Reviews and News:
Eric Ormsby on the pleasures of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the life of its 19th-century English translator, Edward FitzGerald.
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Theodore Dalrymple on Houellebecq’s economics: “In Houellebecq’s world people buy without need, want without real desire, and distract themselves without enjoyment. Their personal relations reflect this: they are shallow and no one is prepared to sacrifice his or her freedom, which is conceived of as the ability to seek the next distraction without let or hindrance from obligation to others. They are committed to nothing, and in such a world even art or cultural activity is just distraction on a marginally higher plane – though it is a natural law in this kind of society that the planes grow ever closer, ever more compressed.”
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Victor Davis Hanson: A world without borders is a fantasy. They “do not create difference—they reflect it.”
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In 1977, French historian Philippe Ariès argued that “the story of mortality in the West was one of our increasing alienation from death: the death of others and our own. This was a lamentable outcome of dechristianization.” A new book on death challenges Ariès’s thesis.
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Kevin P. Spicer reviews Lawrence Douglas’s account of the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk, “the Ukrainian national and twice-denaturalized American citizen who was convicted in 2011 by a German court of ‘serving as an accessory to the murder of at least 28,060 Jews’ at Sobibor. By the time the court in Munich reached that emphatic decision, there had been more than thirty years of legal proceedings, including trials in three different countries. In a compelling yet intricately argued study, Douglas, a professor of jurisprudence at Amherst College, recounts the courtroom drama of Demjanjuk’s trials while examining the complexities of how legal systems in the United States, Israel, and Germany have handled crimes committed during the Holocaust.”
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“France’s government has allocated half a million dollars for the preservation and restoration of France’s oldest Jewish building, discovered by accident under a parking lot in 1976.”
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How ignoring criminal intent (mens rea) reduces liberty: “With a mens rea requirement, a person knows when he’s doing wrong, but not when intention is irrelevant and the criminal offenses are technical and numberless. That’s today’s America, where the law on the books can make every American a felon.”
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A “trashy and incoherent” Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival.
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Essay of the Day:
In Aeon, Iwan Rhys Morus looks at our longstanding fascination with electricity:
“To celebrate the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900, a number of French artists were commissioned to produce a series of cigar box cards on the theme ‘En l’an 2000’. They came up with some fantastic imagery: in the future world they portrayed there was clearly going to be a great deal of aerial warfare and submarine sport, and a lot of electricity. The denizens of the year 2000 would put on their makeup with electricity, they would farm with electricity, and travel everywhere by electricity.
“In one especially striking image, a group of schoolboys sit at their desks with electrodes strapped to their heads. In the corner of the classroom, their teacher feeds textbooks into a machine that minces them up, distils the information they contain and transmits it directly into the schoolboys’ brains. That century-old image of French schoolboys having their heads electrically pumped full of knowledge seems a good place to start thinking about a more recent manifestation of bodily electricity: the announcement by researchers a few months ago that electrical stimulation of the brain could turn us all into better thinkers.
“In February 2016, scientists working at the Catholic University Medical School in Rome published experimental results showing that the memory and mental performance of lab mice could be significantly improved after short bursts of very low-intensity electric current were delivered to their brains through electrodes attached to their scalps. The scientists found that the electric stimulation led to increased levels of a protein called BDNF that plays an important role in neural development. Two years before, scientists at Northwestern University announced that using a technique called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to deliver electrical currents, they’d improved memory in their human experimental subjects. Both research teams highlighted how their methods might offer better treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders involving memory loss, as well as improving memory in healthy people. The Italian study was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and was hailed as offering ways to enhance the performance of military personnel in highly stressful situations, too.
“It’s not only the mind that a dose of electricity can help. Some gyms now offer clients the option of electrical stimulation as they exercise. Imagine going through your usual routine, but dressed in a full body suit festooned with electrodes; as you exercise, the electrodes deliver a series of small electric shocks that further stimulate the muscles, providing an additional workout.
“Technologies like these, that use electricity to enhance body and mind, are often presented as the cutting edge of science. But those French illustrations should remind us that using electricity to improve ourselves has been part of our technological imaginations for some time. What is it about electricity that makes it seem such a fertile resource for these sorts of transformations? And how has our changing understanding of our electrical selves been shaped and reshaped as we have turned electricity into a powerful tool for remodelling ourselves?”
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Image of the Day: Ecola State Park
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Poem: Robert B. Shaw, “The Tally”
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