Reviews and News:
Everybody likes Reinhold Niebuhr. Is that a good thing? "That so many people from disparate and opposing viewpoints profess to have been influenced by a writer is not always a sign of that writer's merit or philosophical rigor; often it's a sign of vacuity at the heart of his work. Or maybe it suggests that his admirers would rather praise him than take his ideas seriously."
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William Empson and the ambiguity of the Buddha's asymmetry: He "came to suspect that the sculptural techniques he thought he had discovered may have been inspired by an ancient style of fortune-telling that interpreted the two sides of the head separately. In the end, though, his true interest was not in the ways in which East Asian Buddhist sculptural tradition might have reflected some set of psychological or physiological constants about human beings, but in its unique genius in embodying the contradictions of personality; and ultimately he decided that the richness he saw in these images was to a great degree the effect of Buddhism itself."
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Who is the biggest publisher of foreign fiction translated into English? Amazon.
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Harold Bloom's Falstaff: "Bloom pushes us to love a knight who disdains morality, but he will not brook any suggestion that Falstaff has blemishes—including any such suggestions from Shakespeare himself. We see this in Bloom's declaration that Shakespeare must have been forced, perhaps on pain of death, to write The Merry Wives of Windsor, the wild farce written between the Henry IV plays that features Falstaff trying and failing to seduce a pair of married women. He fails, over and over, and is humiliated. Bloom seems ashamed of the Falstaff in this play, but rather than consider the commonalities between this Falstaff and Hal's Falstaff, he will discuss it no further than asserting Shakespeare never meant for the play to be read by his posterity. Bloom's chief flaw is that he is exasperatingly prissy with Falstaff, meeting any questioning of the character with the joyless finger-wagging of a schoolmarm."
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An impeccable, fair-minded life of Martin Luther: "In letters that were both deeply learned and alarmingly frank, his charisma shines through, but we also see his complexity: He was a man who could, by turns, be abusive and utterly unforgiving, but also gentle, affectionate and funny."
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The revenge of analog: "Our experience of analog items is inescapably, importantly placed in time—and in presence…we increasingly ache for a sense of belonging and real presence that exists only in real time."
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Essay of the Day:
In City Journal, John Tierney makes the provocative argument that no institution "has done more to help the poor than Walmart":
"If budget-cutters in Washington decided to eliminate food-stamp benefits to New Yorkers, the city's politicians would be denouncing the cruelty of the 'Republican war on the poor.' Yet Mayor Bill De Blasio and the city council are already inflicting the same sort of pain on low-income New Yorkers by denying them access to one of the nation's most effective anti-poverty programs: Walmart.
"When he was mayor, Michael Bloomberg supported Walmart's efforts to open a store in New York, but the company faced unremitting resistance from unions and elected officials, and it gave up the fight once de Blasio moved into Gracie Mansion. 'I have been adamant that I don't think Walmart—the company, the stores—belong in New York City,' de Blasio said.
"Walmart's benefits are obvious to shoppers and to economists like Jason Furman, who served in the Clinton administration and was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama. In a paper, 'Walmart: A Progressive Success Story,' Furman cited estimates that Walmart, by driving down prices, saved the typical American family more than $2,300 annually. That was about the same amount that a family on food stamps then received from the federal government."
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Photo: Soyuz MS-02 space capsule
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Poem: Andrew Motion, "Waders"
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