Reviews and News:
T. S. Eliot and the rise of the managerial class: The anti-aristocratic managers of the state, Eliot argued, “form an anti-culture and will only share in common with one another the technique of management, i.e., the committee meetings whereby they dominate a society. Believing they deserve their status and the vaulted space they occupy, they have no sense of duty or gratitude to the larger body they rule.”
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The first Nobel prize for songwriting went to Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, albeit only after Tagore converted songs into “compositions that are meant to work as poetry without music.”
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Did an earthquake shrink Mount Everest? “The last time the mountain was measured was more than six decades ago, also by the Survey of India. They found that Everest rose to 29,028 feet above sea level. It is unlikely that a new survey would find that Everest’s peak was in fact below 29,000 feet, but measuring technology has significantly improved, leaving room for discrepancies. No other peak in the world lies above 29,000 feet, and the current estimation of Everest’s height puts it 777 feet higher than the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, in Pakistan.”
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Were Gambia’s borders created by British cannonball fire?
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The inimitable Christian Ferras: “His eyes are closed, his cheek still pressed against the chinrest of the violin, as he plays his final, whispered utterances. Here, just before the resolution of the cadence—an awful, beautiful moment—something extraordinary happens: tears start streaming out of Ferras’s shut eyelids, rolling quickly down his cheeks.”
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List: 32 90’s Songs Written by Poets
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Essay of the Day:
How hard can it be to mine asteroids? Hard, as Sarah Scoles explains in Wired:
“‘Our vision is to catalyze humanity’s growth, both on and off the Earth,’ says Peter Diamandis, co-founder of mining company Planetary Resources, in a PR video. A graphical spacecraft, presumably future-theirs, flies away from our planet while he speaks. ‘At the end, the entire human race will be the beneficiary, as we expand our reach beyond the Earth, into the solar system,’ he continues.
“But traveling the road to space-based industry will require giant leaps. Like picking the most lucrative asteroids—the ones with lots of water and precious metals—from far afield. And negotiating spacecraft near their complicated gravitational fields. To do that, companies will have to leave the comfy confines of Earth’s orbit, where they currently do all their experimenting.”
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Photo: The Eldfell Eruption
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Poem: Marcia Menter, “A Poem by Schiller, Set by Brahms”
