Reviews and News:
Some people argue that whites should not play black characters and that heterosexuals should not play transgendered ones. Not Simon Callow: “This is madness. The whole idea of acting has gone out of the window, if you follow the logic of that…To say it is offensive to transgendered people for non-trans people to play them is nonsense. Because you have to have been a murderer to play Macbeth, you have to be Jewish to play Shylock. It’s nonsense. The great point of acting is that it is an act of empathy about someone you don’t know or understand. I continue to defend Laurence Olivier’s performance as Othello.”
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Euthanasia’s slippery slope: “Belgium legalized euthanasia for adults the year after Holland did, in 2002. As in Holland, the courts ruled that doctors might kill a patient if that person was competent and conscious, had repeatedly asked for euthanasia, and was suffering unbearably as a result of an incurable disorder. Only twelve years later, in 2014, the Belgian parliament passed a bill that allows the euthanizing of children, no matter how young, so long as they are terminally ill. In Holland, the lower age limit for euthanasia is currently twelve, with parental consent, though euthanasia advocates are pushing to eliminate any age limit.”
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Joseph Bottum argues that we’ve reached peak Tolkien: “Anyone who doesn’t love Tolkien isn’t much of a reader. But, then, neither is anyone who thinks The Lord of the Rings the greatest novel ever written.”
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Listen to a performance of a “lost” song of the middle ages.
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John McWhorter is the latest to argue that the current campus narrow-mindedness began in the classroom: “Our students’ oversimplified sense of what racism consists of is not, in the end, their fault. While claims that college campuses have been taken over by a furiously leftist professoriate are vastly exaggerated, let’s face the facts. Namely, in the climate that has reigned since the 1980s, a student is highly unlikely to encounter a class discussion on race issues in which views pointedly opposed to the liberal orthodoxy are given as much air time as the orthodoxy, or in which a critical mass of students…feel free to espouse the oppositional view knowing that if they are logical and civil they will not be accused of moral degeneracy.”
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The other Benjamin Disraeli: “Disraeli: The Novel Politician takes a different approach to Disraeli’s life and character. Instead of a typical biographical study, Cesarani finds the key to Disraeli in his ambivalent attitude toward being Jewish and how this background influenced his political career.”
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One of the biggest obstacles the allies faced in WWII was learning to cooperate: “The British thought the Americans were reckless and brash while the Americans regarded the British as conceited and standoffish. There was a saying in England that the young American soldiers training there were ‘overpaid, oversexed, and over here.’ But most friction between the armies was at the division level and higher; and the higher up the chain of command, the greater the friction.”
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The Vatican’s maps: “In the days when pontiffs rarely left Rome, Pope Gregory XIII commissioned giant maps depicting all of Italy—so that he could explore the peninsula without leaving the city’s safety. By 1582, a team of top artists had painted and illustrated 40 meticulous maps, most of them measuring some 15 feet by 16 feet, onto the walls of a vast gallery. In their original form, the paintings had an almost 3-D effect, with city landmarks, mountain valleys and the white crests of ocean waves clearly visible.”
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Essay of the Day:
Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the photoelectric effect and for “his services to Theoretical Physics,” but not for his theory of relativity. This was because of Henri Bergson. Jimena Canales explains in The Nautilus:
“In April 6, 1922, Einstein met a man he would never forget. He was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the century, widely known for espousing a theory of time that explained what clocks did not: memories, premonitions, expectations, and anticipations. Thanks to him, we now know that to act on the future one needs to start by changing the past. Why does one thing not always lead to the next? The meeting had been planned as a cordial and scholarly event. It was anything but that. The physicist and the philosopher clashed, each defending opposing, even irreconcilable, ways of understanding time. At the Société française de philosophie—one of the most venerable institutions in France—they confronted each other under the eyes of a select group of intellectuals. The ‘dialogue between the greatest philosopher and the greatest physicist of the 20th century’ was dutifully written down. It was a script fit for the theater. The meeting, and the words they uttered, would be discussed for the rest of the century.
“The philosopher’s name was Henri Bergson. In the early decades of the century, his fame, prestige, and influence surpassed that of the physicist—who, in contrast, is so well known today. Bergson was compared to Socrates, Copernicus, Kant, Simón Bolívar, and even Don Juan. The philosopher John Dewey claimed that ‘no philosophic problem will ever exhibit just the same face and aspect that it presented before Professor Bergson.’ William James, the Harvard professor and famed psychologist, described Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) as ‘a true miracle,’ marking the ‘beginning of a new era.’ For James, Matter and Memory (1896) created ‘a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley’s Principles or Kant’s Critique did.’ The philosopher Jean Wahl once said that ‘if one had to name the four great philosophers one could say: Socrates, Plato—taking them together—Descartes, Kant, and Bergson.’ The philosopher and historian of philosophy Étienne Gilson categorically claimed that the first third of the 20th century was ‘the age of Bergson.’ He was simultaneously considered ‘the greatest thinker in the world’ and ‘the most dangerous man in the world.’ Many of his followers embarked on ‘mystical pilgrimages’ to his summer home in Saint-Cergue, Switzerland.
“Bergson’s reputation was at risk after he confronted the younger man. But so was Einstein’s. The criticisms leveled against the physicist were immediately damaging. When the Nobel Prize was awarded to Einstein a few months later, it was not given for the theory that had made the physicist famous: relativity. Instead, it was given ‘for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect’—an area of science that hardly jolted the public’s imagination to the degree that relativity did. The reasons behind the decision to focus on work other than relativity were directly traced to what Bergson said that day in Paris.
“The chairman for the Nobel Committee for Physics explained that although ‘most discussion centers on his theory of relativity,’ it did not merit the prize. Why not? The reasons were surely varied and complex, but the culprit mentioned that evening was clear: ‘It will be no secret that the famous philosopher Bergson in Paris has challenged this theory.’ Bergson had shown that relativity ‘pertains to epistemology’ rather than to physics—and so it ‘has therefore been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles.'”
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Image of the Day: Space bubble
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Poem: Aaron Belz, “Dearly Beloved”
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