Reviews and News:
Sykes-Picot at 100: “Over the last hundred years, the very phrase Sykes-Picot has become shorthand for a number of ideas about Middle East history. To wit: Sykes-Picot imposed artificial borders on the region; it legitimized colonial interference in the Middle East; it represented the betrayal of the Arabs by the Western powers. As it turns out, all of these beliefs are premised on conceptions that are grounded not in historical reality, but political ideology.”
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The poetry of men like George Gascoigne, Barnabe Googe, Sir Thomas Vaux, and Sir Walter Raleigh was forgotten or ignored because of its general “lack of mannered affect.” It shouldn’t have been.
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Petrarch’s long shadow: “Romeo’s language announces him as one of the great stock characters of the Elizabethan stage: from his vocabulary to his attitudes of love and despair, he is the quintessential Petrarchan lover.” (HT: A. M. Juster)
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The meanings of Christ’s crucifixion.
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The booze, bullfights, and brawls that inspired Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
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Iron Maiden in China: “For Chinese nationals, especially those living in the austere capital of Beijing, watching Iron Maiden is unlike anything they will ever have seen before, if only because the cost and bureaucracy of bringing a full show to China — as Maiden did — is prohibitive for most Western bands. It was a similar story when they first played Poland. ‘The Polish audiences were some of the best I’d ever seen,’ Dickinson told Billboard in 1984. ‘I think it’s because they’re so starved for Western entertainment.’ The same could undoubtedly be said of the Chinese audiences last month. For Westerners, spoiled for choice when it comes to stadium rock, it is almost impossible to comprehend fully the impact of seeing a show as energetic and theatrical as Iron Maiden’s for the first time; a flicker of light in a dreary communist world…In Beijing, as in many other cities, there were fans waiting at the airport clutching Maiden records and posters. During a rare sightseeing opportunity, Gers posed for a picture with two young men sporting Iron Maiden T-shirts and long black hair in politically charged Tiananmen Square. Just hours later he was back on stage wielding his Fender Strat while Chinese police stood scattered among the audience, sticking out like sore thumbs in their severe blue jackets and peaked caps against a sea of euphoric metalheads. Although the police rarely interacted with the audience (except to tell one fan repeatedly to put his shirt back on after he removed it in a fit of ecstasy and waved it in the air), their robust presence was reminder enough that this was a surveillance state, and leant great poignancy to the sight of thousands of Chinese fans singing along to the group’s 1993 hit ‘Fear of the Dark’, which includes the lyric: ‘Fear of the dark, fear of the dark, I have a phobia that someone’s always there.'”
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Essay of the Day:
In Commentary, Tim Kane notes that today’s “inequality economists” like Thomas Piketty argue that capitalism has had almost no impact on the standard of living in the West. They’re wrong:
“Three years ago, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) made its author the most famous economist in the world. The book caused a sensation by highlighting rising income and wealth inequality in the United States and Europe, especially in its jarring claim that inequality is just as bad today as it was a hundred years ago. Piketty writes: ‘The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910. Basically, all the middle class managed to get its hands on was a few crumbs.’
“These two sentences sum up a profound irony—the central contradiction of modern progressives. They do not believe in progress. A century ago, America’s first progressives believed very much in the power of their reforms. Theodore Roosevelt was proud to protect the environment. John Dewey was busy promoting universal education. Alice Paul was busy fighting for a woman’s right to vote. They succeeded. Today, neo-progressives would have us forget all that, and maybe it’s because economic hindsight is anything but clear.
“As a professional economist, I find myself haunted by Piketty’s book. After reflecting on the issue many, many times, attending conferences, and reading dozens of scholarly papers, I keep coming back to his disturbing comparison of our time to the year 1910. Why 1910? He could have picked 1960 or 1800, I suppose, but the year 1910 seemed to float in the back of the mind like a silent paradox. Have we nothing but crumbs to show for a century of capitalism?
“One way to value the progress enjoyed by everyday people is to imagine having to do without all of the material things we have that our ancestors lacked. How much money would you be willing to accept to give up indoor plumbing for a year? Having water on tap in every home in 2010 offers us no point of comparison to 1910. The current crisis of toxic tap water in Flint, Michigan has caused an uproar, but it’s in part a story that shows how much we take clean tap water for granted. Most homes have five or more taps between the kitchen, bathroom sinks, shower, and washing machine. The cost of tap water across the United States is roughly half a penny per gallon, which is surely far less than the actual value we get from it. But few homes in 1910 had any taps. Treating water with chlorine to cleanse it of toxins was first done in 1908.
“How much money would you demand to give up modern public goods such as highways or emergency fire and ambulance services? How much is air conditioning worth to you? What about penicillin? Entertainment of any kind that is not live? The ability to travel to Australia from Minneapolis in a day’s time for the price of five men’s suits? Recorded music, movies, and cable television? How much would you have to be paid to surrender the Internet for a month? No Facebook. No Netflix. No email. No Google searches. No Google Maps.
“These are Piketty’s crumbs. Here are some others.”
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Image of the Day: Landmannalaugar
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Poem: William Logan, “Up from Below”
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