Editor’s note: Prufrock will be off Monday and Tuesday for the July 4 holiday. It will return on Wednesday, July 5.
Reviews and News:
How did scientific publishing go from not caring about profit to making money at margins that rival Google? One man: Robert Maxwell.
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Dogs to search for Amelia Earhart’s remains.
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How a small Pentagon agency shaped modern life: “Few have heard of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but this small Pentagon enclave has spawned some of the transformative inventions not just of modern war but of modern life: the Saturn rocket, stealth aircraft, armed drones, biofeedback systems and — biggest of all — the internet. Yet DARPA has also devised some of the most disastrous fusions of science and war, including Agent Orange (the defoliant that disabled thousands of American troops, as well as untold numbers of civilians, in Vietnam) and myriad other projects that treated the world as a giant laboratory but neglected to notice the people inside. In The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, Sharon Weinberger, an executive editor at Foreign Policy and the author or co-author of two previous books about the military-scientific complex, traces the ups and downs of this agency, with its ‘mix of geniuses and mediocre bureaucrats’ and the ‘procession of nuts, opportunists and salesmen’ who pitched wild ideas and often won contracts to pursue them.”
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Has pop music made Britain more liberal? “British people are more liberal on such issues as same-sex relationships and abortion than they have ever been…Cannabis smoke regularly wafts around our town and city centres; Glastonbury is as much a part of the national calendar as Wimbledon or the Grand National. And throughout our waking hours, there is one constant above all others: what the dictionary still calls pop music, probably the most potent means of communication human beings have ever come up with, now the lingua franca of all but the oldest generations, defined by a tangle of non-conservative ideas, and right at the centre of our everyday experience.
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In Case You Missed It:
In The Washington Post, Geoff Edgers writes about the slow death of the electric guitar.
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Jeffrey Meyers remembers novelist J.F. Powers at 100.
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Ben Franklin’s very American faith: “There was a lot more to Franklin’s religion than his self-description as a deist. In fact, Franklin was the pioneer of a uniquely American kind of faith, one which touted the benevolent effects of faith even as it jettisoned virtually all theological beliefs.”
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What’s it like be a ghost writer? Andrew Crofts explains in the Times Literary Supplement
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Interview: Sam Leith talks to Jonathan Meades about food, plagiarism, and metaphysics.
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Classic Essay: Paul Elmer More, “The Wholesome Revival of Byron”
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