Reviews and News:
Was Benjamin Franklin a "thorough deist"? Not exactly, says Thomas S. Kidd: "The pull of traditional faith grew stronger in the last decades of his long life. One reason for this was relational. His closest sibling, Jane (Franklin) Mecom, was an evangelical Christian who occasionally jousted with Franklin on topics such as salvation by God's grace alone. He also became close friends with George Whitefield, the premier evangelist of the Great Awakening of the mid-1700s. In fact, his relationship with Whitefield had started as a business association, because Franklin printed (and profited enormously from) Whitefield's writings and sermons. But over time, their relationship became closer, even though Whitefield reserved the right to question Franklin about the state of his soul. Franklin once even proposed to Whitefield that they should found a colony together in the Ohio territory, one that would be committed to Christian ethics, especially in its treatment of Native Americans. The weight of these relationships kept Franklin from going too far with espousing radical deism – he knew he would have to answer to Jane and George if he did."
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How Pixar lost its way.
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In praise of boredom.
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The power of the Sagrada Família: "When not working on his other buildings, Gaudí spent most of his time on the great Nativity façade of the Sagrada Família, as the first instalment of his ambition to create a language of architecture and faith which would reflect the alma of Spain. The Tragic Week in 1909, when churches and convents in Barcelona were burnt, graves desecrated and nuns raped, had a profound, cathartic effect on Gaudí. Thereafter, working exclusively on his expiatory temple for the rest of his life, he became obsessed with sin and suffering, went to confession daily and led an increasingly ascetic life. He devoted all his energies to his celestial city, his towering tree of God, as van Hensbergen aptly puts it, in pursuit of his vision of universal peace."
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Joseph Bottum on the morality of haggling: "The success of Quaker-owned department stores in the 19th century spread the practice of price tags to nearly all retail sales in America. (Excluding horse-trading—and the manners and morals of horse-lots would pass in turn to car dealerships, where buyers and sellers alike expect to bargain.) Moral concern drove the idea of openly displayed prices. Haggling was a species of lying: sellers dishonestly overvaluing their wares, and buyers dishonestly undervaluing them. The Friends were instructed to let their yea be yea and their nay be nay, using honest measures and holding to fixed prices. And thereby even the marketplace, the center of commerce, could be evangelized—freed from deceit and the cruelty of trying to get the better of other people. On the whole, I'd rather live in the Quakers' world than the hagglers' world."
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Revisiting the trail and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer: "The Duchy of Württemberg became the site of the trial of the 'court Jew' Joseph Süss Oppenheimer. He was a very wealthy and powerful figure, who served a number of princes in southwest Germany, most notably Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg, for whom he acted as financial adviser and master of the mint. Shortly after Carl Alexander's death in March 1737, Oppenheimer was arrested and accused of numerous crimes, including embezzlement, adultery, debasement of the coinage and treason. After months of imprisonment and interrogation, he was put on trial. He was found guilty and publicly hanged in Stuttgart on 4 February 1738. The life and death of Oppenheimer was portrayed in the single most notorious Nazi film, Jud Süss, a vivid and hideous anti-Semitic work that characterised him as greedy, lascivious and alien. It was directed by Veit Harlan and commissioned by Joseph Goebbels. After the war, in a web of lies and in a Germany full of ex-Nazis, Harlan denied contributing, through his film, to the massacre of the Jews of Europe. After all, he was just a film-maker and nothing more. In the denazification process he was tried for crimes against humanity and exonerated, but witnesses later accused him of doing everything possible to win the contract to make the film. He was accused again of war crimes but never punished. What really happened? Was Oppenheimer guilty? What was his trial like? The complexity of the story has led Yair Mintzker to adopt a very unusual technique. He calls his book 'a polyvocal, critical work of scholarship: a polyphonic history'. He provides four accounts, each with its own dedicated chapter, of the trial, examining the case in turn from the perspectives of four individuals connected with it."
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot writes about the overdose crisis in West Virginia and what locals are doing to fight it:
"In Berkeley County, which has a population of a hundred and fourteen thousand, when someone under sixty dies, and the cause of death isn't mentioned in the paper, locals assume that it was an overdose. It's becoming the default explanation when an ambulance stops outside a neighbor's house, and the best guess for why someone is sitting in his car on the side of the road in the middle of the afternoon. On January 18th, county officials started using a new app to record overdoses. According to this data, during the next two and a half months emergency medical personnel responded to a hundred and forty-five overdoses, eighteen of which were fatal. This underestimates the scale of the epidemic, because many overdoses do not prompt 911 calls. Last year, the county's annual budget for emergency medication was twenty-seven thousand dollars. Narcan, which costs fifty dollars a dose, consumed two-thirds of that allotment. The medication was administered two hundred and twenty-three times in 2014, and four hundred and three times in 2016.
"One Thursday in March, a few weeks before Michael Barrett responded to Angel Holt's overdose, I rode with him in his paramedic vehicle, a specially equipped S.U.V. He started his day as he often does, with bacon and eggs at the Olde Country Diner, in Martinsburg. Barrett, who is thirty-three, with a russet-colored beard and mustache, works two twenty-four-hour shifts a week, starting at 7 a.m. The diner shares a strip mall with the E.M.T. station, and, if he has to leave on a call before he can finish eating, the servers will box up his food in a hurry. Barrett's father and his uncles were volunteer firemen in the area, and, growing up, he often accompanied them in the fire truck. As they'd pull people from crumpled cars or burning buildings, he'd say to himself, 'Man, they doing stuff—they're awesome.' When Barrett became a paramedic, in his twenties, he knew that he could make a lot more money 'going down the road,' as people around here say, referring to Baltimore or Washington, D.C. But he liked it when older colleagues told him, 'I used to hold you at the fire department when you were a baby.'
"Barrett's first overdose call of the day came at 8 a.m., for a twenty-year-old woman. Several family members were present at the home, and while Barrett and his colleagues worked on her they cried and blamed one another, and themselves, for not watching her more closely. The woman was given Narcan, but she was too far gone; she died after arriving at the hospital."
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Photo: Shadowrise and sunset
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Poem: Caitlin Doyle, "Cradle Thief"
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