Reviews and News:
Maureen Mullarkey: E-readers will never replace physical books.
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The central question of Allen Tate’s life and work was “Whom and what shall our souls believe?”: “Tate was keenly aware of the answers provided by art and history, and both—especially southern history—encouraged in him a tragic worldview. But in order to make full sense of human life as tragedy, Tate had to find an authority external to himself. ‘One might assert man’s tragic destiny,’ writes Glass, ‘or his flawed nature, but there could be no justification for such a view apart from an appeal to private conviction or to past examples of poets and thinkers who held similar views. Man is not tragic without the admission that he is subject to the pieties.'”
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Revisiting France’s post-war artists’ alley: “This narrow, nondescript passage — known as the Impasse Ronsin — was once an artery of aesthetic energy that, in no small fashion, defined French postwar art in all its insanity. First the site of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio, Ronsin was later where the likes of Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely all lived or worked for much of the 1950s and early 1960s. For a moment in time, the alley was Paris itself, the lifeblood of an era…In the beginning, it was murder — not art — that christened the street.”
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Smuggling Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs out of the Soviet Union.
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The squalid afterlife of artists’ estates: “Legacies are usually controlled by squabbling heirs, opportunist collectors and vengeful harpies.” Can it be changed?
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Madison and the perils of populism.
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Essay of the Day:
Josiah Ober revisits Socrates’s death in Aeon:
“There is no dispute about the basic facts of the trial of Socrates. It is less obvious why Athenians found Socrates guilty, and what it might mean today. People who believe in both democracy and the rule of law ought to be very interested in this trial. If the takeaway is either that democracy, as direct self-government by the people, is fatally prone to repress dissent, or that those who dissent against democracy must be regarded as oligarchic traitors, then we are left with a grim choice between democracy and intellectual freedom.
“But that is the wrong way to view Socrates’ trial. Rather, the question it answers concerns civic obligation and commitment. The People’s Court convicted Socrates because he refused to accept that a norm of personal responsibility for the effects of public speech applied to his philosophical project. Socrates accepted the guilty verdict as binding, and drank the hemlock, because he acknowledged the authority of the court and the laws under which he was tried. And he did so even though he believed that the jury had made a fundamental mistake in interpreting the law.”
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Image of the Day: Renovated Rose Reading Room
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Poem: Chris Childers, “Catullus 51” (HT: A. M. Juster)
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