Mr. Benjamin is anachronistic when he positions Brod as somebody who does mistaken by Kafka in cleansing up and vetting the Kafka diaries. Today we revere error, fragmentation and queerness. But when Brod revealed the diaries, he was embarking on a challenge at a time that none of these qualities have been valued, and publishing any of it was in opposition to his nice pal’s needs, so Brod took cautious but necessary steps towards a reveal of Kafka.

Try to think about publishing your greatest pal’s very private diaries, unedited, in opposition to their needs a few years after their demise. I’d counsel that what Brod did was simply sufficient, certainly excellent for the second, and that we see Mr. Benjamin’s new fuller translation as following in Brod’s nice footsteps.

Rather than take Brod down, we must be on our knees to him for his braveness and perception, and thank him for what he has given us.

To the Editor:

Re “A Ban on TikTok Won’t Make Us More Secure,” by Glenn S. Gerstell (Opinion visitor essay, Feb. 4):

Privacy laws is, certainly, a key half of a bigger answer to serving to our legal guidelines catch as much as the realities of our digital world — and to stopping international adversaries from utilizing our knowledge in opposition to us.

But we additionally want to assist Americans discover ways to navigate our on-line world and grow to be much less vulnerable to manipulation. Otherwise, the threats that Mr. Gerstell so aptly described will stay.

Luckily, there may be one other promising answer: We can be certain that extra Americans are news literate.

News literacy teaches you to establish credible sources and separate reality from fiction. Evidence more and more reveals that this strategy will help “inoculate” individuals in opposition to being manipulated by misinformation. Just look to Finland, which requires media literacy instruction beginning in preschool. Its residents are essentially the most immune to misinformation of all Europeans surveyed, as you reported on Jan. 11 (“How Finland Teaches Even Youngest Pupils to Spot Misinformation”).

We want a concerted effort from state and native governments to make news literacy instruction a actuality for all Americans. Let’s demand media literacy instruction in faculties and defend ourselves from deceptive claims that unfold on-line.

Ebonee Rice
Washington
The author is senior vice chairman, educator engagement, for the News Literacy Project.

To the Editor:

Re “911 Gets a Call; It’s Your Watch, and It’s Worried” (entrance web page, Feb. 4):

False-positive alerts from Apple Watch’s well being options usually are not new. In 2020, I co-wrote a peer-reviewed research study that found that many alerts from Apple Watch’s irregular coronary heart rhythm detection characteristic have been false positives.

We noticed that for each seven sufferers who went to a well being care setting with an alert, just one was identified with clinically actionable heart problems. These misguided alerts result in the overuse of well being care assets.

Apple and different expertise firms should rigorously contemplate unintended penalties of false-positive alerts once they develop health-focused options, lest their merchandise flip into the algorithm that cried wolf.

Kirk D. Wyatt
Fargo, N.D.
The author is a pediatric hematologist and oncologist.

Unrepresentative Polls

To the Editor:

Re “Is Trump Way Up or Way Down?” (The Upshot, nytimes.com, Feb. 3):

Pollsters appear to wish to ignore the straightforward indisputable fact that it’s unattainable to have a consultant pattern when individuals more and more don’t reply to pollsters. Pollsters argue that they use statistical instruments to appropriate for unrepresentative samples, however their apparent failures in current elections belie this.

Pollsters and the media, together with The New York Times, have a vested curiosity in polling, however given all of the poor polling it’s exhausting to argue that it provides vital advantages. Polling is extra speculative than news and must be handled as such.

Douglas Renfield-Miller
Redding, Conn.