Reviews and News:
Alan Sokal hoax redux: “Somewhere in the latest issue of Badiou Studies, a multilingual, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the thinking of the philosopher Alain Badiou, lives an article entitled, ‘Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-) Being-Queer.’ The article was written by one Benedetta Tripodi of Alexandru Ioan Cua University—and it is a joke.”
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Shakespeare is not our contemporary: People “never seem to imagine themselves as actually learning anything from the great ones of the past brought back to life. They only dream of having their own prejudices confirmed.”
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The rise of pirate libraries: “‘It’s the creation of a universal library of the best stuff,’ says Joe Karaganis, who studies media piracy at Columbia University’s policy think tank, American Assembly. ‘That will not include the latest Danielle Steel novel.’ It does, however, include hundreds of thousands of books and millions of journal articles that otherwise are found only through expensive academic journals. Scanned or downloaded from journal sites, they are available through pirate libraries for free.”
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How C. S. Lewis’s wartime talks became Mere Christianity.
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Blake Seitz reports that fundraising for the planned Eisenhower Memorial is behind schedule: “A spokesperson for the commission did not disclose the exact amount it had raised from private fundraising. However, based on information now available, the amount must be between $2.9 million and $4.7 million—an underwhelming sum for the commission, which began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a fundraising campaign in 2011…The fundraising effort was projected to raise an average of $7 million per year between 2011-15. The commission did not meet this fundraising target in any of the past five years.”
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An original watercolor of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince to go up for auction.
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Essay of the Day:
How will American democracy end? Alexis de Tocqueville, Myron Magnet writes in City Journal, argued that it would be the result of a secularized individual Puritanism and a pursuit of equality over freedom:
“As nothing is perfect in human affairs, Tocqueville of course paints the inevitable shadows into his otherwise sunny panorama. Powering the frenzy of American activity is a high-voltage charge of anxiety. After the Revolution, most states outlawed entail, the inheritance rule that the owner of an estate must leave it to his eldest male heir, with pittances to the other children. Henceforth property got divided and redivided more or less equally, with the result now that ‘the families of the great landowners have almost all been absorbed into the common mass,’ Tocqueville observes, and even fallen ‘into the uttermost depths of obscurity.’ America thus has almost no permanently rich families: ‘wealth circulates there with incredible rapidity, and . . . it is rare for two successive generations to garner its favors.’ This leveling force generates ‘that restlessness of the heart which is natural to men when, all conditions being almost equal, each person sees the same chance of rising.’ With everyone feverishly striving, though, whenever some individual manages to shoot up out of the mass to wealth and power, his fellows respond with envy and wonder if he’s a crook. The result is an ‘odious mingling of the ideas of baseness and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor.’
“So while democracy often gives rise to ‘a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed,’ it can also lead weak men ‘to want to bring the strong down to their level’—with such base fervor as ultimately to defeat democracy’s purpose by ‘preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.’
“In any event, all the striving intensifies Puritan individualism to an extreme where it ‘disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the mass of his fellow men,’ leaving ‘the larger society to take care of itself,’ Tocqueville writes. ‘These people owe nothing to anyone. . . . Thus not only does democracy cause each man to forget his forebears, but it makes it difficult to see his offspring and cuts him off from his contemporaries. Again and again it leads him back to himself and threatens ultimately to imprison him altogether in the loneliness of his own heart.'”
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Image of the Day: Britain’s crumbling colonial heritage
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Poem: Ron Smith, “What a Rush”
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