Reviews and News:
A new biography of Sigmund Freud argues he was “cruel, incurious, deceptive, and both fragile and vainglorious.” In short, “a blowhard.”
What’s the inevitable result of treating robots like humans? Treating people “like pieces of metal.”
Why everyone loves blue.
Joseph Bottum reviews a detective novel filled with French postmodernists: “The Seventh Function of Language begins with a true event: the 1980 death of the literary critic Roland Barthes after being run down by a laundry truck on the streets of Paris. As it happens, Barthes had just left a lunch with François Mitterrand, the Socialist running against the more conservative president of France, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. And in Binet’s telling, Barthes had with him a document that everyone wants to get their hands on. The Bulgarian secret service, for instance—and shouldn’t we be suspicious that a Bulgarian was driving the laundry truck? The unsubtle hand of the KGB might be behind Barthes’s death. But so might Mitterand. Or Giscard d’Estaing. For that matter, so might any of the postmodern theorists who populate the book, for the document apparently concerned the possibility of a seventh function for language, beyond the six hypothesized by semiotics. And this seventh function seems to be the use of language for magic: the spell-binding that could capture, in a frisson, the obedience of the listener.”
In Case You Missed It:
Sargent’s women: “Elsie Palmer…sat for Sargent when she was 17. It was a difficult commission and she was 18 by the time it was finished. Although Sargent’s early sketches show her as innocent, childlike and charming, Lucey tells us that the finished portrait ‘dispenses with charm.’ In the final painting, Elsie looks like a grim little ghost, with her blunt bangs, pop eyes and pale little face. She’s clad in a pleated linen dress that resembles a shroud.”
Music was a significant part of life for medieval Scots, and no songs were more important than those found in Thomas Wode’s Scottish Metrical Psalter.
The Vanzolini Saki, an elusive Amazon monkey, has been observed for the first time in 80 years.
“Vladimir Nabokov famously demanded that interviewers supply him in advance with written questions to which he would reply in writing, dismissing or bending inquiries with the deftness of a good trial lawyer, indulging or patronizing interviewers as he pleased. Critics deemed him an autocrat imperiously stage-managing his image, as though literary interviews weren’t already understood as a species of theater.” He claimed, however, it was because he was a “wretched speaker”: “The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect — or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
Interview: Bill Kristol talks with Christina Hoff Sommers about Google, Gamergate, and free speech
Classic Essay: William Rose Benét, “Among the Slicks”
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