Alan Jacobs

It’s in State Department memos, vintage pages of Woman’s Home Companion and your inbox: Times New Roman, the most widely used typeface in the world — and one of the most controversial. For more than half a century, it was attributed to a titan in the field of typography, Stanley Morison. But in the late 1980s, a Canadian printer discovered that Morison might have plagiarized the classic font.

The original story of Times New Roman’s genesis goes like this: Morison wrote a blistering article in 1929 arguing that Times Old Roman, the font of The Times of London, was dated, clunky, badly printed and in need of help — his help. The paper listened and charged Morison with directing the creation of a new suite of letters. He did, and on Oct. 3, 1943, Times New Roman debuted on the bright white broadsheets of the London daily.

Here’s the problem with this tidy account: Evidence found in 1987 — drawings for letters and corresponding brass plates — suggests that the real father of the font wasn’t a typographer at all, but a wooden boat designer from Boston named William Starling Burgess.

Chas Freeman … is a former diplomat who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his visit to China in 1972. Because Freeman was working during the discussions between Nixon and Zhou Enlai, he knows that one of the most famous stories about Zhou is not true. Half the commencement speakers in America have quoted Zhou’s alleged response when asked whether the French Revolution had been a success: “Too soon to tell.” Ah, those far-seeing Chinese! In fact, Freeman points out, Zhou was not talking about the French Revolution of 1789. He was talking about the upheavals that began in France in 1968 and had not fully simmered down by the time he and Nixon talked.

If you feel that Catholicism or Christianity or religion is not represented, by detractors or defenders, in ways that honor its profundity and beauty, live out its profundity and beauty. To do this is more telling than any argument.

Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve is some kind of great movie. And yet, like most of the best Hollywood movies of its time, its emotional range is narrow, it makes almost no pretensions to observation of American life or to social satire, its characterization is almost nil and its conflicts a clash of stereotypes. It is, in short, “classic” Hollywood and so has none of the features by which we are accustomed to recognize serious art or dramaturgy. And yet it can surely be argued from the experience of this wonderfully funny movie that its effect on us is somehow serious—that it has the richness, completeness, and resonance by which we recognize something fully and seriously done, whether we can explain it or not—and no one has yet quite accounted for or settled on a way of explaining the power and force, the peculiar beauty of the Hollywood studio film at its best. But The Lady Eve gives us some leading clues to the whole Hollywood achievement. Though it might be objected that this Hollywood movie is a poor example of the studio film, since Sturges was unquestionably an auteur, one of the first within a major studio, an independent artist with a coherent body of unmistakably personal work. But unlike Welles and Chaplin, Sturges was an artist who not only did not fight the Hollywood system, but who hardly seemed able to function without it. And he was happiest, most secure as an artist, when he was dealing with the formulas and stereotypes that the great studios had long ago established and imposed on the imagination of the world. But since his response to those formulas, happy and whole-hearted as it was, was also relatively sophisticated, his work gives a specially helpful insight into the way these formulas—the charms and totems of the so-called Hollywood magic—work on us.

What is strangest in the recent waves of young arrivals in Silicon Valley is that they tend no longer to be downtrodden geniuses rejected in the playing of social status games, but sterling alpha males. Legions of perfect specimens seem to have grown up in manicured childhoods, nothing scrappy about them. When children started to be raised perfectly in the 1990s, chauffeured from one play date to the next, I wondered what world they would want as adults. Socialism? Facebook and similar designs seem to me continuations of the artificial order we gave children during the boom years.

I was just struck by this in recent discussions about instituting a no laptop policy in the classroom. It was so self-evident that maybe it’s just obvious, but I hadn’t thought about it in quite this way before. If you want to teach and run your class as you did in the nineties (or as others did in the nineties), then it makes sense to institute a no laptop policy (and obviously a no phone policy) in your classroom. Basically, in order to adopt those practices one has to recreate the technological-material conditions of the period. Now, as it turns out, those conditions in the nineties were much like the conditions throughout the 20th century, at least for humanities classes. The key materials of desks, chairs, lights, books, paper, pens, chalk, etc. had been functionally the same for decades. It’s a little naive, but still understandable, that one would misrecognize these historical conditions for absolute ones.

Part of the weakness of current theological warfare is that it is premised on stable, lifelong belief – each side congealed into its rival (but weirdly symmetrical) creeds. Likewise, in contemporary politics, the worst crime you can apparently commit is to change your mind. Yet people’s beliefs are often not stable, and are fluctuating. We are all flip-floppers. Our “ideas” may be rather as Woolf imagined consciousness, a flicker of different and self-annulling impressions and convictions. What if you were a strong Christian believer, and you woke one night, terrified by the sudden awareness that God does not exist? Hours pass in this unillusioned crisis, and then blessed sleep finally returns. The next day, you wake up and the awful doubt – a thing of the night – has mysteriously disappeared. You continue to “believe in God”. But what does such belief now mean? If it has not been annulled by the doubt of the night, does it now contain the memory of its inversion, as a room might trap a bad smell? An essay or work of polemic finds it hard to describe the texture of such fluctuation, whereas the novelist understands that to tell a story is to novelise an idea, to dramatise it. There is no need to make a tidy solution of belief; to the novelist, a messy error might be much more interesting. The Brothers Karamazov offers a famous example from the 19th century – a novel in which the author, a fiercely Christian believer, argued against his own beliefs so powerfully that many readers are swayed by Ivan Karamazov’s atheism (as Dostoevsky feared might happen).

Dylan’s refusal to be known is not simply a celebrity’s ploy, but a passion that has shaped his work. As his songs have become more introspective, the introspections have become more impersonal, the confidences of a no-man without past or future. Bob Dylan as identifiable persona has been disappearing into his songs, which is what he wants. This terrifies his audiences. They could accept a consistent image — roving minstrel, poet of alienation, spokesman for youth — in lieu of the “real” Bob Dylan. But his progressive self-annihilation cannot be contained in a game of let’s pretend, and it conjures up nightmares of madness, mutilation, death.

The nightmares are chimerical; there is a continuing self, the Bobby Dylan friends describe as shy and defensive, hyped up, careless of his health, a bit scared by fame, unmaterialistic but shrewd about money, a professional absorbed in his craft. Dylan’s songs bear the stigmata of an authentic middle-class adolescence; his eye for detail, sense of humor, and skill at evoking the archetypal sexual skirmishes show that some part of him is of as well as in the world. As further evidence, he has a wife, son, and house in Woodstock, New York. Instead of an image, Dylan has created a magic theater in which the public gets lost willy-nilly. Yet he is more — or less — than the sum of his illusions.

The act of translating what for me are the mysterious symbols of communication into actual comprehension has always been a hardship to me. I often read a sentence two or three times before I truly understand it; must restructure its syntax and sound out of its syllables before I can begin to absorb its meaning and move on to the next sentence. And when I make the mistake of becoming aware that I am reading, and behaving in a way that enables this mysterious, electrically charged process to take place, my mind balks and goes blank and I become anxious and stop.

The Incarnation, the coming of Christ in the form of a servant who cannot be recognized by the eye of flesh and blood, but only by the eye of faith, puts an end to all claims of the imagination to be the faculty which decides what is truly sacred and what is profane. A pagan god can appear on earth in disguise but, so long as he wears his disguise, no man is expected to recognize him nor can. But Christ appears looking just like any other man, yet claims that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that no man can come to God the Father except through Him. The contradiction between the profane appearance and the sacred assertion is impassible to the imagination.