The literary world is replete with works published posthumously. Jane Austen had two completed works published after she died, but there are many many others including Kafka, Tolkien and more recent giants like David Foster Wallace. In some cases, the writer had finished the work but time or some other reason resulted in its not being published in their lifetime. Austen’s two works are good examples. Northanger Abbey had been sold in 1803 to a publisher who never published it. It was bought back in 1816, and Austen worked further on it that year. Persuasion was completed that same year, which was the year of her death. Both were published months after her death through her brother. In other cases, as we discussed in last week’s post on unfinished works, writers specify that they don’t want their work published. Presumably, there are also cases where we just don’t know the creator’s thoughts.
Monday musings on Australian literature: Posthumous publishing
The Original Laptop? A Tiny Medieval Pipe Organ With Hand-Pumped Bellows
Cold War-era East Berlin had armed checkpoints — now Ottawa does too.
Xie, Y., Xu, E., Bowe, B. & Al-Aly, Z. Nature Med. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3 (2022). “Massive study shows a long-term, substantial rise in risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke, after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease. What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesityor diabetes. “It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, it doesn’t matter if you smoked, or you didn’t,” says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the chief of research and development for the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System. “The risk was there.” Al-Aly and his colleagues based their research on an extensive health-record database curated by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. The researchers compared more than 150,000 veterans who survived for at least 30 days after contracting COVID-19 with two groups of uninfected people: a group of more than five million people who used the VA medical system during the pandemic, and a similarly sized group that used the system in 2017, before SARS-CoV-2 was circulating…”
Scientific American: “Sometime in the next few weeks, the official death toll for the two-year COVID pandemic in the U.S. will reach one million. Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has continued to have the most COVID infections and deaths per country, by far, and it has the highest per capita death rate of any wealthy nation
Seventh child
By tradition, the president of Argentina is godparent to all seventh sons and seventh daughters born in the country; in Belgium, the seventh children are named after the reigning monarch, and that monarch also becomes their godparent.
Police launch investigation into Mick Fuller over racing interests
- by Lucy Cormack and Adam Pengilly
From the archives: Hackers
The second computer worm in history was created to seek and destroy the first computer worm; cracking encrypted messages with “gardening”; the man who hacked a lottery’s random number generator; and the single line of code that can shut down a computer.
AFP uncovers suspected Chinese spy’s alleged plot to smuggle military equipment
- by Nick McKenzie and Cloe Read
THE HIGH PRICE OF BEING RIGHT ABOUT COVID:
This past month, [Jennifer Sey was informed that it had become “untenable” for her to stay on at Levi’s. She was offered a $1 million severance package, but she refused to take it, knowing that if she did, she would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring her from speaking about why she was leaving the company.
She lost it all: her career, the chance to become Levi’s next CEO, which was well within her grasp, and the money she was owed — all because she questioned one aspect of the COVID narrative and refused to stay silent.
Here’s another example. Eric Flannery, a veteran who owns a burger joint in Washington, D.C., decided that he would not enforce the city’s vaccine mandate, which required all businesses to ask patrons to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 when officials implemented it last month. His reasoning was simple: “I’m not a government agent, and quite frankly, it’s not my job to check your personal medical history for you to come in,” he said. “I’m not a medical doctor. I don’t have any opinions on the vaccine. You should talk with your medical doctor and make an informed decision on your own and decide that.”
As a result, Flannery’s bar, the Big Board, was slapped with multiple fines, and its liquor license was revoked. Ultimately, Flannery was ordered to stop doing business altogether by the D.C. Health Department. And last Thursday, D.C.’s Assistant Attorney General Anthony Celo demanded that D.C.’s Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration make its suspension of the Big Board’s liquor license permanent, arguing its “continued operation places the community at risk.”
Just four days later, D.C. announced it would lift the vaccine mandate.
- Isaiah Berlin by Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy.
- Plato by Richard Kraut.
- Bruno Bauer by Douglas Moggach.
IEP ∅
- Referring to the World: An Opinionated Introduction to the Theory of Reference by Kenneth Taylor is reviewed by Mark Sainsbury.
- Hope Under Oppression by Katie Stockdale is reviewed by Céline Leboeuf.
- Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals by Timothy Williamson is reviewed by Malte Willer.
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media ∅
- Unconditional Equals by Anne Phillips is reviewed by Teresa M. Bejan at Boston Review.
- Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman is reviewed by Andrew Anthony at The Guardianand by John Walsh at The Times.
- The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscomble, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin Lipscombe is reviewed by Kate Manne at The Times Literary Supplement and by Anil Gomes at The Guardian.
- Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David Chalmers is reviewed by Jess Keiser at The Washington Post.
- The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (translated from the French by Richard Philcox, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, a foreword by Homi K. Bhabha, and an introduction by Cornel West) is reviewed by Kwame Anthony Appiah at New York Review of Books.
- Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids by Scott Hershovitz is reviewed at Publisher’s Weekly.