Alan Jacobs

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.

CMYK

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

The term “religion” now delimits a particular, limited sphere of activity, a form of life like golf or novel-writing in scope and meaning. The precise nature of the subordination will differ depending upon the polity within which it is enforced, but it will always be there and always enforced. The nation-state brooks no rivals when it comes to establishing a hierarchy of order and subordination, and if some particular set of Christians or Muslims or Jews gets uppity, refusing to acknowledge the state’s hegemony in this matter of establishing hierarchies of loyalty, and claiming, perhaps, unrestricted loyalty and authority in ordering the lives of their adherents, then the state will respond quickly, and usually with violence.

In the American case, the establishment of the appropriate set of hierarchical relations between the state and particular religious groups is now so firmly in place that it has come to seem inevitable and natural, even to those who have been categorized by the state as religious. American Jews and Christians have become, for the most part, just what you would expect of those who have embraced the category “religion” for their Christianness or Jewishness - that is, hobbyists and cheerleaders. The former because their Christianity and their Judaism have become for them a part-time leisure activity; the latter because, so far as the question of the relation of their Christianness or Jewishness to the state comes to mind, they will think of it as one of unambiguous and enthusiastic support - that is, as cheerleaders.

Suppose you wanted to go live at a luxury resort for four years. You’d expect that to cost, wouldn’t you? (No one is going to write an editorial raging about how if you wanted to live at Club Med it would cost you at least $50,000 a year – probably more.) So why are people surprised that it costs a lot – really a lot – to send a kid to college for four years? College is the sort of thing that seems like it should cost a lot: beautiful buildings on nice land, nice gym, nice green spaces, expensive equipment, large staff that have to be well-paid because they provide expert services. If you want to be puzzled about something, figure out how and why it was ever cheap, not why it costs now.

But this thought that colleges and universities are like luxury resorts, so of course it costs, is not very comforting to apologists for the cost of higher ed. Four years of resort living does not sound like a model that can, in fact, be available to everyone. If the democratic dream is that every kid can go to college, and if the dream of college is that every college kid can live for four years in the equivalent of an expensive resort, then the dream dies.

How do you measure a spirit, or dissect a phantom? For many, ghosts are beyond the frontier of what science can interest itself in, one boundary for the discipline. For others, ghosts, being a phenomenon like any other, are equally open to objective study. Yet most interesting of all, the technologies and machines that define the modern world and would investigate the spectral themselves have seemed prone to being haunted.

The process, perhaps, began with the gloomy railways of Charles Dickens’s “The Signalman” or Arnold Ridley’s “The Ghost Train”. But soon it spread to demon-driven cars, to mezzotints, to haunted motorways, ghostly presences in lifts, or confined to a cursed submarine. Most intriguingly, the instruments that ghost hunters themselves would use have seemed spooked: the photograph that freezes a vanishing moment catching the recurring vanishing of a ghost; the tape-recorder left on in an empty room that picks up bodiless voices; the numerous tales of eerie messages on mobile phones or ghostly disturbances within computers. Like our photos, our recordings, our texts and our tweets, the ghost is a trace, linked to technology, detected within it, and somehow inhabiting it. When the familiarities of life are themselves revealed to be haunted and strange – when there are slight deviations from the customs that conceal our relation to death – we are closest to the anxious heart of the ghost story.