Reviews and News:
How the Rose Garden became the Rose Garden: “Before it became the Rose Garden, the area between the West Wing and mansion proper was a plain and tired lawn. ‘It is driving the President crazy,’ said Mrs. Kennedy, and its inadequacy was reinforced when the Kennedys visited Europe and saw regal gardens in England and Austria.”
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Harry Stein: “How my friends and I wrecked Pomona College.” “I don’t want to take undue personal credit, or blame, for all that followed. But if the antiwar movement at Pomona can be said to have had a father, I was the father’s sidekick. The guy in question was named Andy, and he lived across the hall in the freshman dorm.”
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Ferdinand Brunetière’s 19th-century fight against positivism: “Science and Religion, which appeared five years before Brunetière converted to Catholicism in 1900, surprised many of his contemporaries. His admiration for the eloquent seventeenth-century theologian Bossuet notwithstanding, Brunetière had counted as a rationalist until this point. If prone to asceticism and pedantry, he ultimately enjoyed the reputation of a freethinker. Indeed, the arguments advanced in the essay at hand — which was written after a visit to the pope in 1894 — do not conform to dogma, even though they advocate the Church’s authority: Brunetière, it seems, arrived at his conclusions by thinking matters through as soberly as possible. There is not the slightest hint of spirituality in the pages to follow. While conducting a vigorous polemic against faith in secular improvement, Science and Religion strikes a balance between age-old moral commandments and the practical demands of modernity. For Brunetière, ‘science’ and ‘religion’ need not count as opposites. To employ a philosophical idiom that is not the author’s own, they admit dialectical resolution.”
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Louis Untermeyer’s 1945 Longfellow is beautiful.
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Fragile minds: “Diagnosing the illnesses of historical figures is a strange activity. I’m not really sure I approve of picturing the dead in the blue light of a science unknown in their own times, as if they were wearing hospital robes and sitting on examining tables, legs dangling like small children in an adult chair. But I do know that reading Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder, Claudia Kalb’s unpretentious collection of 12 profiles, is a pleasure. In good hands, the goal of embarrassing biographies is literary: to teach compassion with stories of heroes and their tragic flaws. Kalb lives up to her enjoyably grabby title and transcends it. In some 300 pages, roughly divided between biography and medical reporting, she succeeds because of her literary touches and compassionate voice. Moreover, the science is insightful and up-to-the-minute as well.”
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The life of Scottish war poet Charles Sorley staged in verse, song, and prose.
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Essay of the Day:
In National Affairs, Eli Lehrer considers the future of work in America:
“In recent years, more than a few Americans in public life have spoken of a revolutionary ‘gig economy’ that, through websites and smart-phone apps, is providing new types of work opportunities and new ways of linking consumers with service providers. Some say this new economy — dominated by firms like Uber, Lyft, and TaskRabbit — has produced positive effects, such as newly flexible work arrangements, increased innovation, increased self-employment, and a dominance of small employers. Others, however, say it has produced mostly negative ones: increased temporary employment, decreased job security, and less full-time work for many Americans.
“Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida — until recently, a presidential candidate — declared in October of last year that “an important truth facing us in this election…is that the American economy is fundamentally transforming” in the direction of new employer-employee relationships. The center-left Markle Foundation largely agrees. ‘America is in the midst of the biggest economic transformation in over a hundred years,’ the foundation wrote in announcing its multi-year, multi-million-dollar Rework America project, which is intended to explore the new nature of work in America’s digital economy.
“While Rubio is enthusiastic about this new gig economy, and Markle generally optimistic, not everyone feels the same way. To Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, current trends ‘are polarizing our economy’ and leaving many Americans to make ‘extra money renting out a small room, designing websites, selling products they design themselves at home, or even driving their own car.’ Clinton frets that this transformation is ‘raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.’
“Conventional wisdom says that loyalty between employers and employees is declining rapidly, for both parties. More than 90% of millennials surveyed by the executive-development firm Future Workplace say they expect to remain in a job for less than three years. A widely publicized report commissioned by the Freelancers Union in 2014 found what appears to be strong evidence of a growing gig economy: About a third of the workforce, 53 million Americans, are now freelancers, the report says. Conventional wisdom also holds that their numbers will increase. The accounting- and tax-software firm Intuit projects that, by 2020, 40% of the workforce could be freelancers.
“The market certainly appears to be convinced that the gig economy is a big thing. Household-name companies like Uber, Thumbtack, and Airbnb have achieved valuations in the billions of dollars on the premise that, by unlocking otherwise-trapped capital and skills ranging from un-driven cars to underutilized carpentry talents, they are uniquely positioned to match workers and clients by providing everything from surgery to valet parking.
“The idea of a new, revolutionary shift in the way Americans work offers a compelling narrative for policymakers. Those on the left, like Clinton, use it to argue for a stronger social safety net, positing that only the government can provide the protections that once came from traditional employers. Those on the right, like Rubio, exalt the growing ranks of rugged individualists — small-business entrepreneurs and innovators who, if largely left alone in an environment undergirded by the rule of law, modest regulation, and low taxes, will deliver a better future for everyone.
“For all its appeal across the political spectrum, the narrative of the gig economy has a major problem: There is very little broad statistical evidence that the American workplace has fundamentally transformed, become dominated by smaller businesses, become more flexible, become more mobile, or reduced opportunities for full-time work. Indeed, the preponderance of the evidence indicates the opposite has happened. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.”
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Image of the Day: Cirrus over Paris
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Poem: Rochelle Jewell Shapiro, “Double Exposure”
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