This past year Michael Murray brought out Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind, tracking his subject’s astonishing life from a French boyhood in which Barzun played marbles with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire through a brilliant career at Columbia University, first as an undergraduate, then as a teacher, and finally as the university’s provost. Murray relates a particularly delightful story about young Professor Barzun. In one of his first history classes, Barzun recalled, there “was a beautifully dressed man of about forty, with very black hair and a signet ring with a diamond and a tie pin; he was done up to the nines. At the end of the first semester, he came to me and said: ‘I am a Turk, and I want to express my gratitude because in your dealing with the Turkish question you have been perfectly fair. This means so much. I want to tell you that if ever at any time someone stands in your way or has done you harm, here is my card, just call me, and he will be taken care of.’”
Boris Karloff presides over an art deco Black Mass in The Black Cat (1934, dir. Edgar Ulmer) (via)
If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast before Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.Every one of these factors can be tied to longevity.
If news as [W. H. Russell, the great Victorian journalist] knew it, and as the last reporters in Fleet Street in the 1980s understood it, is now dying, when was it born? The answer is that it was a child of technology, achieving meaningful existence after the arrival of steam-powered printing presses about two centuries ago.The hand-operated, Gutenberg-style machines in use before that didn’t have the power to reach large numbers of people quickly enough to be instruments of news. They carried some fresh facts, but editors knew that their technology was usually too slow to compete even with word of mouth, so they gave priority to commentary. The early Times, for example (it was launched in 1785), or William Cobbett’s famous Political Register, was primarily a vehicle of opinion: they tended to make just the same tacit assumption you now find in today’s daily papers — that the reader already knows the facts.
Another piece of historical symmetry here is that the first steam press was introduced at the Times in 1814 in an overnight coup designed to prevent sabotage by the old-style printers. It took a remarkably similar coup in 1986 — when Rupert Murdoch suddenly moved the Times to new premises in Wapping — to introduce computer production to British national newspapers. This was one of the developments that would eventually kill old-style news. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.
[A] new branch of the neuroscience explains everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix “neuro” to whatever you are talking about. Thus, “neuroeconomics” is the latest in a long line of rhetorical attempts to sell the dismal science as a hard one; “molecular gastronomy” has now been trumped in the scientised gluttony stakes by “neurogastronomy”; students of Republican and Democratic brains are doing “neuropolitics”; literature academics practise “neurocriticism”. There is “neurotheology”, “neuromagic” (according to Sleights of Mind, an amusing book about how conjurors exploit perceptual bias) and even “neuromarketing”. Hoping it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon, I have decided to announce that I, too, am skilled in the newly minted fields of neuroprocrastination and neuroflâneurship.
Why are the Adam and (to a lesser extent) the Eve of Venus, or Perelandra, tan from the shoulders up? Also, enormous? And can some extraterrestrial meterologist explain the cloud patterns on that planet?
I will just add that the people who bought this book based on its cover were among the most cruelly disappointed people in history.
A surprisingly, and disconcertingly, accurate cover for the first installment of C. S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy
Another superb example