Has anyone ever said you should write a book? If so, they’re probably wrong.
A filmed version of Hamilton, starring the 2016 cast, could be headed to movie theatres or a streaming service soon: “According to The Wall Street Journal, multiple studios are currently bidding on the rights to the recording, as is Netflix, which would likely host the film on its streaming service.”
Priests and UFOs: “Michael Burke-Gaffney, S.J., a Canadian priest who is an astronomer and professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had an extensive personal interest in U.F.O.s—even covertly investigating them for Canada’s National Research Council and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In 1966, after the noted astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek penned an infamous letter to Science magazine offering seven reasons why U.F.O.s merited scientific study, Father Burke-Gaffney responded with his own letter. He takes a more cautionary tone. Until we identify mysterious ‘atmospheric phenomena,’ he asks, should not scientists strive ‘(i) to exhort people to have patience, and (ii) to remind them that, up to the present, U.F.O.s have furnished no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, and (iii) to point out that the existence of extraterrestrial little green men is no more firmly established than that of leprechauns?’ There is no official Vatican position on U.F.O.s and aliens, although in 2014 the Vatican Observatory co-hosted a conference on the subject with the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, called ‘The Search for Life Beyond the Solar System: Exoplanets, Biosignature and Instruments.’ The next year, Pope Francis gave an interesting response to a question about extraterrestrial life: ‘In every case I think that we should stick to what the scientists tell us, still aware that the Creator is infinitely greater than our knowledge.’”
Anna Aslanyan reviews a film of a country that does not exist: “A young man stares into the camera, blinking, then turns his head away. His name is Kolya, and he was born in 1990 in what was then the USSR. Later that year, his native Transnistria broke away from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and proclaimed itself an independent state; today, it remains unrecognized by most countries and the UN. To Kolya, ‘it’s not important whether it’s recognized or not’. He has a Russian passport, but he doesn’t see himself as a Russian citizen; nor can he quite verbalize what connects him to this narrow strip of undistinguished land between the Dniester river and Ukraine. Extinction, directed by the Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas, and screened this week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, is a black-and-white portrait of a country that exists largely in the minds of its inhabitants.”
What is secularism? It is the belief that “the things of this life and of the next cannot only be distinguished but also divided—what is more, that they ought to be.” Is this the best way to organize modern societies?
Essay of the Day:
What can Russian populism in the late nineteenth century teach us today? Gary Saul Morson explains:
“Populism fed on guilt, and everything about Likharev, down to his very gestures, expressed a consciousness of guilt about something. The populist ideologists insisted that all high culture depends on wealth stolen from the common people and is therefore tainted by a sort of original sin. As Russia’s greatest autobiographer Alexander Herzen lamented, ‘All our education, our literary and scientific development, our love of beauty, our occupations, presuppose an environment constantly swept and tended by others . . . somebody’s labor is essential in order to provide us with the leisure necessary for our mental development.’ Shame and guilt over unearned privilege shaped a generation of the ‘repentant nobleman.’ Pyotr Lavrov’s Historical Letters (1868-69), the populist bible, put it this way: ‘Mankind has paid dearly so that a few thinkers sitting in their studies could discuss its progress.’
“Perhaps high culture should be abolished altogether? This urgent question came to be called ‘the justification of culture,’ with many writers contending that justification was impossible. Since the symbol of Russian culture was Pushkin, critics, most notably the nihilist Dmitri Pisarev, insisted that any pair of boots is worth more than all of Pushkin’s verse. The nihilists at least worshiped science—like Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, who dissects a frog to show that people are nothing but complex amphibians—but the populists rejected science as well. A story about the writer Vsevolod Garshin as a boy tells how he too dissected a frog, only to take pity on it, sew it up, and let it go. Not knowledge but pity became the moral touchstone. The populist argument about ‘the justification of culture’ became part of what philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev called “the Russian Idea” and, so far as I know, marks Russian culture as unique. (To be sure, it is common today to convict the Western tradition as the product of imperialism and dead white males, but that is still different from rejecting high culture per se.)”
Image: Pyrocumulus cloud time lapse
Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Swallows”
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