Prufrock: Vegan Denied Swiss Citizenship, France’s Catholic Moment, and the Dying Language of Whistles

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Well, this makes my naturalized Swiss heart thump with pride: “Swiss Locals Deny Citizenship to ‘Annoying’ Vegan”

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Mark your calendars: Two stars to collide in 2022, give or take a year, to create a red nova “that will put on a fiery show visible even without the use of a telescope. For those looking to catch a glimpse of the nova, the new star could be as bright as Polaris, the North Star, and will appear in the northern wing of Cygnus, Drake reports. Once it explodes, the nova should be visible for most of the year.”

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Caked in dust and dating back to 1674, New York City’s court proceedings archives are being transferred to be preserved and made accessible to researchers: “Some of the early records swear allegiance to King George III, and the names of historic figures like Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr pop up in documents from when they were working as lawyers in the city. The rows, on the seventh and eighth floors of the Surrogate’s Courthouse in Manhattan, include the condemnation records of the properties taken to make way for Central Park and the city’s grid system of streets. In one room, shelf after shelf is filled with the immigration documents of Europeans who sought to become citizens of the United States. The vast collection, once part of a bureaucracy aptly named the Division of Ancient Records, is visited occasionally by researchers, like historians and genealogists (both academic and amateur). It is mostly the province of the staff members who tend to the documents, many of which predate the Declaration of Independence.”

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Paul Nash’s independent life: “Nash’s inauspicious start and apparent conservatism of approach make all the more striking what came after. He joined the Artists’ Rifles in 1914, married Margaret Odeh in December that year, and was sent to the front two years later, where he made sketches and was exhilarated by the sense of purpose but was sent back with an injured rib before seeing action. The drawings brought him a commission to be an official war artist, like his brother John, but he returned to a very different war, at Ypres Salient. ‘I am no longer an artist’, he wrote in a (now notorious) letter; ‘I am a messenger to those who want the war to go on for ever . . . may it burn their lousy souls.’ He came under frequent shellfire and described the experience as ‘unspeakable, godless, hopeless . . . sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man’. When he returned home he painted in oil for the first time: dense, crowded and distinctly ungraceful images of a churned and ravaged landscape, where, especially in the bitterly titled ‘We Are Making a New World’, the sun rises innocently (the long white beams bisect the canvas) on scenes of devastation.”

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An amazing short video from Aeon on the dying language of whistles known as Silbo Gomero, which was once used throughout La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands.

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Essay of the Day:

One half of high-school seniors are not prepared for college? Why? Chester E. Finn, Jr. in National Affairs:

“Our schools create a fog when it comes to academic preparation for college success. Concerned more with inclusiveness, validation, and graduation than with college preparedness, administrators encourage teachers to, for instance, consider pupil effort in their grading, and push students to take advanced courses for which they have the ambition but not the readiness. Those in charge have their reasons, which mostly turn out to safeguard the interests of adults and their institutions, even as they wreak havoc with the next generation. None of this is acknowledged, however, save by a handful of would-be illuminators, for the education system has generally persuaded itself that this fog is better for kids than clarity would be.

“And the colleges themselves are complicit in this fraud, often for similar reasons. They admit students who they know are not adequately prepared to take on credit-bearing courses, and then require them to complete remedial classes to catch up. Most students who are required to take these ‘developmental’ courses never make it to classes that earn credit, and in time they leave school with nothing but debt and disillusion.

“If Hillary Clinton had her way, entry through the ivy gates would eventually become cost-free for almost everyone. Her campaign literature promised that, ‘By 2021, families with income up to $125,000 will pay no tuition at in-state four-year public colleges and universities. And from the beginning, every student from a family making $85,000 a year or less will be able to go to an in-state four-year public college or university without paying tuition.’ Moreover, ‘[a]ll community colleges will offer free tuition.’ This ‘free college’ plan, however, would do nothing to solve the problem that students aren’t able to do the work, and it would only inflate the number of ill-prepared students pursuing post-secondary degrees that they cannot achieve. (This plan is unlikely to be realized during the Trump administration.)

“Ambition and optimism are laudable traits. So is this country’s long tradition as a place of second chances, a land where you can always start over, compensate for past mistakes, choose a new direction, and find the educational path that takes you there. But at a certain point, encouragement becomes damaging. It’s time for our K-12 school system and our institutions of higher education to take responsibility for their complicity in a system that lies to millions of students and their families every year.”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Hamnoy

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Poem: Rob Griffith, “Stones”

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