LONGEVITY: Drug that increases human lifespan to 200 years is in the works. “Taken in pill form, the drug would eliminate cells in the human body that are responsible for advancing the ageing process – potentially doubling our lifespan. But is this desirable?”
How Did The Romans Keep Wine From Going Bad In Their Amphorae? Like This.
Q & A: Julia Sherwood
At Radio Prague International Ruth Fraňková has a Q & A with Julia Sherwood on discovering Czech comics and on translating in tandem.
Martin Walser archive
German author Martin Walser -- now ninety-five years old -- handed over his literary estate to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, the national German Literary Archive, on Sunday. (German has the great term Vorlass for an estate that is handed over while the giver is still alive: an estate is a Nachlass -- essentially a 'left-behind' --; a Vorlass is a 'left-ahead'.)
The haul includes the diaries Walser has been keeping since 1958 -- 75 volumes, covering some 25,000 pages -- and there are a total of some 75,000 handwritten pages of writing. Also included: his private and working library, of some 7,800 volumes.
See also, for example, the SWR report.
Q & A: Arunava Sinha
At Firstpost. Chintan Girish Modi has a Q & A with Arunava Sinha: ‘You have to stand by the persecuted in a minority-majority situation’.
'Our Souls Were Near Ally’d'
Live long enough, nurture the human gift of friendship often enough, and you will know sadness and loss – yet another human paradox. Out of nowhere I felt the pang of missing Terry Teachout, who died in January. Like other powerful emotions, sadness metastasizes. From Terry I thought of David Myers, who died in 2014. They were critics who knew and respected each other. Each I met only once in person. Our friendships were largely digital, sometimes daily but no less real and important. Both confirm Dr. Johnson’s observation that “friends partake each other's pleasures as well as cares” and are “led to the same diversions by similitude of taste.” I thought of Dryden’s lines in “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham”:
“Farewell, too little and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own;
For sure our souls were near ally’d; and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorr’d alike:
To the same goal did both our studies drive,
The last set out the soonest did arrive.”
In his 1924 essay on Dryden, T.S. Eliot quotes the elegy in full and writes: “From the perfection of such an elegy we cannot detract; the lack of nebula is compensated by the satisfying completeness of the statement.”