links from January 10 to February 9, 2010
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Week Starting 2010-01-10
- Gimme the Ax lived in a house where everything is the same as it always was. “The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out,” said Gimme the Ax. “The doorknobs open the doors. We are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house. Everything is the same as it always was.” So he decided to let his children name themselves.” Carl Sandburg, master of nonsense.
- Oh how Samuel Johnson could talk! “His sentences emerge perfectly formed, seeming to illustrate in their cadences the virtues of classical order.” He spoke, it seems, largely to share the inestimable blessings of perfect mental symmetry with any nearby mortals. Take Alan Jacobs’ word for it.
- Mary Karr’s Illiterate Progenitor: My father lived so far from the page / the only mail he got was marked Occupant. / The century had cored him with its war, and he paid / bills in person, believed in flesh and the family plan.
- Eight hand-written pages, with sketches, from a busy cartoonist to a fourteen-year-old fanboy. Let us now praise John K. for his generosity, openness, accessibility, and ability to encourage the next generation.
- Moby Dick has a lot of pages in it. And this guy’s going to make a drawing on every one of them.
- “Replaced by a kaleidoscope of transient sexual and psychological configurations, which serve chiefly to make children of adults and adults of children, the declining family is ceding enormous tracts of social and legal territory to the state.” Douglas Farrow on the machinations of The State.
- Americans love that Bible. It’s reading it that we apparently hate. Why it remains the favorite unopened book, and some warnings about where this is taking us.
- More loudly to inveigh against your absence, / Raising the volume by at least a third, Humbly I say I’ve written this immense / Astonishing “Sonata” word by word, /With leitmotivs you’ll wish you’d never heard,/ And a demented, shattering Cadenza. –Gjertrud Schnackenberg
- Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly. Or did the butterfly dream he was Zhuangzi? Skepticism is good for many things, but let’s be reasonable about our skepticism.
- Who was Salmon P. Chase, and how’d he get on the $10,000 bill? And why, come to think of it, are there $10,000 bills anyway?
- John Mackey, visionary CEO of Whole Foods, is into some weird stuff. 9,000 words in the New Yorker are ample enough to show it all.
- Raymond Chandler, an educated Edwardian gentleman wrote noir crime novels that gave voice to people from the wrong side of the tracks in pre- and postwar Los Angeles.
- There are lifestyle poets, like adventurous Byron or the wandering Beats. Then there’s Wallace Stevens, who sold insurance and had no life outside of poetry. “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself.”
- International terror against a Western superpower, 88 BC. Perhaps the time is right to read up on old Mithradates.
- Don’t trust anyone over 17. Generation gaps now come in 4-year cycles, with high schoolers experiencing new technology in ways fundamentally different from college students.
Week Starting 2010-01-17
- First Person Tetris puts you right in the game.
- Neverending snacktime for kids. Does this trend signify arrested development, parental spinelessness, widespread boredom, the hungriest generation? Or is Fruit by the Foot just yummy?
- Old English gave us great words about killing, breaking, and hurting: Deriendlic, gedeþed, cyricbryce. But it also gave us bealofus (liable to sin) and digollice –one of those words of which any language should be proud.
- Guess what Vanity Fair thinks of the creation museum in KY? You’re 99% right, without even reading it! A.A. Gill scores a few good lines, but sees irony where it isn’t, and tries for laughs with irrelevant bigotry like “here in Nowheresville, Kentucky, tennis is considered a game for Europeans and other sexual deviants.”
- George Leonard (1923-2010) was the journalist-prophet of California new-age consciousness. Perched at Esalen, he saw the future.
- Why should we keep assigning Emerson to be read by students? Maybe we shouldn’t. Here is the strong case against Ralph “Weirdo” Emerson.
- “Enchantment is his major theme: life as we know it, only prone to visitations by Norse gods, trolls, Arthurian knights, and kindergarten-age zombies.” More than anybody needs to know about that creepy megaforce Neil Gaiman, the most famous writer you’ve never heard of.
- Lawrence of Arabia. He translated the Iliad. And his 1917 essay on how to work with Bedouins is the most important strategy paper driving U.S. conduct in Iraq.
- The wrath of God did not smite Haiti. But what if it was the wrath of Gaia? Why isn’t that considered an equally crazy thing to say?
- Peppered moths turned gray again, and white blood cells walk! Top 15 stories of interest for Intelligent Design. (Plus: an epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of
glucocorticoid receptor evolution!) PDF warning, sorry.
- Wheaton College has big decisions to make. As it seeks a new president, the whole evangelical world is watching.
- In 1972, a low-budget childrens’ book envisioned the year 2010. The kids who read that book are now “living in the future” and well into their forties. Where’s our rocket packs?
- Critical thinking is killing us. “In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions, or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the capacity to learn as much as possible from what they study.”
- You know what workers really want? They want to get better at what they do.
- World of Warcraft is not a movie, it’s our cathedral. “Like a cathedral, it is a supreme work of art that is, on a brick-by-brick basis, the creation of hundreds of artisans and craftsmen, many of whom will be long gone by the time it comes to completion.”
- Crayola’s Law: The number of colors doubles every 28 years.
- The Anglo-Saxon nouns will set you free, but the Latin ones will smother you. William Zinsser tells journalism students how to write good English, even if it’s their second language.
- (Almost) everything we think we know about religion in the pro-slavery south is wrong. Lauren Winner reports on Ursuline nuns imitating slaves, white northern Christians abandoning the freed slaves to proto-Jim Crow, and southern churches speaking truth to power, with limited effect.
- It’s like Lucy with Charlie Brown’s football. Wilfred McClay on Louis Menand on the state of the University.
Week Starting 2010-01-24
- Shakespeare constantly reminds us that all the world’s a stage. And Paul teaches that when Christ includes us in his life, he plays out his life in ours.
- A Beethoven string quartet is not unlike the elliptical music of gossip: one violin excited to pass its small story along to the next violin and the next…
- Militant atheism has a symbiotic relationship with fundamentalism. Exhibit A: Richard Dawkins chewing on the head of Pat Robertson, thinking it’s nutritious.
- What if people got together and sang to God? You mean they do? Millions of them every week? Bifrost Arts wants to know why that’s not the greatest aesthetic fact of modern life.
- You should have finished Moby Dick. Fundamentally strange and endearingly nerdy, it’s the ideal text to read together in a discussion seminar, a group that can share the burden of interpretation and illuminate the book’s mysteries from different angles.
- Modern man has what we call “control issues.” “For more than five hundred years, Western culture has been shaped by the dream of achieving control of an allegedly purposeless nature.” –Ken Myers
- Olympic torch song, piano bar exam, periodic table manners. Feel the satisfying pop of absurdity when you meet the Sweet Tooth Fairy.
- Let’s call it “State Capitalism.” It appears to be a hardy, fast-growing hybrid. Under state capitalism, governments do not so much reject the market as use it as an instrument of state power.
- The year before the 60s: Mad Men, Stepford Wives, Three-Martini Lunches. A new book makes the case that 1959 was the year that changed everything.
- Roland was furious! Orlando Furioso is an Italian poem that left its mark everywhere. Here’s a reminder of the greatness of the poem, occasioned by a disappointing new translation.
- What in the world is MISSIONAL? Is that even a word? And am I for it or against it? Ed Stetzer tries to sort out this newish term, and the movements and theologies arrayed around it.
- When I was a kid, there was such a thing as a brontosaurus. Now you can’t talk to five-year-olds without being corrected about dinosaur species. John McWhorter (the language guy) tells us how to keep up with the explosion of dinosaur discoveries.
- John Stuart Mill secured a free zone for individual liberty. What did he think we would do with it? We would use it to develop and express ourselves, to engage with the beliefs of others, to learn from them, to help them learn from us, and to do our best to see that they live a good life, up to the point of using force.
- Feeling out of control? You’re more likely to fabricate meanings and impose them on the data. Get a grip!
Week Starting 2010-01-31
- Man gave names to all the animals in the garden, but then scientific taxonomy took over with its binomial nomenclature. A new book argues that our attempts to name nature are bedeviled by this clash between instinct and science.
- “It’s not really about me,” he says as he signs the girl’s arm. A profile of Jamie Tworkowski’s rise from surfer salesman to emo guru, giving hope to a world of cutters and self-hurters. (Alert: it’s at Rolling Stone)
- Slacker Valhalla: 4 years of college built on ESPN, beer, and meeting girls. Read how one young man followed the path marked out for him, “succeeded,” and now regrets it.
- Crash Blossoms: “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”
- She loved three things: swashbuckling drama, intellectual order, and the Christian faith. How Dorothy Sayers turned into exactly the public advocate of Christianity needed by her age, and ours.
- I woke up behind the wheel and told my wife I had been talking to Good King Wenceslas. A giant red ant wearing a crown figures in this story, as do the taillights of an eighteen-wheeler.
- It’s the Virtual Piano. Go ahead, strike a chord.
- Over here is Adam Smith’s invisible hand. And over here is the grasping hand of the State, reaching even into the pockets of generations unborn, enabling “the pillage of the future by the present.”
- If Haiti made you think about this thing called “development,” here are eight books to keep you thinking.
- You may think you know how to think abstractly, but your cogitating body prefers a hands-on approach.
- Dante came riding home from the crusades to find his Tuscan villa burned. The ghost of his wife Beatrice pleaded with him to descend into hell and rescue her soul. Wait, what?
- Geert Groote had a plan to heal a century’s woes. It didn’t work in his lifetime (the era of Wycliffe and Chaucer), but his “brethren of the common life” plan was multigenerational.
- The young theologian of 1967 wanted to mobilize the church for social change. Carl Henry was way ahead of him, with a bigger theology of culture and a simple distinction between the church and Christian citizens.
- Valomilk, Cherry Mash, Twin Bing, Fat Emma, and the Vegetable Sandwich. Mourn the loss of the regional candy bar.
- The term “core curriculum” has become a culture-war wedge issue. But we need a core curriculum. Erin O’Connor’s very wise comments on a pretty wise proposal.
- The other swastika, the original one, means well-being or good luck. If you see the world through modern European history, this shape is evil. If you look with the eyes of India, the shape is everywhere, and is benign.
- Pain turned into music. Leave it to Ze, or try it yourself.
- Try to think like a citizen of North Korea. Two new books offer help in understanding why “the cleanest race” has “nothing to envy.”
- Easy = True. “Cognitive fluency” is a measure of how easy it is to think about something. We make decisions every day based on it.
- Howard Zinn (1922-2010) taught that America was awful. His “people’s history” showed a country that was a whitewashed tomb full of genocide, betrayal, toxic waste, and exploitation.
