Reviews and News:
The fascinating, if tragic, story of Bellevue: "'There never was a time when Bellevue appeared even remotely trouble-free,' writes Oshinsky. In the 1848–49 epidemic of Typhus or 'Irish Fever,' a bacterial disease that 'thrives in close, filthy quarters' and is spread by a body louse, the patient death rate at Bellevue topped 40 percent; it was even worse for staff. In the 1850s, a sensational story spread of Bellevue's rat infestation, as a woman was discovered in a hospital bed with a lifeless child whose face had been eaten by vermin (posthumously, it was determined). In 1887, a young reporter named Nellie Bly feigned insanity and was involuntarily committed to the city's system of institutions for the mentally ill. Her story, 'Ten Days in a Mad-House,' published in the New York World, became a sensation for its depiction of brutality and neglect."
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Dispatch from the doomsday community for the rich: "Building a fallout shelter to weather the worst is hardly a new idea, of course... But none have been done on the scale (or at the projected price) of the Trident Lakes project, which will include an eighteen-hole golf course, a 100,000-square-foot equestrian center, polo fields, gun ranges, tennis courts, and a community center connected to the bunkers via an underground network of tunnels. There will also be helipads, and, if the adjoining land can be purchased, a runway long enough to accommodate private jets."
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Looking for a new antibiotic? Go medieval. (HT: A. M. Juster)
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Come, Lord Jesus: Two companies now sell cat wine, "a mixture of liquid catnip and beet juice or other coloring," and one sells testicular implants—to give your pet a more "natural" look after neutering. It claims to have sold more than 500,000 implants so far.
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Why do lesbians have a higher unintended pregnancy rate than non-lesbians?
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The astonishing rise of the Tudor merchant adventurer.
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Sudip Bose on Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem.
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Remembering Harry Crews: "It's hard to find a sin against the mores of academe that Harry Crews did not commit. Students came to know that his attendance was always a variable. Inappropriate relationships with female students were common. Due to a career-long battle with alcohol and drug addiction, he would begin many a semester that he would not complete. The battle with alcohol did not remain off campus, either. It was not uncommon for a student or a colleague to turn the lights on in the morning and find him lying unconscious, in a puddle of one fluid or another...[But] Crews poured himself into his students' work with the same energy that he did his own. In class, he would amaze students by offering page-by-page suggestions on minor details about their stories, from memory. Even after the class concluded, he was known to run into students in the hall and offer comments on work the student hadn't thought about for months."
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Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Brian Vickers reviews two new complete works of Shakespeare—one by Oxford and one by Norton—and finds the American publication far superior to the British:
"Complete editions of Shakespeare have usually carried prefatory material introducing such topics as Shakespeare's life and times, the Elizabethan theatre, and the nature of hand-press printing; Norton 3 devotes over 100 pages to these matters. The New Oxford seems determined to be different. Two of the General Editors, Gary Taylor and Terri Bourus, ignore this tradition and offer two prefaces, 'Why Read Shakespeare's Complete Works?' (including other important questions, such as 'Why read dead white men?' and 'Why read plays, when I can watch films?'), and 'Why Read This Complete Works?'. As these formulations suggest, the editors choose to address their (presumed young) readers with such snappy utterances as 'Shakespeare is the ghost with the most'; 'his quotable-quote quotient is higher than anyone else's'; 'Shakespeare's favourite subjects are monarchy, monogamy, and monotheism; not coincidentally, his most famous speeches and sonnets are monologues. He specializes in one-and-onliness'. Shakespeare may seem difficult – 'So what? So is the universe'. In any case, 'grappling with difficulty strengthens our minds', and 'the more you exercise those mind-muscles, those neural pecs, the easier it gets'. If our neural pecs aren't up to it, 'every reader can google their own favourite' topic.
"The relentlessly up-to-date allusions create a bard for our times, or rather this decade. In 2014 'the influential radio commentator Ira Glass' (who he?), having seen a performance of King Lear, uttered what is here called 'the virally retweeted epiphany, 'Shakespeare sucks''. 'In 2016, a production of Measure for Measure in North Carolina was turned into a protest against the state's new law banning transgender use of public bathrooms (with Mistress Overdone played by a transgender actor)'. Art had no need to imitate nature there. The editors devote about 1,400 breathless words (a quarter of the length of this review) to the 2016 hip-hop musical Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which 'indisputably . . . belongs to the history of Shakespeare's continuing influence'. Not only did Miranda accept a Tony award by reading 'a sonnet (including the very Shakespearean tautology 'And love is love is love is love is love''), but his play includes two quotations from Macbeth, 'Tomorrow and tomorrow' and 'Screw your courage to the sticking place' – although Miranda revealed that 'he first heard the phrase in the Disney musical Beauty and the Beast, and as a child had no idea that it came from a much earlier play'. (The editors comment, 'We pick up scattered pieces of Shakespeare's imagination without realizing it'.) Instead of providing help for readers, these prefaces are ephemeral, narcissistic self-display pieces, their main purpose being to appear cool to the presumed college student readership.
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"The New Oxford Shakespeare employs fewer editors, who are not allowed to introduce the plays they have edited, having been supplanted by the 'tapas' of snippets. The absence of textual notes is one of several features suggesting that this 'Modern Critical Edition' regards serious scholarly issues as of no interest to its intended audience, who are demoted to second-class citizens. Norton 3 treats its editors, and its readers, with more respect. Each editor contributes a textual introduction for the print edition, and adds longer notes on textual cruxes in the digital version. The print version of Norton 3 also includes a brief performance note to each play by Brett Gamboa, who discusses specific production problems in the digital version. In further side-by-side comparisons Norton 3 comes out ahead. Both editions are profusely illustrated, but those in the New Oxford are marred by the paper's excessive print-through. Norton's typeface is clear and legible, New Oxford's (printed in Italy) is elegant, but small and tiring to read; the editorial matter enclosed in boxes, printed in grey, is scarcely legible. Even worse, the designer has set the prelims and prefaces in a smaller font with tiny margins and single spacing, cramming about 1,000 words on the page. The New Oxford includes the music for the songs 'wherever a reliable original score is available'. This is commendable, but they should have been collected in an appendix. It may be disconcerting, on re-reading Twelfth Night, to find five songs inserted into the text of one scene, or the Willow Song in Othello. Norton 3 (digital) provides recordings of all sixty-six songs in the plays.
"In its choices regarding the text, the New Oxford Shakespeare makes two decisions, one questionable, the other disastrous."
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Photos: North Korean border
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Poem: John Burnside, "To the Younger Man"
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