Reviews and News:
Will cities of the future be built with wood? Maybe: “Teng Li, a University of Maryland mechanical engineer, created with his colleagues wood that’s as ‘strong as steel, but six times lighter,’ he said. Liangbing Hu, Li’s co-author on the study, added, ‘This kind of wood could be used in cars, airplanes, buildings—any application where steel is used.’ Making it is just a two-step process.”
Russell Moore sees the ghost of C. S. Lewis in the novels of Neil Gaiman.
David Bentley Hart revisits the life and work of David Jones: “As a poet, Jones was at least the equal of Blake (and certainly less prone to magnificent failures); as a visual artist, he was Blake’s superior in every sense.”
Science’s inference problem: “Over the past few years, many scientific researchers, especially those working in psychology and biomedicine, have become concerned about the reproducibility of results in their field. Again and again, findings deemed ‘statistically significant’ and published in reputable journals have not held up when the experiments were conducted anew. Critics have pointed to many possible causes, including the unconscious manipulation of data, a reluctance to publish negative results and a standard of statistical significance that is too easy to meet.”
Teaching the art of reading in the digital age.
The rise and fall of Mariano Fortuny y Marsal.
Essay of the Day:
In this week’s Standard, Erick Erickson blasts a new book about Donald Trump’s faith:
“Brody and Lamb’s book highlights everything wrong with the morphing of American evangelicalism into a post-Jesus cult of personality looking for salvation delivered by politicians—including its hypocrisy and sophistry regarding Trump and morality. The authors quote one evangelical leader saying that evangelicals’ relationship with the president is authentic, not transactional. But a few chapters earlier, the same individual described a conference call he led with the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisers just after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about assaulting women. During that call, ‘all of us agreed to stand behind the candidate.’ After all, Trump ‘had sacrificed his entire life, in my viewpoint, and supported us. How could we not support him?’
“We can wink-wink at Trump’s misdeeds because he does good things for us. The authors actually write that ‘when assessing the faith of Donald Trump, the significance of the Neil Gorsuch nomination cannot be underestimated.’ Really? That is essential to assessing Trump’s faith? More than his sexual proclivities and adulteries, which are barely touched upon in the book? In a few spots in the book, the authors blame American culture for Trump’s sexual ethics, and in one passage, they even find a way to implicate evangelicals in Trump’s sexual behavior. Follow the twisted logic: First, Brody and Lamb quote another biographer who says that ‘Clint Eastwood, James Bond, and Hugh Hefner’ are the figures who dominate Trump’s self-image. Then we are told that Trump boasted about being a womanizer roughly around the same time that Pierce Brosnan’s first James Bond movie came out. And who do we have to thank for Bond’s having a place in Trump’s mind? ‘Americans—including evangelicals—fund these culture-shaping products with their book purchases and ticket sales.’ So if you’ve ever seen a Bond movie, you’ve contributed to the culture that made Trump Trump.”
Ouch. Read the whole thing, folks.
Images: Lofoten
Poem: Robert Hedin, “Owls”
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