Reviews and News:
Christ's tomb exposed for the first time in centuries: The tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which, according to tradition, is held to be the burial place of Jesus Christ "has been covered by marble cladding since at least 1555 A.D., and most likely centuries earlier…The exposure of the burial bed is giving researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study the original surface of what is considered the most sacred site in Christianity. An analysis of the original rock may enable them to better understand not only the original form of the tomb chamber, but also how it evolved as the focal point of veneration since it was first identified by Helena, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, in A.D. 326."
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The surprising Kenneth Clark: "It is well known that his family's wealth came from the development of English cotton and the invention of the cotton spool: four generations back James Clark and his brothers had built the enormous factory that established Paisley as a world leader in the manufacture of cotton thread. Few people are given, as the young Kenneth was, a hotel on Cap Martin, near Menton, when they come of age. No doubt the security of wealth was a factor in what seemed to many his supremely patrician stance, made familiar through numerous photographs, including that of him aged 30 as the youngest-ever Director of the National Gallery, and later through his television appearances, most memorably in the 13 BBC Two programmes that constituted Civilisation. Yet the life of this inscrutable man was riddled with contradictions and paradoxes."
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Slavoj Žižek's work "is a blur of non-sequiturs and weighty quotations."
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A history of Marshalsea Debtors' Prison: It "was a byword for barbarism, [but] some inmates had the time of their lives — smoking, carousing and playing shuttlecock."
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Philippe Soupault: "My strange friend, Marcel Proust."
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An anecdotal history of television: "For Thomson's generation, growing up in an anxious world after 1945, television served as a communal pacifier. It was a domestic appliance, which assured us that we'd be safe at home. Sitcoms about suburban bliss devised spurious problems that could be solved within half an hour; laugh tracks coaxed us into agreement, while every few minutes commercials touted the brands of deodorant or detergent that would sanitise and sanctify our happy, affluent lives."
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Essay of the Day:
In The Public Doman Review, Nandini Das revisits Richard Hakluyt's The Principle Navigations and its importance for English colonization:
"Richard Hakluyt (1553–November 23, 1616), the orphaned second son of a Welsh family that had settled in Hertfordshire a few generations ago and supported in his studies through the benevolence of the state and guild scholarships, was introduced to the wonders of geography as a young boy through the chance glimpse of 'an universal Mappe' lying on the desk of his older cousin and guardian. Later, Hakluyt would tell the story of how that impromptu lesson in the new advances in geography had ended with the Bible; his cousin and namesake, Richard Hakluyt Senior, had called upon the verses of Psalm 107, that speak of those who 'go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.' It was a claim that would have rung true for Hakluyt, growing up at a time when the expansion of European influence and trade across the world was well under way.
"Elsewhere in Europe, a roll-call of great names that would become familiar to schoolchildren in ages to come had been accumulating for some time, from Marco Polo's late thirteenth-century expeditions to China, to Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India and the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World in the late fifteenth century, but those figures and narratives were merely indicative of a significantly wider surge of global awareness within Europe. English participation in that great surge, however, as an older and wiser Hakluyt would come to realise, was piecemeal, under-funded, and disorganised. English seafaring expertise was not in short supply; if the exploits of Hakluyt's contemporaries like Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Humphrey Gilbert himself were not enough to prove their credentials, the English victory over the Spanish Armada campaign of 1588 — albeit with significant assistance from bad weather and bad tactics on the part of the Spanish — was testimony enough. But the Armada also illuminated the problems that plagued English seafaring and its future. The English fleet was an extemporary mixture of vessels, with the navy reinforced by hired and volunteer merchantmen and boats that were often better furnished and victualled than the notoriously ill-furnished royal ships. It was manned by sailors driven by very different incentives (from untried noblemen to privateers, merchant-adventurers, and fishermen volunteers), and led by men constantly fighting a losing battle against a seriously cash-strapped Exchequer and state support that either came too late or was absent altogether.
" The Principal Navigations was driven by Hakluyt's acknowledgement of that neglect."
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Image of the Day: Havasu Falls
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Poem: Josephine Yu, "The Fortune Teller Knows She'll Never Marry"
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