Reviews and News:
The uncomfortable truth about daycare: Heavy use of “commercial daycare leads to some poor outcomes for many children. Subsidizing this form of child care effectively discourages the use of other arrangements that have not shown these negative effects.”
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Why are the books of the former Donnell Library Center in the basement of a hotel? Nicole Gelinas tells the sad story.
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The curious history of Mein Kampf in France.
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Revisiting the Habsburg Empire.
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The real cause of the French Revolution was money. “Louis XVI’s greatest problem was the French national debt. It had reached four billion livres — accumulated over many wars — and there was an annual deficit of 100 million livres. As a result, Hardman points out, in the 1780s, whereas the British government could borrow at 3. 5 per cent, the French government had to pay 6 per cent, and often more. Unless its finances were reformed, France would be unable to fight more wars. It was a financial crisis, not class tensions (the French nobility was more open than the English peerage), which led to the summoning of the States General and the outbreak of the French Revolution.”
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The paradox of ugliness—it repels but also fascinates.
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Essay of the Day:
In Modern Age, Richard Harp argues that Shakespeare’s plays show us the “dynamic quality of virtue”:
“Aristotle’s famous statement that virtue is a mean between two extremes is generally not quoted in its entirety. He does indeed say, ‘In respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean’—that is, a mean between two opposed vices. Courage is a mean between rashness and cowardice. But the other, less-noticed part of his definition is also crucial: ‘With regard to what is best and right [virtue is] an extreme.’ That is, one cannot, in Aristotle’s view, be a little bit sober or some of the time courageous; either he has the virtues of temperance and fortitude or he does not.
“Today any fictional character with a pulse is called ‘daring’ or ‘brave’ in our ‘irreverent’ popular culture. But Shakespeare’s heroes as well as his villains are as likely, perhaps even more likely, to do the outrageous and the unconventional, not out of a spirit of rebelliousness or cussedness but because of their own imaginative and forceful responses to the extreme circumstances that life has put them in. This is what makes them virtuous.
“Ben Jonson said that language reveals character because it ‘springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us and is the image and parent of it, the mind.’ Shakespeare was adept at illustrating Jonson’s precept for his ‘great variety of readers,’ as his acting colleagues Heminges and Condell addressed the purchasers of their First Folio in 1623. It was by invoking the different shades of the accumulated meanings of words, as well as more recent, subtle changes to those meanings, that he revealed the features of virtue. These talents help account for why Shakespeare retains his relevance and stature four hundred years after his death. For his depictions of virtue not only illuminate the moral dimensions of the early modern period but also speak to the moral dilemmas of our own age.”
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Image of the Day: Liujiang River
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Poem: Elizabeth Spires, “Snow, the Novel”
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