How To Pretend That You Are Smart

“They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

Derek Walcott’s New Yorks. His were the off-Broadway scene of the '50s, the Shakespeare Festival in the ’70s, the west village of the 90

The poet Fernando Pessoa published little, and usually under other names. Only after his death did the scope of his genius become clear 

Satellites Reveal Hidden Colonies of Emperor Penguins We Never Knew ExistedScience Alert

New study links marijuana to cardiovascular disease — but it’s not all bad news Salon

 

PolitiFact’s Daniel Funke with “Why False Claims About Nancy Pelosi Being Drunk Keep Going Viral — Even Though She Doesn’t Drink.”

Finally, Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark has praise for the semicolon

How To Pretend That You Are SmartCurrent Affairs

As you can all can see from her new picture, Granny is now wearing a mask in accordance with health advice for septuagenarians, and so is particularly grateful for all suggestions as to how to prevent the fogging-up of spectacles (C8). Adding to yesterday's offerings, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki of Maroubra offers his own method for keeping his swimming goggles unfogged. "I layer about 5 mm of water into one lens of my swimming goggles, add a single drop of hair shampoo, rub the inside of the lens with my finger for about 10 seconds, transfer the water/shampoo mix to the other lens, repeat, and rinse both lenses with running water for about 10 seconds. This gives me 45 minutes of fog-free swimming. I have to repeat this each day. This technique should work with regular eyeglasses."

• McWhorter and the Harper's letter
• Van Gogh's last painting
• Beethoven myths
• Culture in the Third Reich
• Food in paintings
• Drinking while writing
• On cemeteries
• In praise of pop smut
• In search of Hans Holbein
• Self-cancellation of Bari Weiss

Those who rely on social media for news are less likely to get the facts right about the coronavirus and politics and more likely to hear some unproven claims. The rise of social media has changed the information landscape in myriad ways, including the manner in which many Americans keep up with current events. In fact, social media is now among the most common pathways where people – particularly young adults – get their political news. A new Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted between October 2019 and June 2020 finds that those who rely most on social media for political news stand apart from other news consumers in a number of ways. These U.S. adults, for instance, tend to be less likely than other news consumers to closely follow major news stories, such as the coronavirus outbreak and the 2020 presidential election. And, perhaps tied to that, this group also tends to be less knowledgeable about these topics. Through several surveys over the last nine months, the Center’s American News Pathways project has been exploring the connection between Americans’ news habits and what they hear and perceive about current events

Warsaw poet Julia Hartwig: “You never know when you need to pull out your pen and stop being silent.” | The Book Haven.

I regret that my volume American Poems (2002) is relatively unknown. I don’t know why this is, because my other books have been much discussed, and this one has been left a bit aside. Perhaps I’m wrong, because during one of my last meetings at the PEN Club I read a few poems from it and the listeners bought out the stock immediately. American Poems amused them, because there is a lot of humor, light, greenery, the city, and at the same time a some healthy nostalgia. It describes people, Americans, who interested me immensely. This collection expresses all my affection for America.

135,000 Britons now face the AXE amid fear of ‘economic Armageddon’ as day after day the Covid jobs bloodbath takes its devastating toll Daily Mail 

Orlando Figes, The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture.  The three lives are Turgenev, his mistress Pauline Viardot, and the husband of his mistress, Louis Viardot, a noted financier and activist.  Consistently interesting, even if you are not looking to read about those three particular figures.

 John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World.  Although it has a stereotypically bad subtitle, this is an excellent book.  It clarifies exactly where the Freemasons came from (dissident thought connected to James II), its connection to actual masons, how the movement got routed through Scotland, its prominence to the Enlightenment, its African-American component (Martin Delany), how it influenced Joseph Smith and Mormonism, why Castro tolerated it and the Shah of Iran encouraged it, and much more.  Not in the book, but did you know that the Freemasons claim Shaquille O’Neal?  Shaq confirms.

Callum Williams, The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives.  A clear, well-written, and useful introduction to the lives and thought of some of the leading classical economists.  The “unusual picks,” by the way, are Harriet Martineau, Rosa Luxemburg, and Dadabhai Naoroji.  The author is a senior economics writer for The Economist.

Michael Hunter, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment.  “Though it is often thought that the scientists of the early Royal Society tested magic and found it wanting, this is a misconception.  In fact, the society avoided the issue because its members’ views on the subject were so divided, and it was only in retrospect that this silence was interpreted as judgmental.”

Forthcoming from Marc Levinson, the author of The Box, is a new book Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas, a more general history of globalization.