Reviews and News:
In defense of self-help books: “Mill viewed most people most of the time as simply conforming, ‘ape-like,’ to prescribed roles and life plans, and living lives more or less bound by the confines of family, faith, community, custom, and tradition. He took for granted a social world in which such a nestled existence could take place. That world, if never quite so determinative, has progressively vanished. And self-help books are both an indication of its disappearance and, critically, a response to it.”
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Anthony Esolen on how politics is ruining college students: “You are discussing with another student Augustine’s tribute to his mother, Monica. It may be the first literary tribute to an ordinary woman—not a queen, not an object of erotic desire—in the history of the world. The student is upset. She has been taught that the lot of women from time immemorial was simply and unrelievedly oppressive, and she is disappointed to find something that does not fit the political template.”
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The student union at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) demands that all white philosophers be removed from the curriculum: “The student union at SOAS…stated that ‘decolonising’ the university and ‘confronting the white institution’ is one of its priorities for the academic year. It said that ‘white philosophers’ should be studied only ‘if required’, adding that their work should be taught solely from a ‘critical standpoint’. ‘For example, acknowledging the colonial context in which so-called “Enlightenment” philosophers wrote within.'”
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What happened to the Constitution? “Rule by executive command and administrative agencies has resulted in a decline of the rule of law in the United States. Odd, extratextual interpretations of the United States Constitution have dislocated its content from the common understandings of reasonably prudent Americans. The Progressive Era facilitated a shift in our approach to law that was qualitatively different from the teachings of checks-and-balances, decentralization, separation-of-powers, and other such doctrines alive in the minds of our Founders, even those like Hamilton and the young Madison (as against the later Madison) who favored a strong national government. Consequently, we have found ourselves in a crisis of constitutional morality, there being little institutional and systemic accountability to curb the broad powers of bureaucracy, reckless and unelected federal judges, a delegating congress beholden to lobbyists and corporations, and the expansion of executive privilege, prerogative, and patronage.”
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The Modern Language Association (MLA) rejects call to boycott Israel.
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The one book every music lover should read: “On every page of this book there is something—a memory, an observation, a wry description—that will make music fans smile. I say ‘fans’ because it is hard to imagine that anyone who doesn’t have opinions about Robert Crumb’s cover art for the second Big Brother and the Holding Company LP—an eyesore—or the relative merits of Judy Collins’s mid-’60s concept albums—they’re brilliant—will get very far. Part-history, part-criticism, part-memoir, Love for Sale is too familiarly written and discursively organized to be an overview of what, Hajdu, the music critic for the Nation and a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, reluctantly calls ‘popular music.’ It is to a more conventionally authoritative all-purpose pop history what Odds & Sods is to Who’s Better, Who’s Best: digressive, self-indulgent, and vastly more amusing.”
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Sixteenth-century boxwood miniatures.
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The first round of France’s presidential election takes place in April. What will happen?
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Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Hugh Eakin explains why Sweden is so important in the fight against hacking:
“On April 24, 2013, just weeks before Edward Snowden went public with his leaks about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, General Keith B. Alexander, then the head of the NSA, welcomed a group of Swedish intelligence officials to a secret three-day meeting at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. In the delegation were Ingvar Åkesson, the longtime director of Sweden’s National Defense Radio Establishment (known as the FRA, for Försvarets radioanstalt), a shadowy Swedish government intelligence agency, and five members of Åkesson’s senior staff. One of the aims of the meeting was to discuss Sweden’s growing importance to the NSA.
“In a 2008 law, the FRA had been given expansive powers by the Swedish government to vacuum up all communications traveling over fiber optic networks into and out of Sweden—including e-mails, text messages, and telephone calls. This was of great interest to the NSA, not least because a large percentage of Russian communications traveled through Sweden. In 2011, the Swedes began sharing their surveillance data with the NSA, which included—as NSA officials described it at the time of the meeting—a ‘unique collection [of communications data] on high-priority Russian targets such as leadership, internal politics, and energy.’
“Noting the Swedish spy agency’s unusual technical abilities and reputation for secrecy, NSA officials also viewed it as an ideal collaborator on its hacking and cyberwarfare project, called Quantum.”
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Image of the Day: Drazovce
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Poem: Marina Tsvetaeva, “So You Will Never Find Me”
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