Reviews and News:
Jane Austen 10-pound bank note revealed.
* *
Kermit the Frog has been fired. Well, not the puppet, but the performer who was the voice of the puppet for 27 years was recently let go for “unacceptable business conduct,” according to Disney.
* *
David Williams’s When the English Fall imagines the post-Apocalyptic strength of the Amish.
* *
Inside Facebook’s moderation center in Berlin: “I personally did not have much faith in humankind beforehand, and now I virtually do not have any.”
* *
The culling begins? “An annual report from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics shows that the number of colleges and universities eligible to award federal financial aid to their students fell by 5.6 percent from 2015-16 to 2016-17. That’s the fourth straight decline since a peak of 7,416 institutions in 2012-13. It is also by far the largest (the others were 0.3, 1.2 and 2.0 percent, in order).”
* *
The art of tennis: “Nabokov wrote of the ‘indescribable itch of rapture’ that can come of watching a woman play tennis. The romance – and rapture – of the sport has not been not lost on artists.”
* *
The surprising friendship of Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth: “‘He’d come down here for the weekend, but I don’t think he was too crazy about the country,’ the painter Jamie Wyeth recalled, wryly, of Andy Warhol’s visits to the bucolic southeastern Pennsylvania farm where Mr. Wyeth still lives. By the 1970s, when a joint show saw each man painting a portrait of the other, sparking one of the art world’s unlikeliest friendships, Warhol was famous for many things. Being a nature enthusiast was not one of them. Mr. Wyeth’s meadows and woods — the land that had inspired the artwork of both Jamie and his father, Andrew Wyeth, at whose side he painted through his teenage years — were little match for the pull of ‘General Hospital.’ ‘Andy would spend most of his time down here watching soaps on TV, because he said the TV reception was better than in New York,’ Mr. Wyeth added with a bemused shrug.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In the Harvard Business Review, J. M. Olejarz reviews three books on the vocational value of the humanities:
“College students who major in the humanities always get asked a certain question. They’re asked it so often—and by so many people—that it should come printed on their diplomas. That question, posed by friends, career counselors, and family, is ‘What are you planning to do with your degree?’ But it might as well be “What are the humanities good for?”
“According to three new books, the answer is ‘Quite a lot.’ From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.”
* *
Photo: San Francisco
* *
Poem: George David Clark, “Silent Anniversary”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
