Reviews and News:
What Evelyn Waugh can teach us about fatherhood: “The great novelist wasn’t a great dad, but there’s a lot to be learned from his life and his characters.”
“Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”: “An anonymous ten-page memo by a Google engineer has set the Internet aflame. The tech site Gizmodo published the full text of what it called the ‘Anti-Diversity Screed’…Engadget used the same formulation. But it’s not anti-diversity, and it’s not a screed. It’s written calmly and reasonably well, and it makes entirely legitimate points. The author claims that Google’s diversity efforts are coming up short because the company misdiagnoses the problems that lead to a gender gap in tech. Discrimination may be part of it, but it is also true that men and women differ, on average, in ways that might affect their representation in the field (and indeed in different departments within Google).”
A. N. Wilson: Charles Darwin was a fraud.
Buy E. B. White’s farm for $3.7 million.
Bill de Blasio’s problematic “cultural plan”: “You would think New York City’s arts scene was already pretty diverse, but evidently you would be wrong. It’s too white and too male.”
Photographing cricketers: “One of Eagar’s most famous pictures is of the Australian fast bowler Jeff Thomson. He and his fellow opening bowler, Dennis Lillee, had savaged the English batsmen in the winter of 1974-75 so completely that some commentators had argued the rules of the game needed to be changed… What makes the picture, Eagar tells Ryan, is the position of Thomson’s bowling arm, which is behind his back, so that you can just see part of the ball in his hand between his legs. If that fraction of the ball wasn’t visible, this would be a non-photograph; Thomson would look as if he had lost his right arm. As it is, Eagar captured the instant when Thomson was just about to unleash a ball that might have been delivered at 95 mph. The bowler’s mouth is open; he looks to his left out of the corners of his eyes at his target. Other photographs may say more about the game of cricket, but no other picture better conveys the intent of the fast bowler who at the moment of delivery has eyes only for the batsman at the other end of the wicket. He’s in for the kill.”
Inside baseball: “‘The count is where the strategic heart of the game is found/ That’s where every iota of study and intuition about your enemy comes into play.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Alan Burdick writes about the fascinating artifacts found in Europe’s receding glaciers:
“As the glaciers recede, they are releasing some of the human artifacts that they have absorbed through the ages, including humans themselves. Ötzi, the five-thousand-year-old mummified mountaineer discovered in 1991, remains the most astonishing find. But hundreds of other archaeological objects, preserved in remarkable delicacy, have also turned up—medieval crossbow bolts, coins of Roman vintage, a pair of twenty-six-hundred-year-old socks. In July, an employee of a Swiss ski company came across the mummified remains of a couple who had gone missing in 1942; they were found fully dressed, with their wartime identity cards, backpacks, an empty bottle, a pocket watch, and a book.
“Last week, a paper in Scientific Reports described another recent find, of an object four thousand years old: a circular box, several inches wide, made of willow and pine and sewn together with twigs. It was discovered, in 2012, near the summit of Switzerland’s Lötschenpass, almost nine thousand feet up, and was dated to the Bronze Age. The recovery of a wooden artifact so old and well preserved would be remarkable under any circumstances, but this one contained something curious. ‘We saw that it has this amorphous glob in the middle of it,’ Jessica Hendy, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and one of the paper’s co-authors, told me. She and her colleagues, led by André Colonese, of the University of York, analyzed the glob using a technique typically reserved for ceramics; it detects the presence of fats, revealing if a clay pot once contained, say, dairy or meat. But this time, and for the first time in the history of archaeology, the analysis showed traces of grain—‘some sort of wheat,’ Hendy said, and barley or rye. Science outlets promptly began referring to the artifact as a lunchbox.”
Photo: Exploding Meteor
Poem: Malcolm Guite, “Transfiguration”
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