I don't know. It is hard to know what to make of the paradoxes: look at the shelves of any sizeable grocery, a diversity of food unparalleled in human history, and yet most of it is mediocre compared to the originals in the original homeland. Sympathetic as I am to the "evil capitalism" language, when I look around I see more music and more variety out there than is possible to handle in many lifetimes. Look at the explosion of world music -- globalization at its most amazing -- hideous, wonderful, mediocre, new, all at the same time. The same is true of books -- people are talking about the death of books, and it is raining down books from everywhere upon us. Much of it is "mediocre diversity". Would we have less diversity for more quality? Is the diversity real or fake? How can we answer such questions?



yours,

Peter T.