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Things mankind was not supposed to know — the dark side of science

14 November 2020

9:00 AM

14 November 2020

9:00 AM

When We Cease to Understand the World Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West

Pushkin Press, pp.189, 14.99

One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all, are we supposed to make of all these wikinovels? I mean novels that leap from subject to subject, anecdote to anecdote, so that the reader feels as though they are toppling like Alice down a particularly erudite Wikipedia rabbit-hole.

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