Morning roundup …

… courtesy of Dave Lull.

… Good to know: 'Jane Austen, Game Theorist' by Michael Suk-Young Chwe Is a Joke | New Republic.

One would think, given its title, that Chwe’s book offers an in-depth game-theoretical analysis of the ways that Austen’s characters (specifically, her heroines and heroes) work through their choices (specifically, the ones they make in relation to one another)—why Elizabeth Bennet, to take the most obvious example, rejects Mr. Darcy the first time he proposes but accepts him on the next go-round.
No such luck. What we really get, once we fight through Chwe’s meandering, ponderous, frequently self-contradictory argument, is only the claim that Austenwants her characters to think in game-theoretic ways: to reflect upon the likely consequences of their choices, to plan out how to reach their goals, to try to intuit what the people around them are thinking and how they in turn are likely to act.

… Rude new world: The new intolerance: will we regret pushing Christians out of public life?

… not only Christians, but also Muslims and Jews, increasingly feel they are no longer free to express any belief, no matter how deeply felt, that runs counter to the prevailing fashions for superficial “tolerance” and “equality” (terms which no longer bear their dictionary meaning but are part of a political jargon in which only certain views, and certain groups, count as legitimate).

I think these "liberals" will find that trying to suppress religion is not as easy as they may think. Religion has been around a lot longer than this "liberalism".

… APPRECIATIONS: REMEMBERING BRUCE CHATWIN.

Chatwin is less widely read a quarter-century after his passing but for no good reason. He was a superb storyteller, even if storytelling meant departing from the literal truth—a standard to which we do not hold many other literary travelers, it should be said, from Herodotus to Mark Twain. And, that said, most of his books, which were too few to begin with, remain in print.

… And the winners are : The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature.

… Moments to remember: Ralph Fiennes: Dickens and the Grand Budapest.

The point he is in the process of making is that there is one big difference between cinema and theatre: the close-up. The cinematic close-up brings something new into the world, an intense intimacy. Istvan Szabo explained this to him when he was directing Fiennes in Sunshine (1999). “For me,” says Fiennes, lapsing into a Hungarian accent, “cinema iz about ze cloze-up — to zee thoughtz and emotionz born in the faze for the firzt time