“I had grown up with a different head, an old-fashioned one, and that sea of possibilities and different tasks seemed to me like something cooked up for people other than myself.” – Alessandro Baricco
Last year I noticed a book for sale at, of all places, the checkout counter of the food emporium Eataly. The book was The Barbarians: An Essay On the Mutation of Culture by the Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco. I made a note to check it and finally did so last month. The Barbarians is a timely, playful, and compelling essay about what could be described as a global shift in consciousness regarding high and low culture, the flow of information, knowledge, and how we think. Through a series of brief case studies on wine, soccer, books, Google, and even music, Baricco suggests that we are becoming “mutants: with a changed orientation to the world–one whose sensibility…
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