Reviews and News:
The other Beatrix Potter: “In her lifetime…Potter remained an avid mycologist, studying them with microscope and following the development of fungal spores on glass plates. In 1897, she presented a paper to the Linnean Society of London, one of the UK’s premier natural history organizations. She did this in absentia; ‘On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae’ was read by her uncle before the all-male membership, as the Society didn’t allow women members until 1905.”
So much for prayer and fasting: The Vatican organizes a “hackathon” to find “technological solutions for three global issues the Catholic Church hopes to address: social inclusion, interfaith dialogue, and assistance for migrants and refugees.”
Norman Mailer’s library. He had 7,000 books. “His last wife, Norris Church, referred to them as Kudzu…As fast as she gave them away, they reappeared on every flat surface in their two homes. Norman, she said, spent $1,000 a month on books, and received a large number gratis from writers in search of a recommendation.”
Don’t mess with Dagger John: “In his St. Patrick’s Day sermon in 1852, John J. Hughes, the newly minted first Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, raised a discomfiting cautionary flag. ‘There is reason to fear,’ Hughes admonished the congregants at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street, ‘that when God permits men or nations to prosper to the extent of their desires, it is a mark of his disfavor.’ His warning that the worldly lure of America’s Manifest Destiny was already threatening his parishioners’ spiritual bonds suggested just how far Irish-Americans had progressed in the more than three decades since Hughes himself had immigrated from County Tyrone. Last year, in their Sons of Saint Patrick: A History of the Archbishops of New York From Dagger John to Timmytown (Ignatius Press), George J. Marlin and Brad Miner traced the evolution of the archdiocese. Now, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, in Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America (Three Hills, Cornell University Press), John Loughery prodigiously profiles the most transformative archbishop of them all.”
The problem with numbers: “Sometimes what can be measured is not very important, and what is important, like morale, cannot be measured. Or an institution with many goals might choose to measure only one. You can report massive body-counts, as Robert McNamara claimed for our efforts in Vietnam, and still lose the war. Armies and businesses depend on cohesion, leadership, and dedication, any one of which can easily be compromised in pursuit of some countable proxy. Here is a crucial difference between natural science and any attempt to describe human beings: atoms cannot know the theories that purport to explain them, as people can, nor do atoms ever adjust their behavior in response to descriptions of them, as people do.”
In defense of big business: “Large corporations are vilified in a way that obscures the innovation they spur and the steady jobs they produce.”
Essay of the Day:
Will wine change China’s countryside? Jiayang Fan visits the Ningxia wine region and explains why the government is encouraging wine making:
“Two thousand years ago, Yinchuan lay on the Silk Road, along which goods and ideas travelled between China and Europe: silk went west, and wool, gold, and silver came east. In more recent history, Ningxia was a poverty-stricken coal region whose dusty scrubland was in danger of desertification. But, in the nineteen-nineties, the government began to invest seriously in its infrastructure, irrigating immense tracts of desert between the Yellow River and the Helan Mountains, much as the phoenix had done. A few years ago, local officials received a directive to build a ‘wine route’ through the region, similar to Bordeaux’s Route des Vins. European winegrowers, hired by the government as consultants, had identified Ningxia’s continental climate, high altitude, dry air, and sandy, rocky soil as ideal for vineyards.
“Wine is still a minority taste in China. Su told me that, when he decided to study viticulture, in the early aughts, it was scarcely recognized as a subject. He’d never even tried wine until he took classes with Li Hua, a professor who is generally considered the pioneer of modern Chinese wine production. ‘I didn’t like it at all,’ Su recalled, screwing up his nose. For a moment, he’d suspected that the aura of sophistication that had first drawn him to wine was some sort of Western hoax. What’s more, during Su’s first tasting, his face turned scarlet, a reaction known as Asian flush, which affects about a third of all East Asians—myself included—and is caused by a deficiency of the enzyme that metabolizes alcohol. His professor wondered if he would survive in his chosen career.
“We left the city and drove along the Helan Mountain Grape Culture Corridor, a wide, sinuous road that was recently laid to boost development and tourism. Billboards advertising various wineries—housed in faux-French châteaux, sleek modernist structures, giant pagodas—appeared, like fast-food signs along a highway. The road was lined with poplars, Scotch pines, and desert willows, and, beyond them, I could see the gray-blue ridge of the Helan Mountains. Su described the range as the primordial father of Yinchuan, which it shielded from Inner Mongolia’s vast Tengger Desert, whose sandstorms would otherwise make agriculture impossible.”
Photo: Airglow Milky Way
Poem: Alfonsina Storni, “Ships”
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