Reviews and News:
Benjamin Franklin and the problem with a free press: "Few serious thinkers have reflected with as much clarity on the nature of the press as Franklin. And no other thinker has had so much experience and commercial success in it. A lifelong defender of the freedom of the press, Franklin was nevertheless not uncritical of its effects. Franklin's short but rich essay, 'An Account of the Supremest Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz., The Court of the Press,' written a year before his death in 1790, lays out a comprehensive analysis of the press: its effects on politics and the democratic mind, its mode of rule, and the origins of its power. His study is, in a sense, an examination of the effectual truth of the principle underlying freedom of the press. His reflections are urgently needed today."
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Schools don't need more student-centered pedagogies and technology. They need more time for stories.
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The decline of Damien Hirst: "Much more than contributing any lasting aesthetic or school of thought, Hirst and his peers are memorable for cynically glorifying the cannibalizing death march of late-late-capitalism."
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Is space exploration a waste of time and money?
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Vigilante grammarian: "A video published today by the BBC shows an anonymous 'grammar vigilante' roaming the streets of Bristol, in the UK, adding apostrophes where they're missing and covering unnecessary ones. He's been moonlighting for 13 years, according to the story, and carries a long stick—the 'Apostrophiser'—to help him reach improperly punctuated signs."
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Winner of the What's That Thing? Award for bad public art.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Robert Alter revisits the work of one of the greatest Hebrew writers of the twentieth century— S.Y. Agnon:
"Anon is in some respects an anomalous modernist. Early on, he had an affinity for European gothic writers, and gothic motifs such as the Dance of Death, ghostly brides, and revenants occur in many of his stories. He might, one conjectures, have been drawn to Thomas Mann's recurrent theme of the conflict between eros and the calling of the artist and to Mann's use of narrative leitmotifs. The dreamlike surrealist stories Agnon began to write in the 1930s are in some ways reminiscent of Kafka, though in one interview he vehemently denied any connection, saying that he had only one or two books by Kafka on his shelves and that the main thing for him as a writer was what the Holy One inspired in his heart. With characteristic slyness, he added that his wife, on the other hand, owned Kafka's collected works.
"In a 1916 letter to Salman Schocken, the department store magnate and, later, publisher who became his patron, he expressed his profound admiration for Flaubert, whom he would have read in German translation. This was a writer, he said, 'who mortified himself in the tent of art,' pointedly substituting 'art' for 'Torah' in a well-known rabbinic idiom. Flaubert was his model for the painstaking devotion to the writer's craft—Agnon assiduously revised much of his work, and in the years immediately after World War I he transformed some of the effusive stories of his first decade of writing into beautifully disciplined prose. I suspect that he also learned from Flaubert the narrative technique of free indirect discourse, in which a character speaks through the voice of the narrator, which he frequently used as an instrument of psychological characterization.
"Despite all this, Agnon often wrote as a traditional teller of Hebrew tales for whom the corpus of European literature was remote. In one of his stories he refers to 'Homer, the master [ rav] of the poets of the Gentiles,' using paytan as the word for 'poet,' a term that usually designates a composer of liturgical verse. The stylistic pretense here is that Homer belongs to an unfamiliar realm, though in Agnon's haunting novella Betrothed he has an important part in the protagonist's fateful passion for the sea and the Mediterranean world of origins. Scholem, in an interview on Israeli television a few years after Agnon's death, was asked by the critic Dan Miron what he made of Agnon's Orthodoxy. Scholem shrewdly responded that for Agnon art was the crucial consideration and that he was religious because it served his purposes as an artist."
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Photo: Lake Bled
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Poem: Ange Mlinko, "Borrowed Bio"
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