Reviews and News:
Should Shakespeare be translated into modern English? Columbia linguist John McWhorter thinks so: "He argues that it is time to stop pretending that we can easily absorb 16th-century English — 'We cannot understand what the man is saying' — and that we should use contemporary English translations. Few support McWhorter in public, but more do in private. The specialist Shakespearean director John Bell told me 10 years ago, 'It is obvious the long-term future of Shakespeare on stage must be in modern-English translations.'" (HT: Lindsay Swaim)
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Things famous writers didn't write: "How fitting that the man often credited with saying 'a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes' most likely did not invent the phrase. Commonly attributed to Mark Twain, that quotation instead appears to be a descendant of a line published centuries ago by the satirist Jonathan Swift."
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A history of the cross as religious symbol and art: "A hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Cicero declared that 'the very word cross should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts'." How did it change "into an image thought suitable viewing for all ages in public art galleries?"
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"A study of remains found in southern California puts an unknown human species in the New World more than 100,000 years earlier than expected." Some specialists are skeptical.
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Upload a selfie to Quebec's Musée de la Civilisation's website and find out if you have an ancient sculptural doppelgänger: "Facial recognition software will analyze individual details and compare them to those of 2,000-year-old statues. It will then match you with an ancient doppelgänger, and if you think you closely resemble your chosen sculpture, you can enter a contest to be one of 30 individuals the museum will highlight in the fall show."
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Consumer ebook sales drop 17% in the UK as readers return to print: "It is the second year running that sales of consumer ebooks – the biggest segment of the £538m ebook market, which fell 3% last year – have slumped as commuters, holidaymakers and leisure readers shelve digital editions in favour of good old fashioned print novels."
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Is every guy who reads David Foster Wallace an asshole? Here's a Venn diagram to help answer this important question.
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The accomplishment of Les Misérables rightly understood.
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Essay of the Day:
In Public Discourse, Donald L. Drakeman revisits Abraham Flexner's essay on the usefulness of useless knowledge:
"Deep into the Great Depression, and only weeks after Hitler invaded Poland, Harper's Magazine published Abraham Flexner's surprising homage to two increasingly unpopular ideas: intellectual freedom and useless knowledge. Universities in some parts of the world had become what he called 'tools of . . . a special political, economic or racial creed,' while others were focusing on practical education such as engineering, technology, and the professions. Flexner set off in a completely different direction with the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where members would endure no faculty meetings, suffer no committees, supervise no students, and, ultimately, have, as he put it to one potential recruit, 'no duties—only opportunities.'
"World-renowned scholars, lured by those opportunities, and, for some, fleeing the dire consequences of intolerance, found a new academic home in its three loosely titled 'schools' of mathematics, humanistic studies, and economics and politics. These academics included such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, John von Neumann, Erwin Panofsky, and a host of others.
"All of these opportunities for intellectual inquiry free of goals, metrics, deliverables, and assessments were not designed simply to celebrate uselessness for its own sake. To the contrary, Flexner argued that curiosity-driven research, the 'pursuit of . . . useless satisfactions,' will be 'the source from which undreamed-of utility is derived.' Flexner was remarkably prescient. This unprecedented freedom for scholars such as Einstein and von Neumann to pursue apparently useless knowledge ultimately 'enabled the nuclear and digital revolutions,' as current Institute director Robbert Dijkgraaf points out in his accompanying 'World of Tomorrow' essay in Princeton University Press's republication of Flexner's lively, powerful, and surprisingly timely essay: The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge."
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Photo: The Tatras
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Poem: Susan de Sola, "Frozen Charlotte"
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