“The General Entertainment of My Life”: The <i>Tatler</i>, the <i>Spectator</i>, and the Quidnunc’s Cure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The quidnunc—the news addict hooked on the latest dispatches— remained a figure of fun throughout the eighteenth century, partly because he functioned as a comic canary in the era’s ever-expanding coal mine of periodically printed news. Richard Steele coined the term and, with his collaborator Joseph Addison, satirized the affliction in the pages of the Tatler and the Spectator. Each periodical, in its own way, proposed the theatre as the quidnunc’s likeliest corrective and cure. The tactics by which they did so at once anticipate and rewire some powerful theories of performance and mediation: Peggy Phelan’s on the primacy of presence; Michael Warner’s on the distinctive temporalities—theatrical, periodical—inhabited by the early eighteenth century’s emerging, overlapping publics; Walter Benjamin’s on the different operations of “absorption” triggered by the singular, aureate work of art and the mass-directed entertainments made possible (and prolific) by modern technologies of reproduction. The quidnunc’s disorder is an obsession with the trivial, but Steele and Addison, over the course of their two papers, manage to spin from it an argument more momentous, about theatre, journalism, and time itself in Queen Anne’s age of burgeoning information.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".