Reviews and News:
A thrilling account of Augustine’s conversion.
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Scholars surprised to discover that 16th-century theater was rectangular not round: “Excavations, carried out by Museum of London Archaeology over the past week, have revealed that the Curtain Theatre – one of the three earliest purpose-built playhouses in England – was 30 metres long and 22 metres wide. The investigation has so far exposed the gravel surface of the open yard where the less wealthy members of the audience would have stood.”
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When Barbara became Barbra: “The first time Barbra Streisand sang for an audience, she was still known as Barbara. It was July 2, 1960, and she had signed up to compete in a talent show at a Greenwich Village nightclub called the Lion. If Streisand’s life were a myth, this would be the scene in which she reveals herself as something more than human, a heroine or demigoddess capable of slaying monsters—or, in this case, the audience. She took the stage, Neal Gabler writes in his new book Barbra Streisand, in an oddball thrift-shop outfit, ‘a purple ostrich-feathered boudoir jacket over a dress of lilac and purple,’ and sang the Harold Arlen song ‘A Sleepin’ Bee.’ The result, as a friend recalled years later, was ‘a kind of stunned silence,’ followed by ‘an eruption of yells and whistles, ear-shattering stomping and screaming.’ Inevitably, Streisand won that night’s contest, and while celebrating afterwards, she announced that she was dropping the second “a” from her name: Barbara would become Barbra.”
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David Hume in full: “He suffered not only from melancholy and poor health but also from financial shortfalls, forcing him to rely upon friends and family, even having to retreat to his brother’s home at Ninewells for two years. Although he worked hard, he bounced between the educated equivalent of odd jobs, serving at various times as a tutor, secretary, librarian, and bureaucrat. He longed for financial independence through his philosophical publications, which he would eventually achieve by writing them ‘with Addisonian concision and perspicacity.’ He wanted to write philosophy that people would read.”
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The rise and fall and rise of a career Maoist: “Born in the hamlet of Paifang in Sichuan Province to well-educated, landowning parents, Deng had a privileged upbringing. Pantsov and Levine detail his student years in Paris in the early 1920s, where the French inclination to view Chinese students as sources of cheap labor made him join the Communists and form a useful friendship with a slightly older Zhou Enlai. Then on to Moscow for some ideological fine tuning. Here the Chinese Communists were told to join the Kuomintang, the nationalist movement, and undermine it from within. Thus, in classic undercover mode, we find Deng in 1927 disguised as an antiques dealer in Shanghai, wearing luxurious gowns and fancy hats and enveloped in a cloud of expensive cigarette smoke.”
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Jonathan Franzen needs to brush up on his Shakespeare.
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“Deputy Vice Chair of the Task Force on Academic Outreach” and other automatically generated university administrative titles.
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Essay of the Day:
In Hakai, Ferris Jabr offers a short history of bioluminescence applications:
“For millennia, people have devised ingenious applications for bioluminescence, many of which are little known today. Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote that one could rub the slime of a certain luminous jellyfish, possibly Pelagia noctiluca, onto a walking stick to make it double as a torch. In the late 17th century, the physician Georg Eberhard Rumphius described indigenous peoples of Indonesia using bioluminescent fungi as flashlights in the forest. And before the 19th century, coal miners filled jars with fireflies, as well as dried fish skin crawling with bioluminescent bacteria, to serve as lanterns; the safety lamp had not yet been invented and carrying an open flame into a cave risked igniting explosive gas.
“It took much longer for people to find uses for ostracods and other tiny gleaming sea creatures because, for most of human history, no one knew they existed. Early explorers puzzled over ribbons and specks of light around boats and oars, as well as radiant waves and regions of shining water sometimes known as ‘milky seas.’ Initial attempts to explain such phenomena were often closer to poetry than science. For many, light was akin to fire, even if it was in water. Hai Nei Shih Chou Chi, a fourth- or fifth-century-BCE Chinese text detailing nautical adventures, states that, ‘one may see fiery sparks when the water is stirred.’ Likewise, in the 17th century, French philosopher René Descartes likened the light seen in agitated seawater to sparks struck off flint. During a cruise to Siam in 1688, Jesuit missionary and mathematician Guy Tachard wrote that the Sun had ostensibly ‘impregnated and filled the sea during the day with an infinity of fiery and luminous spirits.’
“In 1753, Benjamin Franklin surmised that some sort of ‘extremely small animalcule’ in water ‘may yet give a visible light.’ Around the same time, naturalists such as Godeheu de Riville, equipped with early microscopes, confirmed that Franklin’s hunch was correct: the ocean’s glints and glows emanated from living things, from tiny ‘marine insects’ we now call plankton. By the early 20th century, bioluminescent plankton were far from unknown entities—they were under intense scrutiny by some of the world’s most powerful military forces, literally caught in the crossfire of human warfare.
“When ships and other vessels pass through large groups of bioluminescent plankton, ripples and clouds of green and blue light often form at their sides and in their wake. Those unwanted spotlights have proven problematic for the navy, especially when stealth is required. In 1918, during the First World War, a British ship sunk a German U-boat off the coast of Spain after spying its glowing nimbus. By the Second World War and the Cold War, navies were studying how to track subs and torpedoes with bioluminescence. The United States Navy continues such research today, attempting to develop an aquatic robot that can measure bioluminescence as a way to both detect enemies and prevent an accidental reveal.”
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Image of the Day: Herding reindeer
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Poem: Joshua Hren, “Gehenna”
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