NY Times Op-Ed: What Mary Can Teach Us About The Joy And Pain Of Life
The Forward op-ed: Is the Christmas Tree a Religious Symbol? What About a Menorah?, by Michael A. Helfand (Pepperdine):
America in the midst of our holiday season — a time for family, rest and hotly contested litigation over religious displays on government The Forward op-ed: Is the Christmas Tree a Religious Symbol? What About a Menorah?, by Michael A. Helfand (Pepperdine):
America in the midst of our holiday season — a time for family, rest and hotly contested litigation over religious displays on government property. ......
“It is impossible to write tragedy without a sense of humor. Humor lights up dark literature, like Rembrandt’s underpainting. Without it the work is merely heavy, turgid. Make ’em laugh before you make ’em cry. Shakespeare does this deftly — the gatekeeper’s scene in Macbeth, the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet. How smoothly Stravinsky does it in the Firebird Suite.
Sibelius lifts your spirits before laying that tragic trombone melody on you in the Seventh Symphony. It is irony, mockery even, that makes Lorenz Hart the greater lyricist than Oscar Hammerstein. “My Funny Valentine” -- Hammerstein could never have conceived such a thought. Without an inner humor, tragic art becomes like the pathetic you-gotta-hear-my-story lapel-grabbing of a barroom drunk. Here is one of the distinguishing differences between Tchaikovsky and Mozart. Mozart’s restraint in sorrow makes his music only the more poignant. And Paul had that kind of elegance.”
Humor Lights Up Dark Literature'
Bitcoin price: Three words from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey gives crypto major boost
Three simple words from a billionaire propelled bitcoin to a higher price than it’s been for a month after a horror six weeks.
For his series Vanishing Spirits: The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch, photographer Ernie Buttons photographed the creatively lit bottoms of glasses emptied of their single malt Scotch whisky. The results look like alien worlds.
These remind me a lot of Christopher Jonassen’s frying pan worlds and Nadine Schlieper’s & Robert Pufleb’s photos of pancakes that look like moons. (via moss & fog)
This biography of King George III is a new and excellent book by Andrew Roberts, who also wrote a great biography of Napoleon. The subtitle of this one is The Misunderstood Reign of George III, and here is one excerpt:
The war was not unwinnable for the British, but they helped to make it so by refusing to change their basic military doctrine and almost anything fundamental at home, in terms of finances, commercial arrangements, conscription and tax levels. Had Germain possessed the concentration of powers that William Pitt had enjoyed during the Seven Years War, he might have imposed his will on the whole governmental structure, but an overdevolving of competencies between ministries was rife for the first two years of the struggle. Until 1777, for example, the responsibility for transporting men and their supplies across the Atlantic was divided between the Ordnance Board (responsible for artillery, engineers, guns and gun powder), the Navy Board (men, horses, uniforms, tents, medicine and camp equipment) and the Victualling Board (food), the Treasury being responsible for all other supplies. This inevitably led to vast amounts of bureaucracy; Germain and Barrington even corresponded over the selection of a single doctor for Howe’s command. This Whitehall system of waging war had been successful in the Seven Years War at a distance of over 3,000 miles across the ocean, but this was to be much harder without a single leader like Pitt; indeed it has been described as ‘an effort without parallel in the history of the world.’
The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight, despite what professors of “Great Books” courses may claim ... great books …
Tom Stoppard’s politics: He opposed trade unions, supported the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and ignored boycotts of apartheid South Africa Tom of Politics
THE STUDY WAS PERFORMED BY SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, SO DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS: Brain surgeons and rocket scientists are no smarter than the rest of us: study.
The History of that Controversial Song "Baby, It's Cold Outside"
The Soviets turned the Volga into a machine. Then the machine broke.
- A bust of the late Ágnes Heller has been installed at the European Parliament in Brussels — the hungarian philosopher was known for her work in politics and political theory, social, and moral philosophy, aesthetics, and other subjects,
- “Rather than asking about the criteria for rightness, I think a more neutral starting point would ask: What does the moral theory hold to be most important?” — Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) thinks “importance,” not “rightness” should be the central concept of normative ethics
- “Many women who desperately want to abort would also desperately prefer to raise the child if forced to carry their pregnancy to term” — Elizabeth Harman (Princeton) on one way Justice Amy Coney Barrett is wrong about abortion
- Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at 50 — audio from the recent conference at the University of Virginia School of Law
- The humanities and virtual reality — three open, online sessions later this week put from the Virginia Philosophy Reality Lab
- “They did a lot to break the grip of an orthodoxy that makes important things unsayable” — Ben Lipscomb (Houghton) interviewed about his recent work on Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch
- “Those of us concerned with identifying and combating systemic racism would do well to avoid over-simplified formulations that privilege one explanatory factor at the exclusion of another” — Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State Univ.) takes up some confusions regarding racism
Ian Urbina, media mogul. Why is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist suddenly at war with a crowd of musicians?
The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight, despite what professors of “Great Books” courses may claim
Can a survey of philosophers’ views indicate the truth of philosophical ideas? Or does it yield just misleadingly tidy data points?