Reviews and News:
David Gelernter on inventing social media, coding for kids (“It’s absolutely asinine”), and the major flaw of the Internet: “It should be structured like a recursive nest, so that you’re encouraged to return to what you were looking at. Instead, the way it is, if you click you’ll probably never go back.”
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“Apple says it is removing virtual private network (VPN) services from its app store in China, drawing criticism from VPN service providers, who accuse the U.S. tech giant of bowing to pressure from Beijing cyber regulators. VPNs allow users to bypass China’s so-called ‘Great Firewall’ aimed at restricting access to overseas sites.”
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Recovering the Black Prince: “We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture of his aggressive temperament and brutal conduct in war; for others it derives from his armour, as displayed on his tomb at Canterbury Cathedral. The cover of Michael Jones’s splendid new biography of this compelling warrior depicts the latter, with Edward arrayed in his suit of plate, his long moustache drooping over the mail of his aventail and the palms of his gauntlets pressed together in prayer, as if seeking God’s forgiveness for all the death and misery he has wrought in his bloody career. Jones convincingly argues that Edward should not be too readily condemned, as he often is by a more censorious modern age.”
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Lost J. M. Barrie play to be published: “An unperformed play by the Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie that has languished in a Texas archive for half a century is to be published for the first time. The play, entitled The Reconstruction of a Crime, was found in Barrie’s archives at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, where the catalogue describes it as ‘a sensational scene’, in which the audience is requested to assist one ‘Mr. Hicks…in the detection of the criminal’.”
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The decline of the American laundromat: “In its heyday, the 5,200-square-foot laundromat brought in over $1,000 a day in quarters. But in the past decade, its owner, a wealthy tech entrepreneur named Robert Tillman, has seen revenues dry up. Business was so bad at his nine other Bay Area laundromats that he sold them off over the years. Lavanderia is the only one Tillman has left, and he’d like to turn it into a 75-unit apartment building, with some units generating as much as $55,000 each year.”
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Was Billy Budd black? “A newly unearthed photograph identifies the African-American Trafalgar survivor who appears in Melville’s final novel. Could the book’s hero have been black, too?”
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The rise and fall of Richard Atkins: “In 1968, Atkins was building toward success he was certain would approach that of the Byrds or Simon & Garfunkel. He’d won a contract with Mercury Records, and recorded with the Wrecking Crew, a group of Los Angeles session musicians famous for their work with the Beach Boys. But stage fright triggered a disastrous make-or-break performance in a small Hollywood nightclub, and everything abruptly fell apart. Atkins gave up music in the prime, and for 50 years he refused even to listen to a radio, so painful were his memories of a career he was convinced could have been. His story became a narrative of failure, but without the happy ending we generally like to document.” Listen to the interview.
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Essay of the Day:
In Public Discourse, Scott Yenor argues that radical feminism gave us transgenderism:
“[T]he ascendancy of transgender rights seems to render questionable—even demeaning—some of the most familiar aspects of life, like sex-specific bathrooms and showers.
“How could such obvious elements of reality come into question? How could the essentials of marriage and family life—and even human life in general—become such subjects of such controversy and invective?
“I argue in a new report entitled ‘Sex, Gender, and the Origins of the Culture War’ that controversies over transgender rights result from the widespread adoption of radical feminist assumptions. Radical feminists rejected the prevailing idea that social expectations about men and women’s roles (which would come to be known as “gender”) were grounded in anatomy and sex. Their critique claimed to show how those elements of womanly identity were neither necessary nor healthy, and posited a future where women would be free to define their identities without any reference to their bodies or to social expectations. A world of complete freedom would be a world “beyond gender”—where no members of society would make any assumptions about individuals based on sex. Attempts to divorce identity from sex put in motion a rolling revolution in marriage and family life whose latest turn is toward transgender rights.”
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Photo: French Alps
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Poem: Gwyneth Lewis, “Lake Pleiad”
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