Malcolm Gladwell puts the responsibility right where it belongs:Slate: Should the NFL be banned too?
Gladwell: As long as the risks are explicit, the players warned, and those injured properly compensated, then I’m not sure we can stop people from playing. A better question is whether it is ethical to WATCH football. That’s a harder question.
I’m not so sure that it’s hard at all. The answer, at least for those displeased with pro football’s response, seems pretty clear. Doing the damn thing is the hard part.
I now know that I have to go. I have known it for a while now. But I have yet to walk away. For me, the hardest portion is living apart–destroying something that binds me to friends and family. With people whom I would not pass another words, I can debate the greatest running back of all time. It’s like losing a language.
Junior Seau Is Dead - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Entertainment - The Atlantic. TNC brings his usual incisiveness and moral clarity to the table. I’m right where he is: I cannot justify watching football. Not with what I know now. Yet it has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember — and when you’re from Alabama, as I am, and a graduate of the University of Alabama, as I am… .
I was talking with two other Alabamians the other day and we agreed that we all remember exactly where we were when Bear Bryant died. One said, “I was at college. My father called to tell me, and I cried.” For better or worse, it’s part of our formation as people, and a major bond of families and friendships. But TNC’s right: it’s time to say goodbye to it.
The Cromwell conjured by Mantel is deeply drawn to Tyndale’s Bible and Tyndale’s Lutheran theology—on the deaths of his wife and daughters, he reaches there for comfort rather than to the Catholic piety of his wife, to which he also publicly assents—but “to be drawn to” is not “to be committed to.” Cromwell’s religious convictions are elusive to us, but Mantel would have us see that they were elusive even to himself. (The same can be said for many of us.) What this Cromwell clearly does believe is that More’s theological and ecclesiastical certainties, and the fierce campaign against heresy that they engendered, are bad policy and immoral besides. He—he who is kind even to dogs and cats—flinches at More’s cruelties, and sympathizes with the Protestants simply because they are hunted down and persecuted. When he rises to be Henry’s chief minister, he becomes a remorseless enemy of the Church’s power not because he hates the Church but because he sees how thoroughly power corrupts, and wants to limit it wherever he can.Again, in all these ways Mantel’s Cromwell is a characteristically late-modern Western man who happens to be living at the beginnings of modernity. By envisioning him so, Mantel has rendered much simpler the task of making the historical novel into a psychological novel. Could she have told the story of More, or for that matter Tyndale, in this manner? I think not. Author and protagonist merge nicely at this point: the True Believer remains inaccessible to them both.
There is one more sense in which this Cromwell manifests the late-modern experience: in repudiating the powers of the Church, he inadvertently, or perhaps half-consciously, throws that power to the State. For Cromwell, even Mantel’s Cromwell, does more than almost anyone in history to enable that transfer of authority. In limiting the power of the Church’s ministers to pursue and punish sinners, in transferring the right to define the condition of marriage from Church to King and Parliament, in making all property effectively the gift of the State, he creates almost from whole cloth the vast powers of modern government. And he grows increasingly aware of the portentous exchange he has made.
[James] Wood praises [Hilary] Mantel for her “cunning universalism”, a slicker version of CS Lewis’s unchanging human heart. But there are great historical novels that insist on the past’s fundamental difference: William Golding’s The Inheritors, for example. Variations in behaviour in that book are not merely a matter of social constraint, as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.It may be that the historical novel genre is as unjammed with greatness as the crime genre, the science fiction genre, the romance genre and the “literary fiction” genre (come on, On Chesil Beach seemed to be rated by David Cameron and most book reviewers, but precious few readers). I rather suspect that Wood’s frustration is with “historical romance” in the true 19th century sense, rather than any of the novels mentioned above. Whatever differences we have, I always agree with Wood that the great is rare and precious.
Stuart Kelly. I like Kelly’s defense of the historical novel here, in opposition to Wood’s prim condescension, but he seems not to know that Lewis coined the phrase “the doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart” in order to refute that doctrine. As a shrewd and learned student of the past, Lewis knew that those people didn’t think as we think at all.
Which leads to the chief problem with Hilary Mantel’s novels about Tudor England. Wood likes what he calls the “universalism” of making Thomas Cromwell seem modern, but that’s what’s wrong with the books. Mantel could only pick as her protagonist a figure whom she can plausibly construe — or so she thinks — as rather like a modern educated Englishman: shrewd, skeptical, tolerant when it serves him but ruthless when he needs to be. As Wood points out in his New Yorker review (not online at the moment) of the new book, Mantel seems neither to like nor to understand her “religious” characters, like More and Cranmer. (Operating in the narrow royal and aristocratic world that she does, she doesn’t have to confront someone like Tyndale, which is just as well.) Moreover, while it’s certainly possible that Cromwell was the pure pragmatist she portrays him to be, it’s also possible that his attitudes towards religion were more complex and more interesting.
By making Cromwell her protagonist, the one through whose eyes we see much of what happens in these books, and then making Cromwell so much like herself, Mantel evades the most serious challenge a writer of historical fiction can face: how to make characters vivid and human when they’re not at all like us.
For the early-twenty-first-century literary writer, the primary way that people from the past are “not like us” is in their religious beliefs. Aside from Marilynne Robinson, how many highly-regarded writers today even make an effort to imagine what religious belief might feel like from the inside? It’s odd that James Wood, who has written so intelligently and movingly about the displacement of religion from the center of European high culture, and from his own life, is blind to the problems this neglect poses.
For the last two decades, we’ve been gratified, bamboozled, astonished and sometimes alarmed by the surprises [the internet] has sprung. The first-order ones were innovations such as the world wide web, file-sharing, VoIP (internet telephony) and malicious software. In turn, these first-order surprises generated other, second-order ones. The web, for example, served as the foundation for search engines, Flickr, blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia and, latterly, smartphones and Facebook.We’re now at the stage where we should be getting the next wave of disruptive surprises. But – guess what? – they’re nowhere to be seen. Instead, we’re getting an endless stream of incremental changes and me-tooism. If I see one more proposal for a photo-sharing or location-based web service, anything with “app” in it, or anything that invites me to “rate” something, I’ll scream.
We’re stuck. We’re clean out of ideas.
Around 2005 things start making the transition to HD – and then we get to today, and a weird new trend is emerging. I first noticed it some time around the Egyptian revolution, when I was suddenly struck by a Sky News report from Cairo that looked almost precisely like a movie. Not in terms of action (although that helped – there were people rioting on camelback), but in terms of picture quality. It seemed to be shot using fancy lenses. The depth of field was different to standard news reports, which traditionally tend to have everything in focus at once, and it appeared to be running at a filmic 24 frames per second. The end result was that it resembled a sleek advert framing the Arab Spring as a lifestyle choice. I kept expecting it to cut to a Pepsi Max pack shot.Since then, I’ve noticed similarly glossy-looking reports popping up on Newsnight and the like, so it may not be long until this is the norm. I’m guessing it’s a practical decision rather than an artistic one: this is how the new ultra-portable, ultra-useful digital cameras make things look: everything’s a teeny bit polished, a teeny bit Instagrammed.
You Should Go To Graduate School If:You Love to Read….
You Love to Talk (And You Talk To Win)….
You Love to Write….
You Are Strongly Self-Motivated….
You Participate in the Happy Delusion that Intellectual Work Matters….
If You Are an Intellectual.
Minds Like Knives//: Why You SHOULD Go to Graduate School.
You should read the full post if you want to get the whole argument, but let me just say that I desperately hope that none of my students who are contemplating graduate school read this. If nothing else, they need to understand that even if applicants believe such things about themselves, they should certainly never say so in a statement of purpose. “You should admit me into your graduate program because I love to read, I love to write, and I’m an intellectual” — that is most certainly not what admissions committees want to hear. Graduate school in most fields is training for a profession: people who teach in such programs want to admit people who understand that and are willing to undertake the necessary disciplines, not people who are looking for venues to explore their passions. (And yes, you should be passionate about what you study, if you’re going to be good at it and make a difference to others, but your passion is not a qualification for admission.)
More important: You do not need to go to graduate school in order to read, to write, to debate, to do intellectual work. You do not even need to go to graduate school to learn from brilliant scholars, though that would be a much better reason to go than any cited in this post, which, oddly, never mentions professors, scholars, or learning. If you want to read, write, and debate, you can do all that for free, and while you’re earning a living and putting money away for retirement. Why should you give up years of your time and earning potential to do what you can do right now, on your own? — and that’s in a best-case scenario, in which you’re getting full funding and therefore at least not hemorrhaging money. But what if you’re not getting that funding, and doing graduate study only by incurring crushing debt?
There are very good reasons for some people to go to graduate school, in some circumstances, but they aren’t listed in this post. This advice only encourages a shallow romanticism about graduate education, and we don’t need any more of that. And Lord help us, the very last thing we need is more people in academia who “talk to win.”
Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at “the neural substrate of which we are composed”.This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn.
At midnight tonight I will leave the internet. I’m abandoning one of my “top 5” technological innovations of all time for a little peace and quiet. If I can survive the separation, I’m going to do this for a year. Yeah, I’m serious. I’m not leaving The Verge, and I’m not becoming a hermit, I just won’t use the internet in my personal or work life, and won’t ask anyone to use it for me.Depending on your perspective, you might be completely shocked that I’d even attempt such a thing, or you might be completely unimpressed. For me personally, the decision felt like a big, crazy idea at first, and now it’s started to seem a perfectly natural evolution of my life with technology.
Goodman D——: Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous
Goodman D——: Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous
By Scott Cairns
You could almost think the word synonymous
with mind, given our so far narrow
history, and the excessive esteem
in which we have been led to hold what is,
in this case, our rightly designated
nervous systems. Little wonder then
that some presume the mind itself…