Reviews and News:
The Bible makes the American Library Association’s list of “Frequently Challenged Books” for the first time. It came in at number six, right after The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.
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Revisiting Robert Penn Warren’s prescient All the Kings Men: “It remains a salty, living thing. There’s no need for literary or political pundits to bring in the defibrillators. It is also eerily prescient, in its portrait of the rise of a demagogue, about some of the dark uses to which language has been put in this year’s election.”
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Christopher Hitchens’s faith: “Hitchens was also a contrarian to himself. His public persona was contradicting the conventional views he found all around him, conventional believers and unbelievers both, but that public persona was also contradicting a much more reflective Christopher, one who was considering certain ultimate questions much more carefully than he could afford to let on. As Peter Hitchens once told me, the reason Christopher’s city walls were so heavily armed, bristling with weaponry, was that if you ever got past those walls there were no defenses from there to the city center.”
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An adventurous Emily Dickinson. She wasn’t “‘the eccentric, quivering, overstrung recluse’ that Deborah Solomon writes about in her 1997 biography of Cornell, nor was she trapped in her Amherst prison-house.”
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Anthony Hecht and Shakespeare: “Not even the Bible quite rivals the Bard as a continual source for subjects and allusions, from Hecht’s juvenilia to his final poems.”
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Delightful, old, and cruel nursery rhymes
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Is “the Hum”—a mysterious noise heard around the world—real or a delusion?
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How the British surveillance agency GCHQ prevented a pirated copy of J. K. Rowling’s Half-Blood Prince from being published online.
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Essay of the Day:
At the beginning of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE, Emperor Qin Shi Huang burned books and killed Chinese scholars in order “to stamp out ideological nonconformity.” According to Ian Johnson, “all our knowledge of China’s great philosophical schools was limited to texts revised after the Qin unification.” That is, until a recent discovery changed everything:
“As Beijing prepared to host the 2008 Olympics, a small drama was unfolding in Hong Kong. Two years earlier, middlemen had come into possession of a batch of waterlogged manuscripts that had been unearthed by tomb robbers in south-central China. The documents had been smuggled to Hong Kong and were lying in a vault, waiting for a buyer.
“Universities and museums around the Chinese world were interested but reluctant to buy. The documents were written on hundreds of strips of bamboo, about the size of chopsticks, that seemed to date from 2,500 years ago, a time of intense intellectual ferment that gave rise to China’s greatest schools of thought. But their authenticity was in doubt, as were the ethics of buying looted goods. Then, in July, an anonymous graduate of Tsinghua University stepped in, bought the soggy stack, and shipped it back to his alma mater in Beijing.
“University administrators acted boldly. They appointed China’s most famous historian, seventy-five-year-old Li Xueqin, to head a team of experts to study the strips. On July 17, the researchers gingerly placed the slips in enamel basins filled with water, hoping to duplicate the environment that had allowed the fibrous material to survive so long.
“The next day, disaster struck. Horrified team members noticed that the thin strips had already started developing black spots—fungus that within a day could eat a hole through the bamboo. Administrators convened a crisis meeting, and ordered the school’s top chemistry professors to save the slips.
“Over the following weeks, the scientists worked nonstop through the eerily empty campus—the students were on vacation, and everyone else was focused on the Olympic Green just a few miles east. With the nation on high alert for the games, security officers blocked the scientists from bringing stabilizing chemicals into the locked-down capital. But the university again put its weight behind the project, convincing leaders that the strips were a national priority. By the end of the summer, Professor Li and his team had won their prize: a trove of documents that is helping to reshape our understanding of China’s contentious past.”
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Image of the Day: 1906 San Francisco earthquake
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Poem: Derek Mahon, “The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush”
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