Reviews and News:
Yoko Ono to share credit for "Imagine": "David Israelite, the chief executive of the National Music Publishers Association, announced at an industry event in New York on Wednesday, at which 'Imagine' was honored with the association's 'Centennial Song' award, that Ms. Ono would be added as a writer."
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The Modern Language Association overwhelmingly rejects boycott of Israel.
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The color red and Western culture: "It is now hard to imagine, but before the mid-1960s most books, and not only on art historical subjects, appeared without a speck of color. It was not as if color printing technology was unavailable, but we had been conditioned by the circulation of millions of black-and-white photographic images, starting in the middle of the 19th century, to what the French historian Michel Pastoureau calls a 'black-and-white reality.' Cinema extended this domination into the mid-20th century. Who can imagine Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal in color? Pastoureau traces the hegemony of black and white to 19th-century Protestant capitalists in whose hands were the great industrial and financial enterprises. Even when the chemical industry could produce any color desired, the first objects of mass production—household appliances, telephones, fountain pens, automobiles—were in black, gray, or brown. Henry Ford is supposed to have rejected any color but black for his Model T. This moralizing of color, as we learn here, has a long history. The changing status of red from prehistoric times to the present tells much about the development of a particularly Western sensibility."
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The racism of protesting "cultural appropriation": "This is the thing about the obsession with 'cultural appropriation': it rehabilitates in PC lingo foul old ideas about racial purity. It makes respectable what that old man used to say: that the races should stick to their own cultures.
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Rod Liddle of The Spectator praises "Mr. Dogg's rich, soft growl of a voice" and latest album.
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Naomi Schaeffer Riley reviews The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness: "If we needed more evidence that feminism has gone off the rails, Jill Filipovic's new book takes care of it. In The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, the contributing writer for the New York Times and columnist for Cosmopolitan (which have a surprisingly similar outlook on these issues) merges two major strains of modern feminist thought—the notion that women should throw off the chains of repression to achieve sexual pleasure, and the idea that the government is the best means for achieving sexual equality. Her conclusion is blindingly obvious when you think about it: taxpayer-funded orgasms. Seriously: Filipovic worries that 'many heterosexual women lack . . . a sense of orgasm entitlement' and concludes that 'pleasurable sex should also be considered a basic health care right.'"
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Visiting the library at the University of Mosul, which was burned by ISIS in December: "I could smell the acrid soot a block away. The library at the University of Mosul, among the finest in the Middle East, once had a million books, historic maps, and old manuscripts. Some dated back centuries, even a millennium, Mohammed Jasim, the library's director, told me. Among its prize acquisitions was a Quran from the ninth century, although the library also housed thousands of twenty-first-century volumes on science, philosophy, law, world history, literature, and the arts. Six hundred thousand books were in Arabic; many of the rest were in English. During the thirty-two months that the Islamic State ruled the city, the university campus, on tree-lined grounds near the Tigris River, was gradually closed down and then torched. Quite intentionally, the library was hardest hit. ISIS sought to kill the ideas within its walls—or at least the access to them. On a rainy day this spring, I walked the muddy and eerily deserted university grounds, in eastern Mosul. I turned a corner and saw the library, a block-long building, charred black and its shell strewn, inside and out, with splintered glass, burnt beams, heat-warped furniture, toppled shelves, and mounds of ashes."
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Stephen Phelan writes about the deadliest motorcycle race in the world—the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy:
"On the first lap, rider No. 63, Jochem van den Hoek, rocketed through Ballig on his Honda at more than a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Some twenty seconds later, turning through a tricky curve at the eleventh milestone, he came off the bike. His death was confirmed that afternoon, around the same time that No. 52, the Irishman Alan Bonner, had his own collision higher up the mountain. Bonner was also killed, bringing the historic death toll on this circuit, which has been in use since 1907, to two hundred and fifty-five, including thirty-two in the past decade. (That figure does not account for race officials and spectators hit by runaway bikes.) For the first twenty years of the contest, parts of the course remained open to public traffic; in 1927, a racer named Archie Birkin was killed as he swerved to avoid a fish truck."
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Photo: Trzcinsko
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Poem: A.M. Juster, "Triptych: Dream, Convenience Store, Bar"
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