I’ve been thinking about a provocative essay by Eric Booth on unifying the arts, which I came across at Springboard for the Arts the other day. Booth’s argument is a strategic one; he wants to revive a robust sense of common mission among dance, music and visual arts institutions along with associated educators. This unifying [...]
Let me preface this by promising – I swear! – that I was significantly more cool in high school than the content of this post suggests. Congratulations to Kavya Shivashankar, winner of the 82nd Scripps National Spelling Bee, which was more riveting than the latest season of 24. I am pleased that so many of [...]
“To recover and understand the traditions and ideas that enable and describe human endeavor in the world:” Jacqueline Goldsby is helping to make the Chicago Defender archive public. Word is that The New Thing in poetry is an insistence on reference: “Scientists and shamans, statistically minded investigators and spell-casters, use language with reference to some [...]
On this blog, I’ve frequently commented on the “defense of the humanities” genre, a type of occasional essay penned by elder (or not-so-elder) scholars, often in a burst of frustration with the dilapidated state of the profession and suggesting a visionary agenda for its miraculous renewal. I’m all for renewals, especially miraculous ones, but I’m [...]
At LRB, Daniel Soar provides a delightful etymological history of the @ sign, which is often referred to with the French term arobase. Evidently, the glyph has roots in commercial measurement units in 16th century Florence. But … The French wouldn’t have got their arobase if they hadn’t derived it not from Italy but from [...]
Eight great links to make up for my mysterious absence … “Perhaps we should rethink our knee-jerk reflex to keep them safer than they wish to keep themselves:” Lane Wallace on risk and risk-aversion. Superman, Gilgamesh, Santa Claus, Dracula … who do you think is the most famous fictional character, ever? “It’s not the sort [...]
Newspapers have given noteworthiness to Roger Ebert’s life; blogging has led him to contemplate death, in prose that grows ever-richer and more uncommonly personal. Meanwhile, replying to his blog has given his readers their own affectations … When I began this blog I thought if there was one thing I’d never write about, it would [...]
A letter from the mathematician Norbert Wiener to his sister Bertha, dated July 27, 1925, in which Wiener recounts running into Albert Einstein on a train leaving Frankfurt. Can’t you just picture it? Twenty years after Einstein proposed his theory of special relativity, twenty years before Wiener pioneered cybernetics, two mathematicians sitting in a third [...]
This is the third post in my series on “Culture and Barbarism,” Terry Eagleton’s essay on religion that was recently published in Commonweal. In the first post, I explained that Eagleton showed that any consideration of religion must grapple with how it jives with developments in the economic system. He also proved that “cultural values” [...]
“My friends here esquivent the Bones for the more part,” wrote Samuel Beckett, “which means the bolus has gone home.” Anthony Lane explores an edition of letters full of prose that is “too deeply mired in private nudges and expostulations to be enjoyable.” “Few writers have excelled him in the arts of second-guessing and self-dissatisfaction:” [...]
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