Reviews and News:
The journalism schools at Berkeley and Northwestern let accreditation lapse: "As we near the 2020s, we expect far better than a 1990s-era accreditation organization that resists change—especially as education and careers in our field evolve rapidly."
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This summer, let your kids be bored: "As a demanding kid I was bored all the time. The cures for my boredom were varied, lovely and familiar: 'I Spy' rounds of escalating complexity, small nose pressed against a car window counting raindrops, hide and seek in supermarket aisles, or drawing v-shaped birds flying over sloppy sunsets on lampshades and, once, my sister's nappy. I became an expert in self-regulation. I had one of those mothers who was always equipped with blank paper and pens, silently producing them from her bag whenever we tugged at her sleeve or slumped across a restaurant table crowded with grown-ups. Any complaint of boredom and out came the kit. A tupperware box that rattled with chewed pen lids, broken crayons and old paper. We scribbled endlessly."
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Prince Philip's early life: "When asked by a journalist which language he spoke at home, Prince Philip, who is of German-Danish-Russian descent and the nephew of King Constantine I of Greece, replied 'What do you mean, "at home"?' Born ninety years ago on a kitchen table in Corfu, he went with his family into exile when he was a baby, after which his mother, Alice of Battenburg, who was deaf, was sent to an asylum, displaying what was assumed to be religious mania. His father, Andrea, then disappeared into a new life in Monte Carlo, his four elder sisters married German noblemen, and young Philip spent the rest of his childhood bundled between various European castles, in whose visitors' books he would describe himself as 'of no fixed abode'."
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Netflix deletes segment in a 1996 Bill Nye episode in which a girl says biology determines sex.
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The great past of the horse: "This unusual book is a series of airy, winging essays that alight briefly on world history, art, literary criticism and historiography before leaping on to make new, often surprising connections. Raulff's animal is the source of 'every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the nineteenth century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the sub-currents of history uncovered by contemporaries such as the libido, the unconscious and the uncanny'. This is not the Pony Club Manual or a trot through the more familiar sights of equestrian art history; it's Kafka, Aby Warburg, Tolstoy, psychoanalytic theory, Nietzsche and bleak monochrome photos in the style of Sebald."
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We need to recover a right understanding of tragedy, argues Robert Kaplan: Tragedy "is the beauty of intolerable truths." It "is not the triumph of evil over good but the suffering caused by the triumph of one good over another."
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Why conservatives should be environmentalists.
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The rise of the very short song: "With the advent of the 45" vinyl, for example, artists had to make sure their most popular songs could be cut to three minutes, the length the format supported. That dynamic fundamentally shaped how American pop music functioned; artists from Elvis to The Beatles defined the country's culture while adhering to the standard. As technology expanded modes of distribution, many artists experimented with longer songs. Data from musicbrainz.org suggests that in the decades following the introduction of the 45" in the 1950's, the average length of popular songs increased, from under three minutes to an average of around four by the mid 2000s. Now, as the tools for producing and sharing music become increasingly universal, a new dynamic towards even shorter songs has emerged."
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Essay of the Day:
In Aeon, Paul Halpern takes a look at Edgar Allan Poe's prescient cosmology:
"Nature's power enthralled the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, and galvanised some of his most memorable works. He was particularly captivated by the natural world's ghastly capacity for destruction. In the short story 'A Descent into the Maelström', for instance, a sea voyage turns into sheer mayhem when a fierce vortex hurls the vessel toward its briny doom, shattering it into splinters. As if he were a journalist reporting a maritime calamity, Poe describes each stage of the devastation in riveting detail. His amateur interest in science lends his tales a measure of credibility that makes them all the more horrific.
"Despite his relatively brief life, from 1809 to 1849, Poe applied his style to an astounding range of genres, from supernatural horror to detective stories. Even among that diversity, though, one piece stands out. In his final major work, Eureka – A Prose Poem (1848) , he took his fascination with nature beyond the human world and crafted a chronicle of the Universe itself. The unique subject matter required an inversion of his usual approach. Instead of imagining a breaking down of regularity into shards, as in many of his famous short stories, Poe envisioned a systematic building up of order from a unitary beginning – a genesis rather than an apocalypse. Moreover, he offered his account as an attempt at realistic truth rather than mere fiction. 'My general proposition … is this,' he wrote. 'In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.'
"Readers who first encounter Eureka are often surprised by its resemblance to the Big Bang model of cosmology, pioneered by the Belgian physicist and cleric Georges Lemaître in the 1920s, and later developed by the Russian-born cosmologist George Gamow and others. In the Big Bang narrative, the Universe started as a kind of dense, unitary 'primeval atom' (Lemaître's term) that diversified as it expanded. The narrative of Eureka is similar enough that, taking it out of context, Poe seems uncannily prescient, almost a prophet of modern cosmology. Even though he had no access to the later theoretical insights and experimental evidence upon which the Big Bang is based, one might trace a narrative thread connecting Eureka's ethereal speculations with the more solid scientific theory."
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Photos: Devil's bridge
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Poem: Elise Paschen, "Impromptu"
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