… the parables of Jesus are not primarily moral tales about how to behave well, Barfield argued. For one thing, if read like that, many of them seem amoral if not immoral. Instead, they are akin to disturbing allegories and strange stories. If we listen to them aright, they imaginatively jolt us out of our suppositions and open our hearts and minds to receive what Jesus called “life in all its fulness”.
Ian Urbina, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, offers a collection of fascinating and often lamentable stories that chronicle how life on the vast oceans of the world is largely ungoverned
Mr. Urbina offers stories of traffickers, smugglers, pirates and other criminals who take to the sea and ply their criminal trades often beyond the reach of international and national laws
… Lerner suggests, what he learned in the school that was the American Midwest was how to be a man, in the narrowest, most noxious sense of the word. And the problem of masculinity—how to define it, achieve it, control it—is the central theme of The Topeka School.
If, on the cusp of my 78th birthday, I haven’t learned how to be a man, it’s probably too late for me to find out. Actually, I don’t think I ever thought about it. I just went about the business of being me as best I could. There are some things best left to practice. Skip the theories. And please don’t bore me with talk of toxic masculinity.
The cold — or whatever it is I caught awhile back — seems have to returned with a vengeance. So I have decided to focus on it for a bit. So I am spending the day in bed and doing all the things you’re supposed. In between naps, though, I will do some blogging, as I already have, actually.
Bob Rae is senior counsel with the law firm Olthuis, Kleer Townshend and teaches public policy and governance at the University of Toronto. He was the Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre and was the interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2011 to 2013. He was previously leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party and the 21st Premier of Ontario, from 1990 until 1995. Between 1978 and 2013, he was elected 11 times to federal and provincial parliaments. Mr. Rae is currently Canada's special envoy to Myanmar. He has written five books, the most recent of which, What's Happened to Politics? was published in 2015, just prior to that year's Canadian federal election.
People once fell out over books, plays and movies the way they now fall out over Brexit. As a teenager, I remember a dinner party at my parents’ house when Germaine Greer said that Jean-Paul Sartre was a ‘second-rate philosopher’ and another guest, the American novelist Chandler Brossard, replied, ‘I think it’s time to go home now,’ and left in disgust.
Well, I’m all in favor of passionate likes and dislikes, though I see no point in getting bent out of shape over them. You used to be able to google “Wilson, Inquirer, Cormac, asshole” and read all the nasty things lots of people had to say about an article I wrote about The Road. I rather liked that. Obviously, I had got their attention, which is always nice. As for what Ms. Greer had to say about Sartre, I think she was being polite. I’d have said third-rate. Being and Nothingness is an excruciating read. And the “philosophy” is pretty forgettable. If you want to read French philosophy of that period, read Gabriel Marcel.
I will never let the fact that Robert de Niro the person is apparently an asshole interfere with my admiration of his work as an actor. But I do wish he would glom on to some insight and realize that it is only his acting that is of interest to most of us. His pontifications. — which tend to come to strings of obscenities — are rather insubstantial, to put it mildly. Go home, Bob. Chill out. Trust me. I will never bother you with my anarchism.
How dare you sail to America on a carbon fibre yacht that you didn’t build which cost £15million, that you didn’t earn, and which has a back-up diesel engine that you didn’t mention.
The “Iambic pentameter FTW” reply guy was wrong on two counts. First of all, the lyrics in question are not in iambic pentameter, a poetic meter best described as “the one that goes da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA” (that is to say: five iambs, or “da-DA”s, per line). And second of all, FTW, or “for the win”—a prepositional idiom that Wiktionary defines as “being the best; being great, awesome, amazing or spectacular; sure to succeed”—is not a phrase that remotely applies to iambic pentameter, the most overrated of all meters. It’s a perfectly serviceable meter, but it’s the Sweeney Todd/Hallelujah tweet of meters: with so many other good ones out there, why does that one get all the glory?
I hardly think it's overrated. Precisely because it is so serviceable.
I’m a person who listens and that’s long been my habit. I much prefer listening to the sounds in the world than talking or making my own sounds. And I prefer sensing the rhythms of the natural world. Right now the katydids are chirping to their particular rhythm. And I love feeling that in the world. It exists in its rhythm and its sense of sound. Whenever I want to make my own sounds with words, that is what I draw from.
I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the course of my own destiny.
I linked earlier to a story about a drug called Lupron. My friend Cynthia has alerted that the reprting in the story was incorrect. So I deleted the post.
Although trust in the media has edged down this year, it is well above the record low of 32% in 2016 when Republicans' trust dropped precipitously and drove the overall trust reading down during the divisive presidential campaign. Republicans' trust is still at a very low level and a wide gap in views of the media among partisans persists as 69% of Democrats say they have trust and confidence in it, while 15% of Republicans and 36% of independents agree.
So they play to their base. Not necessarily the best idea in this case.
Lenin constantly recommended that people be shot “without pity” or “exterminated mercilessly” (Leszek Kołakowski wondered wryly what it would mean to exterminate people mercifully). “Exterminate” is a term used for vermin, and, long before the Nazis described Jews as Ungeziefer (vermin), Lenin routinely called for “the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrels, fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.”
The further you look into it, the more comprehensive and universal do you see the inheritance of our civilization to be. And that is something that we tend to forget today. It isn’t a narrow bequest. It is something which actually is open to all kinds of innovation, which accepts the whole of human being as its subject matter.
Although it can be read on its own, Life and Fate is actually the second part of a “dilogy.” It continues the story of Grossman’s earlier novel, Stalingrad, which he was forced to publish under the title For a Just Cause, a phrase that Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had used to describe the Soviet war effort when he announced the German invasion. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s new translation of Stalingrad allows us to trace the earlier trajectory of Life and Fate’s many real and fictional characters. First published when Stalin was still alive, Stalingrad is considerably less explicit than Life and Fate about its ethical and political themes. Even so, it was, by Soviet standards, remarkably bold.
Those of us here, however, know that rather than merely a luxury—let’s call it Great Booking—is a vital and necessary practice that life is so much emptier and scarier without. One that calls to mind the William Carlos Williams quote, "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there."
Regardless of corruption in Ukraine, it was still smart to withhold funds until after the leaders spoke, because it made Trump the only person Zelensky needs to satisfy. That’s what we want from our presidents. We want them going in strong, with the full weight of their office and influence, to every interaction with foreign leaders, every time.
… for months before Nabokov began work on the book, he took notes. Sitting at the back of public buses, he jotted down teenage slang, setting it aside for his unfortunate heroine. Nabokov was a non-driver, and so on family road trips his wife Véra acted as chauffeur. When Nabokov was not reading road maps, he would be collecting road signs, recording the repetitious names of the hotels and mocking their crass publicity materials, all of which filtered into the final book:
‘. . . all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac’s Courts . . . Some motels had instructions pasted above the toilet . . . asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies . . .’
Downton, then, is for audiences happy that the old aristocratic world is dead, just as the popularity of Choral Evensong on Radio Three is not a symptom of a residual British religious sense, so much as a signal that secularism has triumphed. Religion is a concert, a “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade”, as Philip Larkin called it. The aristocratic old world, comparably, in the Fellowes version, is a tourist attraction.
A Briton in the US explains why we can expect partisanship to get far, far worse.
Now that the judges are wading into politics, prepare for immense acrimony. You will see more lawfare, as people try to take down governments they dislike through the courts. You will learn the names of the judges. You will discover how the judges are appointed. Newspapers will start to dig into their political affiliations. You will learn whether they ever wore blackface, about the bar fights they instigated at UB40 concerts in the 1980s, and you will see them attacked and vilified by politicians on the Right and Left.
September 25th is Lancelot Andrewes Day, when the Church remembers one of its greatest preachers and the man whose scholarship and gift for poetic phrasing was so central to the making of the King James Version of the Bible.
I’m not picking sour cherries. What I have illustrated is everywhere in the NAB. “Be fertile and multiply,” says God to the creatures and then to man. Really? When the Hebrew verb is built from the noun fruit? In a story about what fruit to eat and what not to eat? When Cain and Abel are supposed to offer the Lord the first fruits of their labor?
A guy donated $1 million to a children's hospital, so his local newspaper dug up some bad tweets from when he was a teenager. He did a good thing and gained national attention for it, and our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press had to put him in his place.
Wide Sargasso Sea-- Jean Rhys's novel of the colonial West Indies -- is not a book I expected to read. But I did so last week and found myself largely confused.
The first part of the novel is well done: Rhys highlights racial tensions stemming from slavery and its abolition; she's equally sensitive to violence, and the shadow it cast across the islands. These themes are extended in the second section of the novel, which focuses on the complex relationship between race and power. Rhys explores this complexity by way of the colonial superstructure as well as through tangled family histories. The third section of the novel, which felt most disjointed, attempts in some ways to bring these themes full circle: the violence which is realized in the first part, for instance, is hinted at again in the end -- as if violence bequeaths more of the same.
The sense I had upon finishing Sargasso, though, was that it required an extension: the themes introduced warrant further exploration; the characters, despite their trauma, do not emerge in three dimensions. I suppose, in my reading, there was too much left unspoken by Rhys, too much that felt ephemeral, ethereal. Sargasso is best when most concrete; unfortunately, those moments of certainty paled in comparison to stretches of implication and innuendo.
There is something happening here, I readily concede: I was just not convinced that the pieces, when taken together, amount to a coherent whole. Style is not enough to carry a novel to completion -- even the beauty of the language seeks to communicate profound themes.
The last thing we should do is double down to some political or economic position and send our children out to shut down what little reasonable conversation might still be had.
Even when I was a student — back in the day when Mario Savio was making headlines — I was skeptical of student demonstrations. Students have a right to ask questions. In fact, they have an obligation to. But if they know all the answers, what’s left to study?
An old al Qaeda manual discovered by the Manchester Police in the United Kingdom back in 2000 revealed the terrorist groups’ guidance to terrorists, as well as to terrorist spies. The 180-page training manual’s 11th and 12th chapters dealt with espionage.
“The spy is called an eye because his work is through his eyes or because of his excessive preoccupation with observation, as if all his being is an eye,” the manual noted.
I haven’t shot a gun since I was in my teens — yes, you read that right — but I may soon go around the corner (there’s a gun store nearby) and get one, since I’m old and the city has become dangerous (because of people, not implements). I will then take steps to get a license to carry. As for these Congressional ninnies, if they can’t go to the trouble of getting the facts right, why should I not conclude that they are either really dumb or just lying? Why should anyone take them seriously?
Newman was convinced that the mental refinement that comes from literary and philosophical training is something good in itself, quite apart from its utility. But he added that, far from being useless, an education of this sort would equip the student to enter many walks of life. Whether one becomes a soldier, a statesman, a lawyer, or a physician, one will need the ability to think clearly, to organize one’s knowledge, and to articulate one’s ideas so as to deal effectively with the questions at hand. A narrowly professional or vocational program of training would therefore fail the test of pragmatic usefulness, not to mention the additional test of liberal knowledge as its own end.
Albert Jay Nock makes this same point in The System of Education in the United States. An educated mind, according to Nock, is an experienced mind, experienced by having become acquainted with history and literature and art.
With each one able to hold as much carbon as an average hectare of rainforest, our discovery means that the vast jungle may be a greater carbon sink than previously thought.
“China is steeped in ancient strategy, and the title, ‘Deceiving the Sky,’ comes from an ancient Chinese strategy used by generals to win battles called ‘Deceive the sky to cross the ocean,’” Mr. Gertz explains.
I am certainly unimpressed by the clothing coming out of there.
… if pressed to choosean exemplar of the modern detective novel from among the dozens of contenders who could legitimately press their case, many readers would, I think, vote for the astonishingly productive and consistently compelling Belgian mystery writer Georges Simenon (1903-1989), creator of the everyman Parisian police inspector Jules Maigret.
"It was after the road breakers came. After my brother died because there was no car to take him where the doctor was." "Lots of people died like that." "They said thousands had died in cars. It was better that one man should die because there were no cars."
Dave also sent along the Kirkus review of The Bridge.
… Douglas Murray shows in his impressive and lively survey, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the emerging world of censorship is a world without forgiveness, in which people are condemned for what they are rather than what they do, and in which the real virtues and vices that govern our conduct are ignored altogether as irrelevant.
Newton’s third law of motion — for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction — applies to human actions as well as those among objects. The reaction to the action described herein will not be pretty.
… as Kaufmann writes, honest appraisals of faith and morals often lead to hurt feelings and even war, “most people speak dishonestly of the most important subjects.” And worse, in a state of presumption or resignation, “[m]any recent philosophers prefer not to speak of them at all.” For Kaufmann, this was a pervasive, lamentable, and distressing silence that needed to be broken. How could reticence about religion and theology lead to anything more than ignorance of religious and theological traditions? How could confused interpretations of the Old and New Testament lead to anything more than dismissive, muddled, or overzealous treatments of formative cultures and institutions? And what good is philosophy, if its timeless pursuits are increasingly obscured by petty domestic infighting between the annoyingly abstruse (Continental) and the presumptuously ascetic (Analytic)?
I read a good bit of Kaufmann in my college days. He always impressed me.
Regarding one of these, Antonia Byatt told me once over dinner that if not at first resort, surely at last resort she and her sister Maggie would come to each other’s aid.
Barrett co-authored a scholarly legal article with John H. Garvey, now the President of the Catholic University of America. They stated their conclusion quite bluntly:
[W]e believe that Catholic judges (if they are faithful to the teaching of their church) are morally precluded from enforcing the death penalty. This means that they can neither themselves sentence criminals to death nor enforce jury recommendations of death.
Judges administer the law as enacted by the legislature. If they cannot do that in good conscience, they should resign. I have reservations about the death penalty, because I think it is bad to kill people, but were I judge, I would have to put aside my private reservations and as the law prescribes.
In the realm of clichés in extemporaneous speech, politicians surely lead the field. Without such clichés as “going forward,” “bring to the table,” “level playing field,” “at the end of the day,” “tipping point” and “the American people,” most would be reduced to stuttering, if not rendered speechless. The characteristic cliché-studded political sentence might run: “At the end of the day, given a level playing field, we have to bring to the table [blank] to allow the American people to go forward before we reach a tipping point.”
Title IX’s language is very plain. It prohibits any institution from funding, sponsoring, or listing gender-discriminatory programs and initiatives, so for example, even listing a woman-only scholarship or placing an employment ad specifying only women need apply runs counter to Title IX, though such breaches happen all the time. Title IX also prohibits discrimination in terms of counselling or health benefits. That should mean that both men and women are treated with equal objectivity and respect when, say, sexual-assault allegations come up for assessment. But universities have not covered themselves in glory, to say the least, on that front.
There are some pretty good books in this list — Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, to cite just two. But The God Delusion? As I said when I wrote about it, nobody in his right mind believes in the God Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in. And The Road? I couldn’t suspend the amount of disbelief necessary to take that one seriously.
I discovered a beauty in architecture. I love symmetry and geometry so much—elements that you often find in these massive structures. In my compositions, symmetry is also one of the main factors that distinguishes my artwork. It’s a key element of my style. I also try to harmonize a human and a place with each other. These two elements become as one.
Notre-Dame had always seemed eternal, and the medieval builders certainly thought it would last until the Day of Judgment; but suddenly we saw that it could be destroyed. In the life of every boy there is a painful moment when he realizes that his father is not all-powerful and invulnerable. The fall of the spire made me think of that moment.
Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence is “a bitter mix of right-wing revanchism and black nationalism,” Mr. Robin writes. “It begins with the belief that racism is permanent, the state is ineffective, and politics is feeble, and ends with a dystopia that looks painfully familiar: men armed to the teeth, people locked up in jails, money ruling all, and racial conflict as far as the eye can see.” I think that’s Mr. Robin’s way of saying Justice Thomas is a conservative.
… in my view he overrates the quality—the merit, you might say—of education that underlies and reinforces the new meritocracy. Mr. Markovits shows that elite educational institutions at all stages spend more per student, that they have smaller student-teacher ratios, and that they result in higher SAT scores allowing students to gain admission to elite universities. But what if much of this added expenditure is spent on recreation facilities, computer centers, so-called cultural enrichment and counselling salaries; what does it matter if there are more teachers per pupil if the teachers themselves are not extraordinary; what does a higher SAT score mean except that one is good at taking the SAT, and in some cases preparing for it, as Mr. Markovits records, with the aid of $600-per-hour tutoring; and what, finally, if the elite schools aren’t really in fact all that intrinsically splendid but flourish largely owing to snobbery?
Those among the elite that I have encountered are certainly well-trained. But I get little sense that they are educated.
This is quite incisive. The Pope also is entitled to his private judgment. I am not obligated to share it. And as Charles Williams pointed out, given Jesus view of the religious leaders of his day, perhaps we should not be overly servile to those of our day. God, after all, is intimately in touch with each and every one of us. The institutional Church has been shown, in recent years, to have a lot of ‘splaining to do. The buck stops with God.
"When we heard how homophobic Chick-fil-A was, we thought it was a perfect fit," said King Salman. "But they ran their restaurant for a solid three months here and never once did they stone a gay person, throw a gay person off a roof, or even use anti-LGBT slurs against them."
I have no interest in "literary history." Nor is the spurious taxonomy of "major" and "minor" poets of concern to me. At the risk of trying the patience of long-time readers, I am afraid I must repeat my First Poetic Principle: It is the individual poem that matters, not the poet. As I say, I am fond of "The Trees at Night." I understand the objections that might be forthcoming from moderns: the poem is "sentimental" and "romantic," and its anthropomorphism ("The lonely lovely trees sigh"; "A few homing leaves drift by,/Poor souls bewildered and wan") places it beyond the pale. We have progressed beyond such things, the undeceived and knowing moderns say, all irony and self-regard. They are wrong, of course.
‘Does scientific evidence support the notion that “the Earth is dying”?’ As for resources to answer that question, I point them towards the latest IPCC report as well as the data sources which feed into it. That would include Nasa data on sea ice in the Arctic, which shows a sharp retreat in recent decades, as well as satellite data from the same organization on wildfires – which shows a fall in the acreages burned in recent decades. They might also like to look at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization’s report on hurricanes which last month concluded: ‘it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human activity – and particularly greenhouse warming – has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity.’
The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.
Many people, I've discovered over the years, have a narrow conception of what a book review can do or should do. This reaches its nadir in the perception of a review as essentially a “book report,” hence (supposedly) boring. But what attracted me from the beginning (though, again, I couldn't have said so at the time) was the enormous freedom the form allows! A good review can be “impersonal” or “personal.” It can be focused almost entirely on the book (or books) at hand or use the book under review primarily as a point of departure. There are very few “rules,” in fact, though this or that editor, this or that publication, may impose all sorts of constraints. That freedom appealed to me enormously (it still does), and I enjoyed seeing how many different ways a review could be done, and done well.
At UC Berkeley, the 2019 Spring semester was plagued by multiple high-profile antisemitic incidents. Antisemitic flyers were posted across the campus comparing Zionism to Nazism. Pro-Israel events were purposely blocked in academic departments, while these departments continued to indoctrinate students with a pre-defined anti-Israel narrative.
You have to wonder about the students. There were students in my day — at a Jesuit college no less — who relished standing up to profs and administrators.
A Writer’s People is about Naipaul’s genesis as a writer and of his personal struggles from not knowing to mastery of his craft. It is a story he frequently told, but told this time at a remove, reflected in the life of Gandhi. Like Gandhi, he also came of age far from the center of empire and, while initially ignorant of its institutions and culture, mastered its language and its ways. Although he was a native speaker of English, the Trinidad in which he grew up had no standard form, which is reflected in the English of his first two novels. The older members of his family spoke Hindi, but his father spoke good English, as can be seen in the letters they exchanged when Naipaul was a student at Oxford. These letters reveal the younger Naipaul to be an outsider striving to get in, as well as his ambition “to show these people that I can beat them at their own language.” In A House for Mr. Biswas, the point of view of the omniscient narrator is totally free of dialect. With that novel, Naipaul found a place in a tradition stretching back to Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy (three writers mentioned in A Writer’s People), not to forget Flaubert. But by the 1950s the world around such societies had changed, “had grown steadily larger,” and after Mr. Biswas, Naipaul struck out to look at and report on this larger world. Those reports were not well received in certain quarters.
“… this allows us to see the encounter happening,” said Scott-Warren. “It shows you the firsthand encounter between two great writers, which you don’t often get to see, especially in this period. A lot of that kind of evidence is lost, so that’s really exciting.”
“We have got to have a national conversation and a Republican conversation on where we are going on debt and deficit spending,” Mr. Sanford told Fox’s Chris Wallace. We need “to have a conversation on what it means to be a Republican,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd. He informed both men that we need to have a conversation on trade, and Mr. Wallace that we also need “a conversation on humility and one’s approach to politics.” Mark Sanford, clearly, is a man with a hunger for discussion. If you’ve a free moment, give him a ring.
When I was on a newspaper copy desk, we kept an eye for clichés. Ee probably didn't catch them all, but we kept plenty out of print. Of course, you can make reference to them tongue-in-cheek, as I confess I have been wont to do from time to time.
The profession isn’t entirely defunct – there are some extraordinary critics still on the beat. In cities with major arts centers or celebrated orchestras, such positions are easier for an editor to justify in tough financial times (and it has been mostly downhill since the advent of the internet). But it is now more common for a newspaper to find a general assignment writer to write some nice words about the local production of “The Nutcracker” or a visit from Yo-Yo Ma – the so-called “big-ticket items” – while leaving a city’s more venturesome endeavors alone.
