Clive James writes about Philip Larkin’s “extraordinary” everyday life: “As the ancillary books of correspondence and commentary accumulate, our picture of Philip Larkin grows more nuanced all the time, and at this rate he will soon be as complex a character as your weird uncle, the one who thought that modern society was falling apart for lack of discipline.” (HT: A. M. Juster)
Star Tribune film critic resigns after it was discovered he regularly used phrases from other writers without attribution: “The reviews by Covert in question span many years, but one was published as recently as November 1. In that review, of the film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Covert wrote: ‘There’s breathtaking craft and control in her performance, but not once do you sense the tools at work.’ A year earlier, in a Nov. 27, 2017, review of Call Me by Your Name, Jon Frosch wrote in the Hollywood Reporter: ‘There’s breathtaking craft and control in the performance, but not once do you sense the tools at work.’ The Star Tribune is alerting wire services and syndicates that use Covert’s reviews and asking that they provide this information to editors of news organizations that may have re-published them. We also are removing all of Covert’s work from StarTribune.com.”
Does it matter where you go to college? Derek Thompson: “The seemingly obvious answer is, Of course it matters! How could it not? Ivy League and equivalent institutions provide more than world-class instruction. They confer a lifetime of assistance from prodigiously connected alumni and a message to all future employers that you’re a rarified talent. College isn’t just an education; it’s a network, a signal, and an identity. Elite schools seem disproportionately responsible for minting the American elite. About 45 percent of America’s billionaires and more than half of Forbes’s list of the most powerful people attended schools where incoming freshmen average in the top first percentile of SAT scores. But what appears obvious may not be true. In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is ‘generally indistinguishable from zero’ after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable ‘Harvard effect.’ Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.”
“He-Man reeked of toxic masculinity, but at least he was progressive enough to announce his pronouns.” That’s a tweet from progressive slam poet “Titania McGrath.” She was suspended from Twitter, but now she’s back. “Godfrey Elfwick” tells her inspirational story and gives her poetry the close reading it deserves at Spectator.
In the footsteps of Rousseau around Lake Biel: Seán Williams on the connection between writing and walking: “Although writerly wandering is popularly associated with the left, and not just in England, it is not necessarily so. Irrespective of interpretations of Wordsworth’s poetry, German writing about walking since Romanticism has traversed the full political spectrum…Writerly wandering is not well-described as activism, then, as my critically-minded colleagues would have it, some of them immersed in French theories of the flâneur. But we can say that writing about walking is necessarily an observation on our own place in nature and culture — or nature as culture. On that, all our authors from Rousseau onwards would agree. Leaving politics aside, what most writers on walking also share is sociability — although it is often hidden, or downright denied.”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Helen Andrews draws on her own experience in an excellent essay on online shaming:
“In October 2010, I appeared on a panel to promote a book of essays by young conservatives, Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation. The moderator was Jonah Goldberg. One of the other panelists was my ex-boyfriend Todd Seavey. During the Q&A, Todd launched into a rant about my personal failings. He accused me of opposing Obamacare on the grounds that it would diminish human suffering, which allegedly I preferred to increase; of wanting to repeal laws against fistfights for the same reason; of being a sadistic and scheming heartbreaker in my personal life; and of generally living according to a ‘disturbing’ and ‘brutal’ set of values. For three minutes and forty-five seconds, which, unfortunately for me, were captured on film for broadcast two weeks later on C-SPAN2, he made an impassioned case that I was a sociopath.
“Todd is not a psychologist, but a psychologist with no evidence to go on except my treatment of Todd might well have arrived at the same conclusion. I treated him awfully. I can only plead in mitigation that I was twenty-two. Todd is from Connecticut and has that charming New England stolidity, and I behaved as if his patience, which seemed so infinite when we were dating, really had no limits. The bit about opposing Obamacare because I favored human suffering was outlandish, and other parts of his rant were not quite how I remembered things, but everything he said, he really believed, and he had arrived at those beliefs by a hard road.
“I braced myself for the broadcast. Maybe no one would notice? Within minutes, the offending clip had been posted on YouTube, where it got half a million hits in the first forty-eight hours. It made the evening news on Washington’s Fox affiliate. Greg Gutfeld did a segment about it on RedEye. It was written up in Gawker, the Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, and a hundred lesser sites, and then written up again when Todd expanded his remarks about me into a series of blog posts on his personal website. My inbox exploded with media inquiries, none of which I answered, except to give a short statement to Mary Katharine Ham at the Daily Caller…To the personal friends who emailed commiserations, I replied with an old Aaron Sorkin line about bad publicity: ‘It’s like seasickness. You think you’re gonna die, and everyone else just thinks it’s funny.’
“That, it turned out, was overly optimistic.”
Photos: Photographs from the Royal Society
Poem: Stephen Kampa, “Wasted Time”
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