By GREG GUTFELD [Daily Gut] – And then there’s the Supreme Court hearings [on Kagan’s nomination], which have left most of America in a collective drool-producing nap.
And I freely admit, this crap confuses me – and I’m not confused me so easily not.
For example, on Tuesday, Kagy took heat for blocking the Pentagon’s recruiters access to Harvard Law students. Her defense? That during the ban, recruitment went up! Continue reading “Noted: Looking at the Senate and dreaming of ponies.” »
Third and last.
By AMY MACFARLANE [The Walrus] – “You see that picture of Richard up there?” says Clement Carelse, a scrappy South African expat, pointing at the National Portrait Gallery reproduction that presides over a gathering of the Richard III Society of Canada. He has been recounting the time a distant relative of the fifteenth-century English king found living in London, Ontario, paid the group a visit. “When he walked in the door, it was Richard’s face. Tall man — but that face. Absolutely stunning.” And what did the visitor see when he walked in the door? A dozen men and women of a certain age crowded into the sunroom of an east Toronto home to ponder the intricacies of royal lineage over sausage rolls. He could very easily have written them off as kooks.
By SHANNEN COFFIN [National Review] – There is no better example of [the] distortion of science than the language the United States Supreme Court cited in striking down Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion in 2000. This language purported to come from a “select panel” of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a supposedly nonpartisan physicians’ group. ACOG declared that the partial-birth-abortion procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.” The Court relied on the ACOG statement as a key example of medical opinion supporting the abortion method…
Continue reading “Noted: Changing 'science' for political ends.” »
By SHARON CHURCHER [Daily Mail] – Dressed in a clean but faded T-shirt and loosely fitting gingham slacks, she attracts barely a glance from passers-by.
Yet hers is the face which has stared from the cover of a book that has hypnotised more than 40 million readers around the world, one that has frequently been rated as one of the ten most important books published in the past century.
Continue reading “Noted: Scoop! Harper Lee feeds ducks, wears T-shirts!” »
The G20 apparently turned Japanese and became a kind of Kyoto for deficits. Reports the Daily Telegraph:
“Our challenges are as diverse as our nations,” US President Barack Obama said. “But together we represent some 85 per cent of the global economy, and we have forged a coordinated response to the worst global economic crisis of our time.”
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Continue reading “Calamo: A Kyoto for cash.” »
The DC-3: Winged victory.
By TOM HUNTINGTON [American Heritage] – On April 26, 1944, the 72-year-old Orville Wright posed for a photograph at the controls of a Lockheed Constellation, a triple-tailed, four-engined behemoth that could reach 340 miles per hour and had a ceiling of 24,000 feet. Only four decades earlier, Wright had taken the Flyer, a fragile creation of wire, wood, and muslin, on the first controlled, powered, and human flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle. He noted that his first wobbling flight of 120 feet had been shorter than the Constellation’s wingspan.
H-Lads.
By THEODORE DALRYMPLE [First Things] – Christopher Hitchens’ judgments are nuanced mainly when it comes to judging himself; otherwise, he lives in a Manichean world of good and evil. His brother, by contrast, appears to have undergone a real and painful repentance for all that he formerly was and did. Peter has discovered that it is he, and not just the world, that was and is imperfect and that therefore humility is a virtue, even if one does not always live up to it. The first sentence of his first chapter reads, “I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 1967.” One senses the deep—and, in my view, healthy—feeling of self-disgust with which he wrote this, for indeed it describes an act of wickedness.
By RICK LEWIS [Philosophy Now] – [Antony] Flew sometimes wrote us book reviews, and later the same year, he sent a short review of a book he had been reading called Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
By DAVID S. LANDES [The Wilson Quarterly] – In general, the countries and regions that have done best are precisely those that have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by active trade and entrepreneurial freedom, often in the face of official constraints. These are the countries that have most attracted foreign advances and investment. But they have not done so by following the formulas proffered or imposed by experts from richer lands. The essence of successful enterprise lies in creative imagination and initiative.
By IMOGEN SARA SMITH [The Threepenny Review] – A photograph is something salvaged and proof of something lost. As the camera’s shutter opens and closes with a sound like a mechanical kiss, the present moment becomes, forever, the past. Photographs can slice time finer than the human eye, revealing the moment when a galloping horse takes all four feet off the ground, or when the broken surface of milk forms a ring of points like a chessman’s crown. We reach for our cameras when we see what we know won’t last, a sunset or a baby’s smile or a woman balanced in the air over a puddle.
Continue reading “Noted: Old photographs that still live.” »
Elsewhere in today’s Fortnightly, we publish a review of Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
THUS AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, those reformers who wished to end certain evils of government and of the liquor trade and of discrimination against women could agree on many of their objectives. Corrupt politics and the saloon vote was the enemy of all reform; clean politics and a sober vote was the friend of all reform. Female suffrage was thought to mean more votes for the dry cause and the cause of good government. The ‘superior moral force of women’ would save America from the saloon and from the plutocrats, who were ruling American institutions [30]. The staid North American Review gave progressive reasons for endorsing female suffrage in 1906 as a ‘paramount necessity’; the rise of both socialism and the trusts had made the voting of women necessary, as a means ‘of purifying the ballot, of establishing and maintaining lofty standards as to qualifications required of candidates for public office, of effecting an evener distribution of earnings, of providing a heavier balance of disinterestedness and conservatism against greed and radicalism.’ [31] Dry clergymen also bid for progressive support of prohibition measures. ‘The bartender poses as the dictator of American destiny…. His royal sceptre is a beer faucet.’ [32] Since the liquor trade had corrupted American politics to such a great extent, it was the job of all good progressives to give the women the vote so that they could help the drys to abolish the cursed trade that corrupted all government. The question was simple.
Continue reading “Excerpt: Putting together the Dry coalition.” »
From an OBITUARY in The Daily Telegram – Quinton went up as a scholar to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a brilliant First in PPE, after which he became a Fellow of All Souls. In 1955 he was appointed fellow and tutor of New College.
It was an exciting time in philosophy, as Quinton later recalled in a review of Tom Stoppard’s philosophical play Jumpers: “Philosophy was much more in the public eye then than it is today,” he wrote. “The austerities and consequent boredom of the war and the years that directly followed it awoke an appetite for intellectual self-improvement from which philosophy, along with a lot of other things, benefited. There were philosophers about able and willing to catch the attention of a large public audience: Bertrand Russell and AJ Ayer and poor old ‘Professor’ Joad, who never reached that rank, but was at least lively and colourful. That has all rather petered out. The brightest young philosophers nowadays emigrate to the United States.”
By SAMUEL GREGG [MercatorNet] – Only a short while ago some European politicians were touting the European social model’s superiority over what many continental Europeans deride as “Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” Now, however, governments across Europe are scrambling to avoid the fate of Greece. Moreover, they are doing so by contemplating—and, in some cases, implementing—the hitherto unthinkable: reducing their budget deficits by diminishing the expansive welfare states to which many Europeans have long been accustomed.
By MARK BAUERLEIN, et al. [Chronicle of Higher Education] – While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.
Continue reading “Noted: Too much research 'strikes at the heart of academe'.” »
By DEVANYI BORADE [ducts . org] – The family spared no efforts to chart out the blood line. Memories were taxed, telephone lines were engaged for hours on the end, Society books were dug up and dusted off, the library became an impromptu meeting place for the clan, and even the local post office was not spared. Matters started coming to a head when people broke off in the middle of perfectly normal conversation to start convulsively, gaze into space and make a bee-line for a bit of pen and paper to jot down the uncommon name that had been eluding them for the last so many days.
John Wilkinson’s
Adages for Poetry Students
Chris Miller reviews Chaos and the Clean Line by Stephen Romer
AND Two Essays
by Alan Wall
See also Garin Cycholl’s new review of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.
NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
More daily in
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
