Reviews and News:
The early Elmore Leonard wrote Westerns. The later Leonard wrote “cool low-life” novels that already feel “vaguely dated.”
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Rodin, Rilke, and zoos:” Rodin suggested that Rilke try out an assignment that he himself had undertaken as a student many years earlier. Regardez les animaux, professor Barye had told young Rodin. To the aspiring figurative sculptor, staring at beasts had seemed a second-rate task. But Rodin soon understood why animals have been objects of reverence for artists dating back to the cave painters…For Rilke, the menagerie of bears, gazelles, flamingos, and snakes was a sanctuary compared to the human zoo on the other side of the gates. He began to study the caged animals, displayed behind bars like objects, the way Rodin looked at sculptures on pedestals. Each one was a frontier to be discovered. To guide him on this journey, Rilke recalled the teachings of his old professor from Munich, Theodor Lipps, and devised a process of conscious observation, which he would come to call einsehen, or ‘inseeing.'”
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The role of a national museum is not to shock or make a “big gesture” but to “collect, exhibit, and explain.”
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Ancient library wars: “In the Hellenistic Era—that’s 323 BC to 31 BC, for all you numbers fans—the Library of Alexandria, Egypt was a research hub of high prestige. But while certainly the largest of its time and the most famous, the Library of Alexandria wasn’t the only institution of its kind. Libraries throughout the ancient world competed to be the best Greek library, in rivalries that proved as dangerous and unscrupulous as actual wars. Perhaps the most vicious rivalry of all was between the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum in the city of Pergamon—present-day Bergama, Turkey. In this conflict, the ego-driven kings of both cities enforced various sneaky maneuvers to stunt the growth of the opposing collections.”
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In Case You Missed It:
How to think like Shakespeare: “Class of 2020, welcome to college… Building a bridge to the 16th century must seem like a perverse prescription for today’s ills. I’m the first to admit that English Renaissance pedagogy was rigid and rightly mocked for its domineering pedants. Few of you would be eager to wake up before 6 a.m. to say mandatory prayers, or to be lashed for tardiness, much less translate Latin for hours on end every day of the week. It would be hard to design a system more antithetical to our own contemporary ideals of student-centered, present-focused, and career-oriented education. Yet this system somehow managed to nurture world-shifting thinkers, including those who launched the Scientific Revolution. This education fostered some of the very habits of mind endorsed by both the National Education Association and the Partnership for 21st Century Learning: critical thinking; clear communication; collaboration; and creativity. (To these ‘4Cs,’ I would add ‘curiosity.’) Given that your own education has fallen far short of those laudable goals, I urge you to reconsider Shakespeare’s intellectual formation: that is, not what he purportedly thought — about law or love or leadership — but how he thought. An apparently rigid educational system could, paradoxically, induce liberated thinking.”
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Interest in the Old Masters is down: “The London dealer Guy Sainty, who has long specialized in old masters, said that he is mystified and frustrated. ‘I’ve been an art dealer for nearly 40 years, and I just don’t get it — I don’t understand where the collectors have gone, the people with knowledge,’ he said. ‘There’s a sense somewhere that the American collector has simply lost interest in European culture.'”
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Daniel Johnson reviews Amos Oz’s new novel, Judas: “Judas is a great novel that only Oz could have written — not just because parts of it are so obviously autobiographical. (Doubtless others are not so obvious to this reader.) The period to which he has returned in his late seventies is also the one when he met and married his wife Nily. He is about the same age as his protagonist, the asthmatic, maddeningly passive yet highly intelligent Shmuel Ash. And it is easy to imagine the young Oz, who spent two decades living on a kibbutz, belonging to a far-left groupuscule such as Shmuel’s Socialist Renewal Group, which falls apart over allegiance to the young Marx versus the old Marx.”
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Thomas Nagel reviews Richard English’s Does Terrorism Work? A History: “What struck me on reading this book is how delusional these movements are, how little understanding they have of the balance of forces, the motives of their opponents and the political context in which they are operating. In this respect, it is excessively charitable to describe them as rational agents. True, they are employing violent means which they believe will induce their opponents to give up, but that belief is plainly irrational, and in any event false, as shown by the results.”
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Classic Essay: Jeffrey Hart, “Tennis: From Leveling Up to Leveling Down”
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Interview: Bill Kristol talks with Mark Blitz about natural rights and liberal democracy
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