America from the outside: James Poulos reviews a book on what four famous foreign critics (Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G.K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb) thought of our little experiment.
A life of an American saint: “In a damp, cold quarantine station in Italy, a woman nurses her dying husband. The year is 1803, and the woman, 29-year-old Elizabeth Ann Seton, struggles to pray. ‘My eyes smart so much with crying, wind and fatigue that I must close them and lift up my heart,’ she writes in her journal. The family’s voyage from their home in New York, meant to relieve William Seton’s tuberculosis, has only brought him to death’s door. As their young daughter looks on, Elizabeth spends ‘the night listening for her husband’s breath and “kiss[ing] his poor face to feel if it [is] cold.”’ Finally, William, after whispering ‘May Christ Jesus have mercy and receive me,’ draws his last breath. Nine years after she married the man she called her ‘beloved treasure,’ Elizabeth faces financial ruin, the rearing of five fatherless children—and religious uncertainty. This is not the only tragedy that Elizabeth Seton would endure. Hers was a time of war, economic crisis, and ravaging disease, and each of these would touch her life. Yet she would found the Sisters of Charity. She would create a forerunner of the parochial school system. And she would become the first American-born Catholic saint.”
Are musicians superior thinkers? Perhaps: “In recent years, many studies have concluded that musical training enhances brain function. The goal of this new research was to confirm that link using the National Institute of Health’s Toolbox Cognition Battery, a standardized set of tests that measure the key cognitive functions that together constitute fluid intelligence. These include focus, processing speed, working memory (the ability to temporarily retain information and use it to learn, reason, or make informed decisions), and executive function (the ability to plan, organize, and accomplish goals).”
But some of them are also, like Robert Schumann, “hopeless romantics.”
How’s that HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels? Nick Burns: unsophisticated. The Economist: superficial. The Guardian: PERFECT. BEAUTIFUL.
The ACLU declines to defend civil liberties: “Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.”
Essay of the Day:
In the New Yorker, Sam Knight explains what proteins on ancient objects can tell us about the past:
“In October, 2010, an Italian religious historian named Alberto Melloni stood over a small cherrywood box in the reading room of the Laurentian Library, in Florence. The box was old and slightly scuffed, and inked in places with words in Latin. It had been stored for several centuries inside one of the library’s distinctive sloping reading desks, which were designed by Michelangelo. Melloni slid the lid off the box. Inside was a yellow silk scarf, and wrapped in the scarf was a thirteenth-century Bible, no larger than the palm of his hand, which was falling to pieces.
“The Bible was ‘a very poor one,’ Melloni told me recently. ‘Very dark. Very nothing.’ But it had a singular history. In 1685, a Jesuit priest who had travelled to China gave the Bible to the Medici family, suggesting that it had belonged to Marco Polo, the medieval explorer who reached the court of Kublai Khan around 1275. Although the story was unlikely, the book had almost certainly been carried by an early missionary to China and spent several centuries there, being handled by scholars and mandarins—making it a remarkable object in the history of Christianity in Asia.
“Melloni is the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences, an institute in Bologna dedicated to the history of the Church. He had heard of the Marco Polo Bible, but he was unaware of its poor condition until a colleague spotted the crumbling book at an exhibition at the library, in 2008, and pitched a project to restore it and find out more about its past. ‘It was like a sort of Cinderella among the beautiful sisters,’ Melloni said. Like other people accustomed to handling old texts or precious historical objects, Melloni has a special regard for what Walter Benjamin called their aura: “a strange weave of space and time” that allows for an intimation of the world in which they were made. ‘You have in your hand the manuscript,’ Melloni said. ‘But also the stories that the manuscript is carrying.’
“The restoration took eighteen months. Ten thousand pieces of the Bible were reassembled. In the process, Melloni was determined to subject the document to the latest scientific analysis. ‘We should do on this Bible the type of thing that would be done on the Mona Lisa,’ Melloni told his colleagues. He contacted the cultural-heritage center at the Polytechnic University of Milan, the largest scientific school in Italy, to ask advice. In addition to standard conservation tools, like ultraviolet photography and infrared spectroscopy, which is used to study pigments, the experts there suggested proteomics. ‘It was the first time I heard the word “proteomic” in my life,’ Melloni recalled.
“Proteomics is the study of the interaction of proteins in living things. Where genomics studies humans’ roughly twenty thousand genes, proteomics is concerned with the shifting array of proteins assembled by those genes—our biological content, more or less, from albumin, which makes up sixty per cent of our blood proteins, to beta-amyloid, a family of brain molecules that can be a potential sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Proteomics aims for completeness. The proteome of a single human cell, which might contain billions of proteins, is sometimes compared to an atlas. It can guide geneticists or drug companies to early markers of a disease, or to the precise mechanism of aging, or to promising targets for cancer treatment. The field has been made possible by spectacular advances in data analysis and in lab instruments, which become cheaper and more powerful each year. Top-of-the-line mass spectrometers now allow chemists to sort through thousands of types of proteins in a sample, and to study them, one molecule at a time.”
Photo: Paradise, California
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