Reviews and News:
Barton Swaim: Read Waverley. “The book’s subtitle is ‘Tis Sixty Years Since; when Scott began it in 1805 — it wasn’t published till 1814 — it had been six decades since the Jacobite Uprising of 1745. Nothing like it had ever been written — Waverley was the first historical novel — and its anonymous publication set the Scottish capital abuzz for months.”
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In defense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Political conservatives, whether of a classical liberal or traditionalist orientation, have generally found Rousseau repulsive and dangerous, and his admirers tend to be on the political left. One striking exception to this generalization is Alexis de Tocqueville, who said that Rousseau was a man (along with Montesquieu and Pascal) with whom he spent time every day. Tocqueville is among the most reputable analysts of American life, among people of a wide range of political views. His respect for Rousseau should caution us not to buy the caricatures peddled by people who read carelessly and write recklessly.”
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The Economist leaves 25 St. James’s Street: “But for two German bombs, everything might have worked out differently. The first, which fell in 1941, destroyed The Economist‘s offices in Bouverie Street, near Fleet Street – the old heart of British journalism. The newspaper fled to offices near Waterloo Bridge. In 1947 it moved to St James’s, into a building that was vacant because it, too, had been bombed. Number 22 Ryder Street was not London’s smartest address. It had been an upmarket brothel before the war; Nancy Balfour, the United States editor, shocked a taxi driver by asking to be taken there. It was, say the few who remember it, a pleasant jumble of offices and corridors. But by the late 1950s it had started to pinch, and The Economist decided to do something radical.”
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The worldwide poverty rate is the lowest it’s ever been in modern times thanks to capitalism: “Since 1990, when social critic Naomi Klein claimed that global capitalism lapsed into its most savage form, the proportion who live in extreme poverty – according to a $1.9-a-day poverty line, adjusted for local purchasing power and inflation – has been reduced from 37 per cent, to less than 10 per cent. At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, the world’s countries set the goal of halving the 1990 incidence of extreme poverty by 2015. This was met five years ahead of the deadline. And even though the world population grew by more than two billion between 1990 and 2015, the number of people who live in extreme poverty was reduced by more than 1.25 billion people.”
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Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? “Thirty-four years spent in prison without trial, the heavy security and the total isolation ordered by the King himself all suggest that he was a threat to the crown and a victim of state tyranny.”
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A. M. Juster reviews Joseph Nigg’s history of the Phoenix.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Atlantis, Orsolya Ujj explains why Europeans and Americans have different attitudes towards genetically modified (GM) foods and what this means for trade:
“Why is there a marked divide between Americans and Europeans when it comes to the cultivation and regulation of genetically modified (GM) foods? The United States, which has about 1.4 times as much cropland as the European Union, devotes almost 600 times as much to GM crops; the EU’s total acreage of GM crops, mostly corn grown in Spain, adds up to less than the area of Greater London. This vast difference in production between Europe and the United States reflects their different attitudes toward genetically modified organisms, attitudes that affect consumer preferences and government policies, and that have important political implications for transatlantic trade. Differences in the ways that the two sides regulate GM foods are among the challenges for the ongoing negotiations to establish the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, challenges having to do mostly with European restrictions on genetically modified products from America.
“But explaining this divide requires going beyond the usual discussion about whether Europe is irrational in its concern about the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and its insistence on precaution, or about whether America takes excessive risks for the sake of efficiency and profit. These are complex questions, and we can begin to understand how each side answers them only if we look to the underlying cultural and philosophical reasons for the differences between European and American approaches to GMOs — to the different attitudes toward food and eating, technological mastery of land, and the reliability of scientific experts, as well as to more deeply rooted differences in the ways agriculture is practiced on the two continents. Perhaps the most important of these differences concerns the value of local traditions, which Europe sustains in part by resisting innovations that might alter treasured ways of life.”
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Image of the Day: Skiing above Svolvaer
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Poem: Ashley Anna McHugh, “After the Miscarriage”
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