Morning roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:

… Sad, but mostly true: Bruce Charlton's Miscellany: Disappointed with modernity - we have wasted our opportunities, perverted our opportunities.

I cannot think of a single modern society which used well the opportunities given by the establishment (for a few generations) of peace, prosperity and comfort.

… The curious case of criticism.

In the case of the two reviews of the Roger Ailes book that are cited, it seems evident that Janet Maslin reviewed the book and raised valid questions regarding its methodology. The Weisberg review seems to be more of an opinion piece about Fox News that takes the book under review at face value.

… Before the fall: The magic of Encyclopedia Britannica's 11th edition.

To open an 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is to open a worldview lost forever in the staggering slaughter of the first world war. The 11th edition of the Britannica represents the high tide of optimism and belief in human progress that had dominated the Anglo-Saxon vision since the Enlightenment.

…  Under the Covers —‘Why I Read,’ by Wendy Lesser.

“The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter. On the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.”

… Debunked before reaching urban legend status:  No, Mein Kampf Is Not an Amazon Bestseller.

How many people, then, are reading Mein Kampf in 2014? The answer is that it’s impossible to say, and there’s no real reason to think there are more now than there were six months or six years ago.

… Anniversary dish: Robert Burns’s “Address to a Haggis”.

… Podcast: Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography.