Reviews and News:
The consolations of Latin: “My class meets for an hour at ten thirty every morning, and as I labor to decipher our daily Wheelockian pronouncements, I remember why I loved Latin to begin with. Each sentence is a little puzzle, a Rubik’s Cube of words to be rearranged into their proper order based on arcane rules and hidden clues. There’s a creative thrill, too, in the task of transforming Latin into English…More than anything, though, I love Latin because it has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with anything in my life. Classics evangelists who argue for the practical utility of Latin, its historical significance and English vocabulary-building potential, are profoundly missing the point: Latin is fun because all its native speakers are dead and will never have to meet you.”
French chef removes his three-star restaurant from the Michelin Guide: “Today we would like to go forward with a free spirit, to continue serenely, without tension, to maintain our establishment with a kitchen, a welcome, a service which are the expression of our own spirit and of the land,” he said.
Marilynne Robinson on the importance of words: “I was very struck by something that I came across in my reading of Jonathan Edwards. I recall him quoting a writer who talks about how whatever we say lives on after us, that we continue to exist so long as any word we say exists in a living mind. And that there should be two judgments: one when we die, and one when the full impact of our lives has played itself out. That is, when every word that we’ve said, for good or ill, basically ceases to be active.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s black critics.
A time capsule that may have belonged to Jules Verne is opened: “The most noticeable aspect of the documents are the number of anagrams, lines, and manuscripts with symbols and drawings which are unclear, and may be cryptograms or codes from an unknown secret society.”
Remembering Jerry Pournelle, the science fiction novelist who had “an outsized influence on U.S. space and defense policy.”
The Village Voice’s final print issue features Bob Dylan on the cover. “‘It’s really embarrassing,’ a Voice employee said…‘We ran Bob Dylan on the cover … a month ago.’”
Essay of the Day:
In Big Questions Online, Ari N. Shulman writes about a revised Libet experiment and considers whether neuroscience can measure free will:
“The Libet experiment has come under extensive fire over the years, both for methodological flaws and for its seemingly trivial definition of free will. In a talk at the Human Mind Conference, held last June in Cambridge, England, University College London neuroscientist Patrick Haggard reported on efforts to improve the Libet experiment. Haggard — who collaborated with Libet when he was still alive — argues that he and others have since created neurological tests of free will that are more clearly falsifiable and philosophically robust.”
Images: Japanese woodblock prints
Poem: Benjamin Myers, “Voyager”
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