No one talks about cool people anymore. Every year, there are fewer and fewer of them—Bob Dylan, Don Delillo—reduced to shrunken, digital, thumbnail versions of dorm room wall posters. Alain Delon is dead. Cool is an artifact of a past historical moment and style, when people still cared what other people looked like, or what music actually sounded like, or whether the book you were reading might change your life, which these days is impossible, unless you were to divorce yourself from a cultural context in which books, paintings, and songs no longer matter deeply enough to anyone to suffer very deeply over.Eminem and Taylor Swift might still punish themselves over individual bars or phrases, but let’s be honest: No one else cares. No one even bothers to listen to complete songs. Music is wallpaper. The Young Novelists is a bad Canadian folk-rock band. Painters are held captive in climate-controlled, duty-free...