Alan Jacobs

If your congregation sings only Hillsong choruses, then their emotional repertoire will be limited to about two different feelings (God-you-make-me-happy, and God-I’m-infatuated-with-you) – considerably less even than the emotional range of a normal adult person. It is why entire congregations sometimes seem strangely adolescent, or even infantile: they lack a proper emotional range, as well as a suitable adult vocabulary. But in the psalter one finds the entire range of human emotion and experience – a range that is vastly wider than the emotional capacity of any single human life.

60ansdevadrouille:

Méharée au Hoggar, avril 1964. Dans le lit de l’Oued Ilamane, sous les énormes chaos granitiques de ce massif au coeur du Sahara.

If you want to climb Mount Everest, get in line. And be prepared to die. Via Nick Jackson on Twitter.

I recommend the Betting Books which All Souls [College, Oxford] has privately published now and then, and which enable one almost to sniff the cigar smoke and savour the port of many a pleasurable, if intellectually demanding, evening. The stakes are seldom high, but the subjects are all-embracing. … Asquith bets Malcolm 1s. that twice around Malcolm’s stomach is less than the combined perimeter of Malcolm’s stomach and head, and Steel-Maitland bets Edgeworth that with three exceptions no monument exists within a radius of five miles from the centre of Rome, built between 100 B.C. and A. D. 300, possessing an arch with a lateral thrust. Hardinge once unaccountably bets Doyle 1s. that Admiral Benbow was a black man, Curzon bets Talbot 1s. that the man who stuck a pen-knife through a roll in the Old Testament was not named Jehudi. There was once a bet to the effect that “Home, Sweet Home” was written by a divorced German Jew, and between the wars Corbett succeeded in proving that he could in fact hang upside down by the grip of his toes for 10 seconds on the common-room door.

The whole story has a tragicomic, Nathaniel Hawthorne meets “Curb Your Enthusiasm” feel. It’s easy to imagine [elizabeth] Warren originally checking a box more on a whim than out of any deep determination to self-identify as Cherokee. (She didn’t use the minority-applicant program when applying to Rutgers, where she attended law school, and she identified as “white” during an early teaching job at the University of Texas.) Then it’s easy to imagine her embarrassment when the diversity wars of the 1990s made that whimsical choice something from which she couldn’t dissociate herself without intense public awkwardness. Those wars faded, she no longer listed herself as a Native American, she thought the whole thing was behind her … until she went into politics, where no secret stays buried.

The appropriate response to such a tale is probably sympathy rather than scorn. What does deserve scorn, though, is the academic culture in which an extremely distant connection to a Cherokee ancestor ends up being touted by a law school as proof of its commitment to diversity…. The irony is that Warren herself probably did make Harvard more diverse, since she grew up the daughter of a janitor in Oklahoma — not a typical background, to put it mildly, for Ivy League students and faculty today. But under the academy’s cramped definitions, it was her grandfather’s Cherokee cheekbones, not her blue-collar roots, that led to her citation as a supposed trailblazer.

She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
‘Twas rash, but by posterity she’s read.

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

Dick was a consummate autodidact. He survived for less than one semester at college, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949, taking and quitting Philosophy 10A in the space of a few weeks. Dick left the class in disgust at the ignorance and intolerance of his instructor when he asked his professor about the plausibility of Plato’s metaphysical theory of the forms — the truth of which was later proven for Dick by the experience of 2-3-74. Dick was evidently not trained as a philosopher or theologian — although I abhor that verb “trained,” which makes academics sound like domestic pets. Dick was an amateur philosopher or, to borrow a phrase from one of the editors of “Exegesis,” Erik Davis, he was that most splendid of things: a garage philosopher.

What Dick lacks in academic and scholarly rigor, he more than makes up for in powers of imagination and rich lateral, cumulative association. If he had known more, it might have led him to produce less interesting chains of ideas. In a later remark in “Exegesis,” Dick writes, “I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.” He interestingly goes on to add, “The core of my writing is not art but truth.” We seem to be facing an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but itself a work a fiction. Dick saw his fiction writing as the creative attempt to describe what he discerned as the true reality. He adds, “I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.”

paleofuture:

Tripping Through the Cold War: Drug Warfare of the Retrofuture

This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)

Well, that’s the coolest thing of the day. Don’t know why I had never noticed the very close resemblance between the iPhone and 2001’s monolith. Via Gruber.