Reviews and News:
National Geographic‘s recent Gender Revolution issue is full of bad science and bad arguments.
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The number of visits to the Louvre were down 15% in 2016. The museum is blaming recent terrorists attacks for the decline.
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What should cathedrals do? “The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime is an essentially modern one, born of the eighteenth century. The earlier churches did not operate under either its romanticism or its hyperrationality. The medieval cathedrals could be beautiful, balanced in the vaults of their naves and transepts, while simultaneously sublime, unbalanced and messy in their scattered parts. The medieval cathedrals could convince us of both the human ability to perceive a universe of order and the human incapacity to grasp the essence of the divine. They could sublimely remind us that we are as nothing compared to God—and yet beautifully convince that we matter, that we are able to discern and even instantiate in architecture the structures of the well-ordered universe. The great cathedrals lift us up and cast us down in the same breath.”
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The dark history of the lobotomy: “Tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed in the United States from 1936 onwards, and both these men would continue operating for decades. Lobotomy’s inventor, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his pains in 1949. Major medical centres in the United States – Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania – regularly performed variations on the basic operation Freeman and his colleague James Watts first developed in 1936 (which involved drilling through the skull and then blindly severing portions of the frontal lobes with an instrument that resembled a butter knife, something they referred to without irony as a precision lobotomy), well into the 1950s. It has become fashionable in recent years among some medical historians to argue that the operation was not the medical horror story that popular culture portrays it as being. These scholars suggest that, seen in the context of the times, lobotomy was perhaps a defensible response to massively overcrowded mental hospitals and the therapeutic impotence of the psychiatry of the time. That is not my view, and Luke Dittrich’s book adds to evidence from elsewhere that Scoville, like Freeman, was a monster: ambitious, driven, self-centred and willing to inflict grave and irreversible damage on his patients in his search for fame. He certainly had no time for the Hippocratic injunction, ‘First, do no harm’.”
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In Case You Missed It:
Bach’s God: “Previous Bach scholarship tended to take a more secular tack. Many of us grew up with an Enlightenment Bach, a nondenominational divinity of mathematical radiance. Glenn Gould’s commentary on the “Goldberg Variations” spoke of a ‘fundamental coordinating intelligence.’ One German scholar went so far as to question the sincerity of Bach’s religious convictions. But the historically informed performance movement, in trying to replicate the conditions in which Bach’s works were first played, helped to restore awareness of his firm theological grounding.”
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The full horror of the Siege of Leningrad revealed: “Devastating eye-witness accounts of starvation and despair — long suppressed in Russia— finally see the light, thanks to Alexis Peri’s painstaking research”
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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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P. G. Wodehouse, sloshed.
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Classic Essay: Eva Brann, “The Permanent Part of College”
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Interview: Bill Kristol talks with Harvey Mansfield about how political philosophy can help us understand Trump
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