Reviews and News:
Strapped for cash, the Iraqi government plans to turn Saddam Hussein’s palace in Basra into a museum.
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When pianist André Tchaíkowsky died in 1982, he donated his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company to be used in performances. In a 2008 production of Hamlet, he was Yorick. Not every cranium donor has been so lucky.
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Salvador Dalí’s Zionist paintings: “The paintings were commissioned by Shorewood Publishers in 1967 for the 20th anniversary of the state of Israel. The set is comprised of 25 mixed-media paintings highlighting important religious, historic and political moments in Jewish history.” (HT: Mosaic)
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The Bible may be increasingly challenged in America, but it may also be older than some modern scholars thought.
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Peter Maxwell Davies’s dead-end modernism: “By leaving the public behind modernists pushed music into a cul-de-sac, the only way out of which has been a headlong rush into superficial soft-harmony.”
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Stephen Owen spent 8 years translating the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu. The result is a “3,000-page, six-volume book that weighs in at nine pounds.”
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The Post-Surrealist master: “The art of the Southern California painter Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) is nothing if not clear, and she was nothing if not clear about it: ‘My aim, realized or not,’ she said in 1942, ‘is to calculate, and reconsider, every element in a painting with regard to its function in the whole organization. That, I believe, is the classic attitude.'”
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A re-issued Renaissance English Poetry is for writers, not scholars: “This anthology first came out in 1963, and, as Robert Pinsky says in his introduction, it soon becomes clear that it is a writer’s book, as opposed to an academic’s. The subtitle may be somewhat dry – A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson – though the poems themselves are anything but. This is a labour of love, not an exercise in scholarship and canon-building.”
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Essay of the Day:
In First Things, William A. Wilson takes a look at why the results of a surprising number of scientific studies turn out to be invalid:
“The problem with science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.
“Their findings made the news, and quickly became a club with which to bash the social sciences. But the problem isn’t just with psychology. There’s an unspoken rule in the pharmaceutical industry that half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer decided to test it. Looking at sixty-seven recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, they found that in more than 75 percent of cases the published data did not match up with their in-house attempts to replicate. These were not studies published in fly-by-night oncology journals, but blockbuster research featured in Science, Nature, Cell, and the like. The Bayer researchers were drowning in bad studies, and it was to this, in part, that they attributed the mysteriously declining yields of drug pipelines. Perhaps so many of these new drugs fail to have an effect because the basic research on which their development was based isn’t valid.”
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Image of the Day: Cornelius Claesz van Wieringen, “The Explosion of the Spanish Flagship during the Battle of Gibraltar”
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Poem: Sally Thomas, “To the Child Who Asks”
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