Rorty had indeed revived pragmatism, but Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism” is, by the Deweyans’ lights, a perverted and emaciated pragmatism, a pragmatism not worth resuscitating.
Victoria Woodhull was quite a gal. Having once been an actress and prostitute in Gold Rush San Francisco, she moved on to New York and was ‘reborn’, becoming the first female broker on Wall Street, then founding her very own newspaper to promote her political dream – which was to stand for the presidency in 1872, fighting under the banner of suffrage, free love and equal rights for all.
On paper you were the perfect candidate and you were sure that you’d land a job in the National Clandestine Service and be making dead drops, dangling moles, using active doubles (and passive doubles) and working some highly anticipated honeypot missions. It turned out that being too perfect on paper is a red flag.
Returning from one of those excursions with his little son, nephew, and niece, he had to cross the notorious Corryvreckan whirlpool—one of the most dangerous whirlpools in all British waters.
President Obama: “We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.”
The man of letters — and what was George Orwell, if he was not a man of letters, what was Edmund Wilson, whom I succeeded on The New Yorker twenty-seven years ago? — the man of letters has become very suspect.
You have had no love affairs of consequence. When Yeats, a 51-year-old bachelor, once again proposes to Maud Gonne (the Irish actress and political activist with whom he’d fallen in love as a young man), she declines. When Yeats then proposes to Maud’s daughter, Iseult, she also declines; Iseult would later have an affair with Pound. A month later, when Yeats proposes to you, you accept. At 11:20 in the morning on October 20, 1917, you are married in the Harrow Road Registry Office; the witnesses are Pound and your mother.
In France parading suspects in public is banned. In Britain, once a defendant is charged, until a trial is concluded only court proceedings may be reported. The aim is to avoid prejudicing jurors. Justice in these countries tends to be a sober affair, insulated as far as possible from external tumult. In America it is more theatrical, with lawyers fighting their case over the airwaves and cameras filming battles in the courtroom.
The ruling party hardliners who coordinated the latest crackdowns, like Air Marshal Perence Shiri (“The Butcher of Matabeleland”), are also guilty of carrying out Mugabe’s massacres against minority amaNdebele people in the 1980s. They rightly fear prosecution as war criminals.
“The time appears to have gone by,” reported an Oxford classicist in 1861, “when men of great original gifts could find satisfaction in reproducing the thoughts and words of others, and the work, if done at all, must now be done by writers of inferior pretension.”
These disparate elements are beginning to form an entire ecosystem for teaching and crediting human knowledge and skill, one that exists entirely outside the traditional colleges and universities that use their present monopoly on the credentialing franchise to extract increasingly large sums of money from students.
Denis Boyles: Strauss-Kahn’s erasure from French politics and the IMF, will have almost no effect on international finance. Its only effect will be on French domestic politics. Sakozy’s failure as a politician was to distance himself from France’s ruling élite. That’s why he was elected in 2007 – his victory was a victory over the incestuous, self-serving énarques who had driven French voters from indifference to despair. Now there are more énarques in Sarkozy’s government than there were in Chirac’s. He has become one of them.
Wilfrid L. Randell: Gifted with the facility in the spinning of paragraphs, with skill in the devising of plots, with a deft and pretty touch in the delineation of men and women, and with extraordinary method and perseverance, what could he not have accomplished with the lovelier gift of inspiration – the power to regard his art as a thing of wonder, mysteriously vital, creative, permanent!
All messages, he demonstrated, could be broken down into bits, or binary digits. His theory explained how much information each character in a message conveyed and showed how to make the characters easier to send or to interpret.
Edgar Mason: While the book is unlikely to aid young emperors in their attempts to maintain power, Mr. Paterson has created something very useful for the rest of us: A way of viewing history as a thing cross-pollinated by itself – and an excellent treatise on the governing of our own, personal empires.
