Reviews and News:
How air-conditioning changed the world: “In the beginning, it wasn’t the heat, but the humidity. In 1902, the workers at Sackett & Wilhelms Lithographing & Printing Company in New York City were fed up with the muggy summer air, which kept morphing their paper and ruining their prints. To fix the problem, they needed a humidity-control system. The challenge fell to a young engineer named Willis Carrier. He devised a system to circulate air over coils that were cooled by compressed ammonia. The machine worked beautifully, alleviating the humidity and allowing New York’s lithographers to print without fear of sweaty pages and runny ink. But Carrier had a bigger idea. He recognized that a weather-making device to control humidity had even more potential to control heat. He went on to mass-manufacture the first modern air-conditioning unit at the Carrier Corporation (yes, that Carrier Corporation), which is still one of the largest HVAC manufacturers in the world. Air-conditioning went on to change far more than modern printing—it shaped global productivity, migration, and even politics.”
The hedonism of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: There were affairs and extravagant purchases from the beginning. “In one August 1978 newsletter, Jim, seeking funds for his ambitious Heritage USA theme park, wrote, ‘Unless God performs a financial miracle, this could be the last letter you will receive from me. … Tammy and I are giving every penny of our life’s savings to PTL.’ But the truth was, as Wigger observes, ‘He wrote this at almost exactly the same time he bought [a $30,000] houseboat.’ The kicker: He paid the required $6,000 down payment with PTL funds.”
The problem with teaching today: “We have allowed the classroom to devolve from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of ‘cures’ for social problems.”
Why are so few classic films available on Netflix?
Philip Jenkins reviews Robert Knapp’s The Dawn of Christianity: “To over-simplify, Knapp shows convincingly that the better we understand the thought-worlds of ordinary ancient people, whether Jews, Christians, or pagan/polytheists, the less distinctive do the various categories become. Whatever the labels used to identify them, polytheists, Jews, and Christians inhabited very similar worlds of ‘gods and miracles’, and any credible account of subsequent religious developments has to be grounded in that fact. Such a statement runs flat contrary to the assumptions that guide most accounts of the origins and rise of Christianity.”
What hurricanes dredge up: canoes, coffins, and fangtooth snake-eels.
The Department of Education states that it has no objections to Purdue’s acquisition of Kaplan University after a preliminary review.
Essay of the Day:
Why have there been so many violent protests this year? Joseph Bottum suggests an answer in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard:
“The glory of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. And the horror of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. Coin collectors, baseball-card enthusiasts, and used-book readers have all benefited from the opportunities offered by online connection. So have neo-Nazis, child-pornographers, and Communist agitators. Where they were once connected only by the sickly sweet smell of the ink from the mimeograph machine clumping away on the kitchen table, the forces of anger now have instantaneous links.
“And that instantaneity allows a radicalizing more rapid than the world has ever seen. Back in a 1999 study called ‘The Law of Group Polarization,’ legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein suggested that discussion among people with similar views causes a hardening of opinion. ‘In a striking empirical regularity,’ he wrote, ‘deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.’ It hardly matters whether the groups are pro-gun, pro-abortion, or pro-anarchy. With sufficient group discussion on one side of an issue, everyone involved takes a step toward the extreme: The mildly supportive become strongly supportive, the strongly supportive become wildly supportive, and the wildly supportive become fanatical psychopaths.
“In such books as Violence and the Sacred (1972) and The Scapegoat (1982), the French-American theorist René Girard offered an explanation for this kind of thing, developing his ideas about scapegoating and what he called ‘mimetic rivalry.’ Against Freud, Girard argued that human desires do not always come packaged in predetermined forms. We create many of them in imitation of others. We learn to want by watching what others want, and we catch desire the way we catch a disease.
“More recent years have seen some attention paid to the concept of ‘competitive victimhood.’ A fascinating 2017 trio of surveys by Laura De Guissmé and Laurent Licata, for example, pointed out that a group’s empathy for the victimhood of others is significantly decreased whenever the group expands its own sense of victimhood. But Girard was there first, warning that the idea of victimhood, stripped of its Christianity, would itself become a device of cultural violence, with people competing for the status of victim even as they trample those who oppose them or merely fail to support them sufficiently.
“If that sounds like the current protesters—if that sounds like too much of our current political agitation on both left and right—it should. Trying to understand antifa, the Washington Post recently described the amorphous group as a collection of ‘predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state’ to achieve radical ends, preferring to pursue their radical ends through violent confrontation on the streets. The disorganized organization could not have existed before the Internet—or, at least, it could never have found so quickly people like Josh Cobin to march alongside it, before such leaderless collectives were made possible by computerized communication.”
Photos: Yellowstone
Poem: Marianne Moore, “Saint Jerome and His Lion”
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