Reviews and News:
Why won't Patricia Cornwell stop hunting Jack the Ripper? "The writer has spent two decades and $6 million trying to prove that Victorian London's most notorious murderer was Walter Sickert."
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Camille Paglia contra mundum: Her target in a new collection of essays is "the return of 'the plague of political correctness and assaults on free speech that erupted in the 1980s.'"
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A handful of protestors at the Whitney Biennial want a painting of a black teenager removed because it was done by a white woman: "On Friday, the 2017 Whitney Biennial opened to the public and protesters showed up to physically block and voice their objections to 'Open Casket' (2016), a painting of Emmett Till by Dana Schutz. According to protesters Parker Bright and Pastiche Lumumba —New York-based artists who went to the Whitney on opening day independently, meeting there for the first time — a white artist should not be permitted to use and profit from the image of a black man killed in a racially motivated crime."
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Flannery O'Connor and the way of violence: "O'Connor had a genuine understanding of the way that the human being soul grows only by violence, by the hardships we endure and overcome."
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Josef Pieper on tradition and culture: "The essays and speeches in this collection address topics ranging from the nature of hope to the poems of Boethius. A common theme of these pieces is the need to clarify the nature of tradition and how to transmit it through time."
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What should dictionaries do? Kory Stamper argues that they are not arbiters of truth but catalogs of the way words are actually used.
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Essay of the Day:
Philosophy has become too insular, argues Luciano Floridi in The New Atlantis. It talks "about itself to itself in its own jargon." Instead it should focus on real problems, like information:
"Since the Nineties, I have been arguing that we have reached one of those moments — a turning point in our history. The epochal transition from an analogue to a digital world and the rapid development of information technologies are changing every aspect of our lives: education, work, and entertainment; communication, business, and commerce; love, hate, and anything in between; politics, conflicts, and peace; culture, health, and even how we remember the dead. All this and more is being relentlessly transformed by technologies that have the recording, transmission, and processing of information as their core functions.
"As information technologies come to affect all areas of life, they are becoming implicated in our most important problems — their causes, effects, and solutions, the scientific investigations aimed at explaining them, the concepts created to understand them, the means of discussing them, and even, as in the case of Bill Gates, the wealth required to tackle them.
"Furthermore, information technologies don't just modify how we act in the world; they also profoundly affect how we understand the world, how we relate to it, how we see ourselves, how we interact with each other, and how our hopes for a better future are shaped. All these are old philosophical issues, of course, but we must now consider them anew, with the concept of information as a central concern.
"This means that if philosophers are to help enable humanity to make sense of our world and to improve it responsibly, information needs to be a significant field of philosophical study. Among our mundane and technical concepts, information is currently not only one of the most important and widely used, but also one of the least understood. We need a philosophy of information."
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Photo: Mount Etna eruption from space
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Poem: Ernest Hilbert, "Recessional"
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