links from February 14 to March 18, 2010
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Week Starting 2010-02-14
- Los Angeles is hereby declared the best place to eat. Molecular-gastronomy spectacles, casually elegant hangouts with pitch-perfect Mediterranean food, old-school chop houses, secret restaurants run out of borrowed kitchens by ambitious line cooks, and places that are so beholden to the whims of the farmers’ market that they are barely able to get a sandwich to the table.
- What was wrong with Emily Dickinson? No, seriously, what was wrong with her? Epilepsy? Deep secrets? Repression? Genius? A new biography tries it all.
- Emotion, public service, and triggers. Three things that make an idea go viral.
- Gravity may not be a fundamental force. It may arise as a property of something more fundamental. Prof. T. Padmanabhan on physics, publicity, and … spirituality?
- He may love Jesus, but he hates God. At least Brian McLaren’s “new kind of Christianity” is firmly set against God as revealed in the Bible. Tim Challies has seen enough.
- Sure, the humanities eat their young. But Anthony Grafton at The New Republic says things aren’t all that bad: For example, “Watch us discussing proposals.”
- True or Falsetto: When pop singers reach for the highest vocal registers to signalise neuralgic values of sensibility or emotionality, it makes them sound like mediums to some superhuman, transsexual force, which is making itself heard. Or at least it should.
- The sarcastic font, with a back-slant. Yeah, right, that’ll help.
- The critics have stuck their knives deep into poor old John Milton: too lofty, not serious, un-English, demanding, mean, on the devil’s side. But if you know enough to want some magic with your poetry, Milton’s your man.
- “I can spot a happy chicken a mile away.” One could spend years on a moral philosophical quest, or keep chickens and treat them with courtesy and common sense. One doesn’t just keep chickens, one lives with them.
- If the surge works on terror, why not try it in Salinas? That’s the plan.
- E.D. Hirsch is a social liberal who keeps making arguments that conservatives love. Mainly, he thinks everybody on the educational front of the culture war needs to know a lot more solid information.
- It’s easy to imagine a kind of pop music that would be with us, instead of at us. Plato was right to think that when we move in time to music we are educating our characters. For we are learning an aspect of our embodiment as free beings.
- Bored. Really bored, but in a good way. I’m talking Great Gatsby boredom, with everyone lying around in white clothes and floppy hats, sipping long drinks with cooling names, and being utterly and divinely bored.
Week Starting 2010-02-21
- VOCALIZE! (Вокализ) Edward Khil, Russian crooner from the 70s. He does indeed vocalize.
- “We pretend to study, and they pretend to grade us.” A new study shows that college is only a part-time job, taking up about 3.5 hours per day.
- “We worship an awesome God in the blue states,’’ said candidate Obama. But President Obama doesn’t go to church anymore. Is he successfully keeping his private religion from becoming a public matter? Or is he consistently secular to the core?
- Is it even possible for psychology to be practiced as a science? Big money in pills, political pressure on the DSM, the total collapse of Freudianism, the rise of pharmacological determinism. Louis Menand says the odds are heavy against it.
- Arthur Koestler, the Casanova of causes. Communist turned Cold Warrior, Zionist turned anti-Zionist, public opponent of tyranny turned private bully.
- A weird god named Theos, who hates matter, story, and becoming, but loves spirit, state, and being. He presides over a cold religion that’s all about soul-sorting. Oh wait, you’re talking about Christianity?
- Is there a religion blogosphere? The Immanent Frame issues a report.
- Tiger Woods has converted! No, not to or from Buddhism. He has become a catechumen in the Oprahite faith, confessing that all of life is public, and privacy is an illusion.
- The brain in your gut, the enteric nervous system. It’s got 100 million neurons; more than in your spinal cord or your entire peripheral nervous system. Your belly needs a psychologist, or a neurogastroenterologist.
- It’s as if Jesse Jackson summoned up his own exact opposite. When Jesse Lee Peterson starts talking, the words “I don’t agree with everything he says, but . . .” leap screaming into your mind.
- Yitta Schwartz, age 93, belonged to a Hasidic group that averaged 9 children per couple. And when she died recently, she left 2,000 living descendants. That’s an estimate, because who could count them?
- What the babies want to do is ease everybody’s pain right now. Because babies can’t tell they’re not you. Philosophy and science are converging on the most mysterious five years of our lives.
- Ain’t No Grave gonna keep Johnny Cash from releasing another posthumous album, recorded in his final days.
- Well, we’re out of money. Let’s play board games!
Week Starting 2010-02-28
- The great British schools forgot what they were supposed to do, but some American copycats are giving it a try.
- Los Angeles by 2010 was supposed to be Blade Runner, Mad Max, the tenth circle of the Inferno. Instead, the crime rate has plunged low enough to make little midwestern cities look scary by comparison. How did L.A. become a safe place to live?
- Star Wars amigurumi. May the crochet needles be with you.
- Modern warfare makes big, dramatic battles a thing of the past. Then again, that’s what they said in 1909. Victor Davis Hanson asks whether we’ve seen the last of the big battles.
- One over F, pink noise, on the screen and in your brain. Today’s film-editing standards have somehow synced up with pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us, aligning movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye.
- Conservatism gave America two great ideas: Burkeanism and a limit to the politics of grievance. Both will suffer from the inevitable Republican backlash in the next election cycle.
- Dummies for Dummies.
- Solving for X is detective work. After that, it’s all just formulas. Prof. Strogatz of Cornell is blogging his way through math, and has reached algebra.
- Inerrancy. Not a new doctrine, not a weird doctrine, not a distraction. Michael Horton takes it from the top.
- A Banker’s Progress (The unthinkable has happened: a brand new Doonesbury strip is readable and thought-provoking)
- There go the British Methodists? “We are prepared to go out of existence not because we are failing in mission, but for the sake of mission.”
- Self has no religion to give anything up for, so he’s fasting from museums for Lent.
- The secret of perpetual first lady Dolley Madison: She was nice. A new documentary examines how far that one virtue can go.
- Rent the radio spectrum to the highest bidder. It’s a limited natural resource, and the FCC is already managing it. They’re just managing it with rules from the 1950s.
- Never mind the abortive apps like Wave and Buzz: The reason Google keeps ruling is buried in the algorithmic tweakings of PageRank, Backrub, Fritz, and BigDaddy.
- The classic moral imagination is alive and well, hollering from the tabloids its prophetic denunciations of mid-level noncelebrity bad behavior: Thou Art The Man.
- Modernism found itself by inventing ancient Knossos, a peaceful pre-European matriarchy projected by the “delirious interpretive incontinence” of Sir Arthur Evans.
Week Starting 2010-03-07
- To do theology well, you have to pray and worship. But does that demote theology into a subjective thing, incapable of being studied in a university alongside objective disciplines that deliver real knowledge?
- Stop praising your kids all the time, and send them to bed earlier. George Will puts on his favorite grumpy old man hat. “Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.”
- There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. “Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa.” Marilynne Robinson, reviewed and recommended.
- The new civil war is nonviolent, but it’s already happening. It’s California versus Texas this time, and you can watch it being waged in stats and policies.
- The new Vanhoozer book, and this time he’s actually doing theology. Moving on from methodology, one of the leading theologians of our time puts the mythic magic back into the primary doctrines.
- Everybody should go to college, all research is important, and academia is inherently noble. The Pope Center’s Clarion Call issues a deflationary top ten list.
- Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs. How would you even know if there were a typo in Finnegan’s Wake? Two tireless editors have found them. Margaritomancy! Hyacinthous pervinciveness!
- It was going to be great: An ecumenical, liturgical Springtime. But the icy blast of liberalism is only one of the prevailing winds in our ecumenical Winter. Matthew Milliner ponders.
- Peer review as collusion. Why should we trust professors to hold each other accountable to truth? What if they don’t?
Week Starting 2010-03-14
- American universities, of course, are fast-food franchises with no long-term vision. But in Britain, profs take their time, slow-roasting academic work to seasoned perfection over generations. Not any more. We’re all moving to McDonald’s U.
- What’s pragmatism done for you lately? Stanley Fish’s latest entry in his recent project of thinking the unthinkable in modern American intellectual culture.
- Tyler Cowen’s list of top ten books that influenced him. Plato, Rand, Quine, Mill, Paglia, Hayek, Proust… some guilty pleasures and some points of pride.
- How do we talk to each other about cancer? Dana Jennings wants to stay positive, but prefers to avoid “the nearest rotted-out cliché” and “bankrupt bromides.”
- It pays to improve your word power! But what it the real payoff is not in money, impressiveness, or intimidation? What if it just pays by making your mental life more interesting?
- The cult of the born genius is a secular mystery religion, based on a myth. “Human talent and intelligence are not permanently in short supply like fossil fuel, but potentially plentiful like wind power.”
- That weird love in the Addams family cartoons: Horrible and homespun, sadistic and caring. They shed a light, or maybe cast a shadow, on the human condition.
- Dred Scott had a wife. And she had a desire to be a free citizen of America.
- It was the King James Bible, and everybody knew it. Thousands of diamond-hard phrases that put the punch in the prose of Lincoln, Faulkner, Bellow, McCarthy, Melville. Robert Alter hears it everywhere.
- Comics are a uniquely powerful, still under-explored medium. Brian Boyd gets us thinking, in spite of being overly impressed with Spiegelman and a real bore with the evolutionary thing.
- The Joel Osteen juggernaut is heading for England. “Not just a megachurch,” reports the Guardian, “an ultrachurch.”
- Mark Twain, gifted with a brilliant wit and a golden tongue, spent years compiling a 450-page hit piece on a personal assistant. Tawdry, thy name is Clemens.
- We’ve got boy trouble because boys have got hero trouble. Inveterate idealists in a post-idealist age, they are giving up in droves.
- Lawrence of Arabia, sure. But also Lawrence of Israel? “The sooner the Jews farm it all the better: Their colonies are bright spots in a desert.”
- Play me something in J Flat. Unless you’re still trapped in that old-fashioned traditional octave system. Experimental music tries re-tuning the whole thing.
