Reviews and News:
Mary Shelley among the radicals. “Mary Shelley understood, even as a very young woman, intuitively and imaginatively rather than discursively, that power without goodness is dangerous, that knowledge without ethics is ‘a cancer in the universe.'”
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Hong Kong museum dedicated to the Tiananmen Square protests to close because of legal dispute.
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Edward Snowden to release dance track.
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Van Dyck’s masterful portraiture: “Whereas Rubens was something of a late bloomer among artists, straggling into his thirties before finding his true idiom, van Dyck was one of the most precocious painters in the history of art.”
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Modern warfare and just war theory.
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The tragic life of Klaus Mann.
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Churchill and socialism: “Churchill grew up alongside socialism, watching in his youth as the British Fabian Society grew in influence. Though the circumstances set the stage for a man of great spirit to become a socialist, Churchill went the opposite way, opposing socialism throughout his life on the grounds that the ‘pursuit of complete or perfect equality, even of opportunity, would produce not equality but inequality, not justice but injustice, not freedom but grinding tyranny.'”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Wall Street Journal, Joshua Hammer writes about middle-aged book collector in Mali who saved Timbuktu’s libraries and ancient collections from al Qaeda:
“For custodians of the ancient heritage of the Middle East and North Africa, the recent rise of Islamist extremist groups has posed a dire challenge. Since its seizure of the historic Iraqi city of Mosul in early 2014, Islamic State has pillaged and demolished mosques, shrines, churches and other sacred sites across the region. The group continues to launch ‘cultural cleansing’ operations from Tikrit to Tripoli.
“In this grim procession, there have been occasional victories for culture over extremism, like the recapture last month of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, which may now be restored to something of its previous glory. A less familiar case of cultural rescue features an unlikely hero: a 51-year-old book collector and librarian named Abdel Kader Haidara in the fabled city of Timbuktu, in the West African country of Mali.
“The story begins in April 2012, when Mr. Haidara returned home from a business trip to learn that the weak Malian army had collapsed and that nearly 1,000 Islamist fighters from one of al Qaeda’s African affiliates, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had occupied his city. He encountered looters, gunfire and black flags flying from government buildings, and he feared that the city’s dozens of libraries and repositories—home to hundreds of thousands of rare Arabic manuscripts—would be pillaged.”
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Image of the Day: 19th-century tornadoes
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Poem: Bryce A. Taylor, “The Threat”
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