Reviews and News:
Edgar Allan Poe’s genius: “Poe’s admirers were legion. Many scholars speculate that Pym influenced Moby-Dick. Abraham Lincoln, it was once reported, ‘suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this author.’ Dostoyevsky himself introduced Russian translations of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ and ‘The Devil in the Belfry’—and surely, his Underground Man is a cousin to Poe’s soul-baring monomaniacs. To the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Poe was nothing less than ‘the supreme original short story writer of all time.’ The usually prickly Bernard Shaw agreed with Conan Doyle, adding, ‘The story of the Lady Ligeia is not merely one of the wonders of literature; it is unparalleled and unapproached. There is really nothing to be said about it: we others simply take off our hats and let Mr. Poe go first.’ Tennyson, Hardy, and Yeats regarded that same Mr. Poe as the finest of American poets.”
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Roman-era shipwreck found in Israel’s Caesarea Harbor: “The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced May 16 the discovery of the Late Roman-era artifacts, which include a figurine of a moon goddess and a lamp carrying the likeness of a sun god. Archaeologists also found two stashes of coins, still clumped in the shape of the vessel that once carried them.”
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At the age 24, Spinoza was expelled from his synagogue in Amsterdam with a writ of Herem. Why was he excommunicated and should the censure be rescinded?
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Trouble at The Guardian: Alan Rusbridger, the paper’s former editor-in-chief, has lost a bid to be named chairman of the board of The Scott Trust, which runs the paper. “The Guardian made an operating loss of £52 million last year, saw cash reserves fall by £95 million and is shedding 310 jobs. Due to emergency restructuring it will shortly announce losses for 2015-2016 that are even higher.”
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How do you memorize a 60,000-word poem? “In 1992, at the age of 58, Basinger decided to memorize Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic poem, as a form of mental activity while he was working out at the gym. An actor, he’d memorized shorter poems before, and he wanted to see how much of the epic he could remember. ‘As I finished each book,’ he wrote, ‘I began to perform it and keep it alive in repertory while committing the next to memory.’ The twelve books of Paradise Lost contain over 60,000 words; it took Basinger about 3,000 hours to learn them by rote.”
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Jeff Bezos confirms that Amazon plans to open more physical stores. “How many? We don’t know yet.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Nautilus, Jonathan Waldman revisits the life of Harry Brearley, the man who invented stainless steel:
“Sometime in 1882, a skinny, dark-haired, 11-year-old boy named Harry Brearley entered a steelworks for the first time. A shy kid—he was scared of the dark, and a picky eater—he was also curious, and the industrial revolution in Sheffield, England, offered much in the way of amusements. He enjoyed wandering around town—he later called himself a Sheffield Street Arab—watching road builders, bricklayers, painters, coal deliverers, butchers, and grinders. He was drawn especially to workshops; if he couldn’t see in a shop window, he would knock on the door and offer to run an errand for the privilege of watching whatever work was going on inside. Factories were even more appealing, and he had learned to gain access by delivering, or pretending to deliver, lunch or dinner to an employee. Once inside, he must have reveled, for not until the day’s end did he emerge, all grimy and gray but for his blue eyes. Inside the steelworks, the action compelled him so much that he spent hours sitting inconspicuously on great piles of coal, breathing through his mouth, watching brawny men shoveling fuel into furnaces, hammering white-hot ingots of iron.
“There was one operation in particular that young Harry liked: a toughness test performed by the blacksmith. After melting and pouring a molten mixture from a crucible, the blacksmith would cast a bar or two of that alloy, and after it cooled, he would cut notches in the ends of those bars. Then he’d put the bars in a vise, and hammer away at them.
“The effort required to break the metal bars, as interpreted through the blacksmith’s muscles, could vary by an order of magnitude, but the result of the test was expressed qualitatively. The metal was pronounced on the spot either rotten or darned good stuff. The latter was simply called D.G.S. The aim of the men at that steelworks, and every other, was to produce D.G.S., and Harry took that to heart.
“In this way, young Harry became familiar with steelmaking long before he formally taught himself as much as there was to know about the practice. It was the beginning of a life devoted to steel, without the distractions of hobbies, vacations, or church. It was the origin of a career in which Brearley wrote eight books on metals, five of which contain the word steel in the title; in which he could argue about steelmaking—but not politics—all night; and in which the love and devotion he bestowed upon inanimate metals exceeded that which he bestowed upon his parents or wife or son. Steel was Harry’s true love. It would lead, eventually, to the discovery of stainless steel.”
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Image of the Day: Elephant shadows
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Poem: Alan Feldman, “Repairing the Deck”
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