Reviews and News:
Did Hitler's obsession with the occult lose him the war?
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John Fea on the coalition that made American independence possible.
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David Pryce-Jones visits Albania: "Subjects of the Ottoman Empire for five hundred or so years, the huge majority of Albanians in every generation lived in the traditional peasant style of their forebears. Albania was the one remaining country in Europe where tribal custom continued to govern public and private behavior. The blood feud kept the peace, operating more violently but more consequently than coded law."
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What happened to video games based on movies? "There was a time when every major movie had an accompanying tie-in game. After watching their counterparts on the silver screen, you were ten minutes of fiddling with some red, white, and yellow cables before you too could be Frodo battling for Middle Earth, James Bond sneaking past some Russians, or Harry Potter Flipendo-ing his way through the halls of Hogwarts. Nowadays? Not so much."
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The savage beauty of central Italy: "The moment I pushed open the flaking wooden shutters of the long-abandoned townhouse in Le Marche, Central Italy, I was captivated. Close by, swifts were dipping and soaring around a medieval campanile. In the distance, high peaks of the wild and spectacular Monti Sibillini were bathed in sunlight. Perhaps Gildo, the genial estate agent at my side, did mention the word terremoto at some point as he led me outside to view an oasis of unruly vines and fruit trees circling a central, oddly placed, palm. I did notice a couple of zig-zag cracks in the brick wall of an imposing palazzo that partially overlooked the garden; its glass windows were broken and nesting birds were swooping in and out. But by the time I understood that the building had been damaged years before in an earthquake, my mind was already firmly set. It was Spring 2004. The earthquake Gildo spoke of had struck in 1997, its epicentre on the other side of the Apennines in neighbouring Umbria. The quake had killed eleven people, destroyed many homes and caused severe damage to Italy's artistic patrimony, including frescoes by Giotto and Cimabue in the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi. But locals spoke of the generally long-term cyclical nature of such events; a repeat of such seismic activity in the area, I reflected, was surely unlikely any time soon."
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Don't talk about your book until it is published.
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Essay of the Day:
What is time and why is it impossible for physics to say much about it that truly matters? Raymond Tallis in The New Atlantis:
"In an important sense it 'loses' time — something that some physicists might welcome, given that aspects of it seem to have no place in a physical world whose laws seem to be time-reversible, or invariant with respect to temporal reversal, and hence indifferent to the unfolding of time.
"But it is the unfolding of time, and its apparent 'unidirectionality' — always moving (or so we are inclined to say) from earlier to later — that matters most in our experience of time. The attempts of physicists to explain this feature of time have on the whole been thoroughly inadequate, including the attempt, which we will discuss later in this essay, to define the direction of time in terms of an accumulation of information. The idea of time as an 'arrow of information,' as it is sometimes called, shows the general inability of physics to accommodate the conscious observer that makes physical science possible — the inability, that is, to connect an objective explanation of time, understood as a feature of material events, with a person's subjective experience of time. It is the role of philosophy to try to make this connection, to examine the relationship between what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars characterized as the 'scientific image' and the 'manifest image,' and to seek something that encompasses them both."
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Photo: Red sprites over the English Channel
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Poem: Carol V. Davis, "Early Morning, Beijing"
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