Reviews and News:
Listen to the world’s oldest piano. The instrument “was made in 1720 by the inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731).”
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Wesley Lowery’s They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement doesn’t begin with a “horrifying story of an innocent man gunned down by police or the sobs of a grieving mother. Instead, it begins with Lowery and his buddy Ryan Reilly (of the Huffington Post) getting arrested in a McDonald’s while covering the Ferguson protests. Apparently they didn’t leave fast enough when police instructed them to. They spent all of 20 minutes in jail. The next section commences with Lowery on a sailboat with some former colleagues from the Boston Globe. The trip was important, you see, because that’s where he was when Michael Brown was killed. In the next chapter he painstakingly spells out how he read about the shooting on the Instagram feed of a friend, St. Louis reporter Brittany Noble. Her entire life story is apparently pertinent, from how to pronounce her first name (three syllables) to her résumé (some small-market TV stations and then the CBS affiliate in St. Louis) to her relationship status (engaged). After all, it was Noble, Lowery writes in what’s probably the worst string of words in the entire book, who ‘landed the first major scoop of Ferguson: the emotional reaction of Michael Brown’s mother as she arrived at the scene.’ It goes on like this for most of the 200-odd pages…To him, the issue of whether controversial police shootings were justified seems like a distraction”
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Schools should not teach general “critical thinking” skills detached from subject specific courses: “Of course, critical thinking is an essential part of a student’s mental equipment. However, it cannot be detached from context. Teaching students generic ‘thinking skills’ separate from the rest of their curriculum is meaningless and ineffective.”
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Escaping East Berlin: “In the summer of 1961, as more than 1,000 East Germans were escaping to West Berlin every day, the East German communist regime built the Berlin Wall to stem the exodus. What began with barbed wire developed into a fortified “death strip” with outer and inner walls, guard towers and dogs, armed guards with a shoot-to-kill order, tripwires and antitank obstacles. The Berlin Wall snaked its way for 96 miles around West Berlin, separating it from East Berlin and the surrounding East German territory. A similarly brutal barrier, with the addition of land mines, was established along the nearly 900-mile border between East and West Germany from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Czech border in the south. Yet East German citizens did not stop trying to escape to democratic West Berlin and West Germany. Some were shot and killed in the process, or caught and imprisoned. The successful ones scaled the wall, swam or boated across waterways, rigged up small submarines, hid in secret compartments of cars crossing the border, floated over the wall in hot air balloons, or dug tunnels under the wall. It is this last method that is the subject of Greg Mitchell’s engaging book, The Tunnels.”
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In Case You Missed It:
The poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch reviews a history of how we deal with our dead.
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Hadley Arkes remembers the Chicago of his childhood and how the city has changed.
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Revenge of the analog: “‘Sooner or later, everything old is new again,’ Stephen King once wrote — an observation that’s never been truer than today. Far from being dead, vinyl records sales rose to $416 million last year, the highest since 1988, and artists like the Black Keys, Lana Del Rey and Beck are eagerly embracing the format. Instant Polaroid-like cameras have caught on among millennials and their younger siblings. A new Pew survey shows that print books remain much more popular than books in digital formats. Old-school paper notebooks and erasable whiteboards are the go-to technology among many Silicon Valley types, and even typewriters are enjoying a renaissance in today’s post-Snowden, surveillance-conscious era. In his captivating new book, The Revenge of Analog, the reporter David Sax provides an insightful and entertaining account of this phenomenon.”
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Stephen Eide and Keith Whitaker on the relationship between morality and gentlemanliness.
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Classic Essay: Edward C. Banfield, “Policy Science as Metaphysical Madness”
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Interview: John J. Miller talks to Bernard Cornwell about his family and his latest book, The Flame Bearer.
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