Wednesday, October 12, 2011
By William Triplett [Wall Street Journal] – “Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes” is a palimpsest that mostly contains recovered writings of the great Greek mathematician, but it also includes two other recovered texts that have caught the attention of a variety of scholars. A good chunk of these writings exist nowhere else, any other copies having been lost or destroyed long ago.
“It really is a small ancient library of unique texts,” Mr. Noel says. Continue reading “• Archimedes’ palimpsest, buoyed by history, floats into view in Baltimore.” »
By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Chronicle of Higher Education] – In 1972, the first year for which accurate statistics exist, almost 1,200 new Ph.D.’s competed for just over 600 new teaching jobs. Except for two short periods in the late 1980s and the 2000s, the number of openings in history departments has consistently fallen short, sometimes by a very wide margin, of the number of doctorates awarded. As public contributions to higher education shrink, state budgets contract, and a lagging economy takes its toll on endowments and family incomes, there is little reason to expect the demand for tenure-track faculty members to expand.
As many observers have noted, this is not a transient “crisis.” It’s the situation we have lived with for two generations. Continue reading “• Higher ed’s dilemma: too many docs, not enough ports.” »
'The earliest photograph to show a human…' (Click to enlarge.)
By MIKE DASH [Smithsonian] – There is no real doubt that Britain’s longest-reigning monarch allowed her voice to be recorded in that long-ago fall. The man who made the recording freely discussed it and it is recalled in a letter in the Royal Archives, dated 1907; the incident also rates a passing mention (without a source attribution) in Elizabeth Longford’s exhaustive biography of the Queen, Victoria R.I. The question is what happened to the recording after it was made—and, in a broader sense, why it matters whether it still exists. The search for the recording takes us from the New Jersey laboratories of Thomas Edison to the Highlands of Scotland, and from the archives of the Rolls-Royce motor company to the vaults beneath London’s Science Museum. Before we set of on that trail, though, we first need to understand why anyone should be interested in a few utterly unimportant phrases spoken by a long-dead queen.
Continue reading “• The work of Steve Jobs’ predecessors surveyed, photographed, and recorded.” »
Thursday, October 6, 2011
By KEN WORPOLE [Independent] – [Nobelist Tomas] Transtromer’s subjects often feel that they have woken from the dream of life. The constant inversion of dream time and reality, of night and day, of the horizontal and vertical worlds, are abiding themes for this writer, a psychologist by profession who has worked principally with those deemed to be outcasts from society.
Continue reading “• Waking, with Tranströmer, from a ‘dream of life’…” »
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
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[Announcement from The Gershwin Hotel and Suzanne Tremblay] – “3 Carsons out of Texas” – L.M.Kit Carson, film pioneer; Rev Goat Carson, Grammy-winning lyricist; and Neke Carson, a multimedia artist – are the subjects of a special month-long event at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan, 20 October to 20 November 2011.
The event is ‘A Celebration of the Art, Film and music of the Carson Brothers’ and begins with an opening reception on 20 October from 6-9pm.
The Gershwin is at 7 East 27th St., New York, NY 10016. For details, ring +1 212 545 8000 x 7421.
By NORMAN BIRNBAUM [The Nation] – In the late 1960s and early ’70s [Christopher] Lasch sought to shape the New Left into the redemptive movement he and many of the rest of us were seeking. Decentralization, local autonomy, a distrust of doctrines of efficiency and technocratic calculation were crucial issues on the New Left. Lasch thought of a reinvigorated citizenship, and sought contact with revisionist historians and activists like Gar Alperovitz, Michael Harrington, Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd. He joined the socialist historian James Weinstein in a group intended to develop a large project for democratic renewal. As the New Left succumbed to sectarianism and self-immolation and Lasch’s disappointment with it grew, I decided to explore profane American politics by working with the United Auto Workers and the New Deal’s heirs in the Democratic Party. I was impelled to do so by the lessons being offered by Europe. Enrico Berlinguer in Italy, Willy Brandt in Germany and François Mitterrand in France were persuading the makers of a culture of protest to accept the burdens of a long march through the institutions of society. Lasch took a different approach, sensing—correctly—that the analogy to Europe was shallow. By the time I moved to Washington in 1979, we had taken very different paths. Miller’s biography confirms my regrets. I missed a very great deal in not confronting Lasch’s thought after our common immersion in the New Left.
Continue reading “• Christopher Lasch: are student protests the same as serious social action?” »
By JAMES BOWMAN [New Criterion] – the real luck belongs to those who, speaking English as their native tongue, are privileged to be able to appreciate, with a little study, real Shakespeare rather than approximate Shakespeare. How ironic that Wanamaker, who devoted so much of his life and energies to reproducing in authentic detail Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, should have taken such a slapdash attitude towards the authenticity of Shakespeare’s language. I am reminded of the production of Troilus and Cressida I saw at the Globe in 2005 which presented the play in what purported to be the authentic Elizabethan pronunciation of its language but then cast women in the roles of several of the Greek warriors at Troy — as if the absence of the most basic sexual authenticity was or ought to have been beneath the notice of the audience. Continue reading “• You could tell by the way he talked, Shakespeare was no elitist.” »
Friday, September 30, 2011
By JOHN H. COCHRANE [Wall Street Journal] – Europe’s deepest problem is bad ideas. Unpleasant price movements represent “illiquidity,” “speculators,” “market manipulation,” “lack of confidence” and “contagion,” not the hard reality of looming default. The point of policy is to “calm markets” and “provide confidence”—not to solve financial problems.
When the price of bread rose in their revolution, the French took bakers to the guillotine. They got more inflation, and less bread. When their descendants saw bond prices falling, they passed restrictions on short sales. They got lower prices, and less liquidity. Continue reading “• The euro-crisis: killing the bakers doesn’t lower the price of bread.” »
Thursday, September 29, 2011
By EUGEN WEBER [The Atlantic] – Hindsight suggests that the best characterization of Germany’s approach to occupied France was “Give me your watch and I’ll tell you the time.” But if the Germans looted with all the enthusiasm once shown by Napoleon’s armies, they also struck deals that could serve both sides. The new order was European. With French and German bankers, industrialists, and other businessmen meeting regularly, the idea of a United States of Europe was making its way, along with visions of a single customs zone and a single European currency. The European Union, its attendant bureaucracy, even the euro, all appear to stem from the Berlin-Vichy collaboration. Bureaucratic controls proliferated, administrative and business elites interpenetrated, postwar economic planning took shape—as did that greater Europe in which France’s Hitler-allotted role would be one of a bigger Switzerland, “a country of tourism … and fashion.” For the present France offered an economy to be milked at will, and a reservoir of labor.
Continue reading “• Germany finally assumes control of Europe – and ownership of the Balkans.” »
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
By AL FILREIS [Jacket 2] – By all accounts, the Stanford-based critic-poet Yvor Winters was prickly. His views on what modernism was good and what bad: usually, the earlier and the more “precise”/imagistic the better. His view on Stevens (the early modernist, detached, comic ironic short stuff of Harmonium was good, the later rhetorically blown-up long-lined essayistic poems, poems made of philosophical propositions, were bad) had a huge effect on a generation of teachers who thought that to teach Stevens one had to teach only “Sunday Morning” or “Ploughing on Sunday.” His view on William Carlos Williams: early short stuff good, late stuff sloppy and imprecise. Continue reading “• Yvor Winters and ‘Poetry’ – before it had ‘editorial brains’.” »
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
By ROSEMARY MITCHELL [Open Letters] – In his heyday, the historical novelist William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) was briefly considered to be a credible rival of Dickens and W. M. Thackeray. Now he is known to few besides scholars of the Victorian gothic or historical novel, and enthusiasts for nineteenth-century Manchester, the city of his birth. Perhaps if he had stuck around in his native place, and – like Elizabeth Gaskell – had written novels about the industrial modernity he found there, we would be reading his fictions as part of a B.A. Hons degree in English Literature, or watching middle-brow T.V. adaptations of them, starring a cast probably composed of teenage pop stars looking for an acting career, and maturing British character actors desperate for work after the last film in the Harry Potter franchise. But Ainsworth fell in love with old woods full of ancient rookeries, mouldering manor houses, blood-stained castles, ruined abbeys, and nooks and crannies in old city streets and country churches. Continue reading “• The forgotten work of Ainsworth, the ‘footnote’ Gothic novelist.” »
Monday, September 26, 2011
By MICHIO KAKU [Wall Street Journal] – In the 1930s the Nazi Party criticized Einstein’s theory, publishing a book called “100 Authorities Denounce Relativity.” Einstein later quipped that you don’t need 100 famous intellectuals to disprove his theory. All you need is one simple fact.
Well, that simple fact may be in the form of the latest experiments at the largest particle accelerators in the world, based at CERN, outside Geneva. Physicists fired a beam of neutrinos (exotic, ghost-like particles that can penetrate even the densest of materials) from Switzerland to Italy, over a distance of 454 miles. Much to their amazement, after analyzing 15,000 neutrinos, they found that they traveled faster than the speed of light—one 60-billionth of a second faster, to be precise. In a billionth of a second, a beam of light travels about one foot. So a difference of 60 feet was quite astonishing… Continue reading “• The speed of light problem – ‘a difference of 60 feet’ – is familiar to baseball pitchers.” »
Monday, September 26, 2011
By WILFRIED KUEHN [Domus] – The exhibition Maniera Moderna at Haus der Kunst, Munich includes a broad selection of works reflects the versatility of Carlo Mollino’s oeuvre: on view are his drawings and architectural plans, furniture and furnishings, Mollino’s race car Bisiluro, his photomontages, Polaroids of female nudes, his essays on architecture, photography and downhill skiing, as well as other archival material. A photographical essay by Armin Linke created for the exhibition provides an overview of Mollino’s constructions and their state of preservation….
When creating settings for female models in his interiors he allows materials that are soft and silky to abut onto hard and severely reflecting surfaces. The manner in which he treats light and shadow, materiality and surfaces, recalls the work of Man Ray. The effects live from artificial light, as corresponding to a night person. Continue reading “• Looking at Carlo Mollino’s life in a ‘twilight avenue’.” »
Thursday, September 22, 2011
By TIM BLANNING [TLS] – Gradually European towns and cities became safer places when the sun went down, and this security promoted forms of social activity beyond whoring, brawling, gambling and drinking. As Koslofsky very reasonably argues, almost all the work on the public sphere has concentrated on locations and institutional forms, and has neglected time. Coffee houses were open all day, of course, but it was at night that they came into their own. As the London pamphlet Character of Coffee and Coffee-House claimed in 1661, “they borrow of the night”. Most served alcohol and many were frequented by prostitutes, but in general they served as respectable meeting places for the upper and middle classes. Moreover, as well as promoting a critical body of public opinion, they could also on occasion be the focus of more concerted political agitation. Continue reading “• Enlightenment, as a nightly public service.” »
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
By ALEX PRESTON [New Statesman] – There is a science to investing in bubbles. George Soros has built a career and an extraordinary fortune on the back of his “theory of reflexivity”, which identifies bubbles before they inflate and which, crucially, tells him when to get out. As early as the Davos conference in January 2010, Soros had dubbed gold the “ultimate bubble”. Over the course of 2010, he continued to buy gold, both physically and through ETFs such as the iShares and SPDR gold trusts. He rode the price up from below $1,100 per ounce to $1,400 per ounce in the first quarter of 2011. Then he began to sell. Continue reading “• George Soros, bubble science, and the lunacy of the $2000 ounce.” »
