Reviews and News:
Jonah Lehrer’s “insolently unoriginal” book on love: “Jonah Lehrer has had time to work on A Book About Love. His schedule no longer teems with lucrative speaking engagements. He no longer writes for The New Yorker or contributes to ‘Radiolab’ on NPR. With this project — his shot at redemption, provided to him by Simon & Schuster after his public tumble from grace — Mr. Lehrer could have written something complex and considered. Books are still the slow food of the publishing business. Yet here is Mr. Lehrer, once again, serving us a nonfiction McMuffin.”
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Dante’s Divine Comedy is a great work of art and the product of “vicious factionalism.”
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Was there an Irish Enlightenment?
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Roman-era mosaics have been discovered in Israel, including a rare depiction of the parting of the Red Sea.
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How to become a man: “For most boys…becoming a man is The Big Journey. And their needs are being forgotten today—with the result that many, not just Vance, are scrabbling. My three decades at the U.S. Naval Academy, which is part of the world of privilege Vance manages to join, have shown me that most midshipmen also arrive chasing a vision of masculinity that the Naval Academy quickly kills, leaving them burnt out and rootless at an early age.”
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The problem with “generationalism”: “Politicising relations between the generations is a destructive pursuit. It encourages people to conceptualise social problems in personal terms: in the case of Boomer-blaming, placing the problems of the world squarely at their parents’ door, and castigating ‘the old’ for standing in the way of ‘the new’. It presents a rigid view of history, in which a younger generation is simply waiting in the wings for its chance to move up ‘the ladder’ – as though life was ever as straightforward and as neatly organised as that.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, James MacMillan examines the search for transcendence in modern music:
“There are certain words associated in the public mind with modernism in the arts and modernism in music in particular. Modern music can sound wild and even savage. Like much else in the modern arts, contemporary music can open a door to the dark side of human nature and our thoughts, our fears and our experiences. Yet it is modern music that sparkles and bedazzles as generations of composers fell in love with new bright instrumental colours and experimental orchestrational vividness. And in spite of the retreat of faith in Western society, composers over the last century or so have never given up on their search for the sacred. From Elgar to Messiaen, from Stravinsky to Schnittke, from Schoenberg to Jonathan Harvey, one constantly hears talk of transcendence, mystery and vision.”
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Image of the Day: Shelf cloud
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Poem: Heinrich Heine, “Three Poems”
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