Alan Jacobs

Rory Stewart:

Now I was walking downstream in Cumbria. It was a holiday: I hoped to let my thoughts settle, but I also hoped to learn more by walking the ground because the Eden is the vital artery of the constituency of which I am MP. Eden, too, was once a place of conflict. For 400 years it was a north-west frontier province of proxy wars against Scotland. And these were not the first fights. Beginning at the source, among the dark rivulets of the Mallerstang Valley, I soon passed the castle of the slayer of Thomas Becket. Ten miles later, I passed Crosby Garret, where a Roman frontier cavalryman had discarded a glittering mask and helmet. (It was dug up in May this year). By the time I reached the narrow deserted gorges at the very centre of the river, I was in green, fertile land. But the valley was always shadowed by the limestone hills and their histories.

Eden attracts far fewer visitors than its beauty deserves, perhaps because it is not what a visitor to Cumbria expects. When a tourist climbs Wild Boar Fell from Garsdale in Yorkshire, or walks from Martindale in the Lakes or Alston, in the Pennines, they cross moss and becks, beneath mists and eagles. And if they glimpse, 1,500ft below, a great, cultivated river basin, stretching towards a fertile plain and the sea, they must be tempted to ignore it. After all, it doesn’t make sense. How could it be there – this great flat slab of sandstone, 90 miles long and 20 miles wide? How could it wedge itself between the limestone mountains of the dales, the fells and the borders?

Why do we weed the collection? First, we don’t have much choice. We’re running out of space and building a wing onto the library to make room for more books just isn’t in the cards.It would be an irresponsible use of funds. But there’s a more positive reason to weed the collection. Not all books age gracefully. Some weren’t much good to begin with, and they haven’t improved with age. Lots of them confidently state truths that are no longer true, if they ever were. Most of the books we remove are benignly bad - like advice books for executives on how to use computers to improve payroll management circa 1975; they aren’t dangerous unless large numbers of them fall on your head. But others are recklessly bad, such as state-of-the art reviews of how to treat mental illness or how to deal with juvenile delinquency published in 1970. I’m not talking about classics, about books that shaped our thinking and continue to be cited. I’m talking about books that weren’t all that great when they were published. And libraries are full of them.

Another of the king’s chief men, approving of his wise words and exhortations, added thereafter: ‘The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.’

mwfrost:

via io9

This is a deluxe copy of the Quintet (Khamsah) of Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī (d.725 AH /1325 CE). Although now incomplete, this manuscript was penned in nastaʿlīq script by the famous late 16th century Mughal calligrapher Muḥammad Ḥusayn Zarrīn Qalam al-Kashmīrī and decorated by a number of illuminators and painters. Its illustrations are signed by eleven painters: Laʿl (Lāl), Manūhar, Sānwalah, Farrukh, Alīqulī, Dharamdās, Narsing, Jagannāth, Miskīnā, Mukund, and Sūrdās Gujarātī. On the other hand, its headpieces and a medallion are inscribed with the names of Ḥusayn Naqqāsh, Manṣūr Naqqāsh, Khvājah Jān Shīrāzī, and Luṭf Allāh Muẕahhib. The codex has beautifully decorated borders with vegetal, bird, animal motifs and human figures. The figures are portrayed in various traditional activities such as praying, reading and hunting. Khusraw and Shīrīn preside over the wedding of youths.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBk3ynRbtsw?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]

Via Scott McCloud

Giacometti in his studio, via Paris Review

information considered and reconsidered

The Fourth Amendment’s increasing irrelevance stems from the fact that the Supreme Court is mired in precedent decided in another era. Over the past 200 years, the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees have been construed largely in the context of what might be called “physical searches”—entry into a house or car; a stop and frisk of a person on the street; or rifling through a person’s private papers. But today, with the introduction of devices that can see through walls and clothes, monitor public thoroughfares twenty-four hours a day, and access millions of records in seconds, police are relying much more heavily on what might be called “virtual searches,” investigative techniques that do not require physical access to premises, people, papers or effects and that can often be carried out covertly from far away. As Abdullah’s case illustrates, this technological revolution is well on its way to drastically altering the way police go about looking for evidence of crime. To date, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment has both failed to anticipate this revolution and continued to ignore it.

I’ve been emphasizing the bad news, but I do think it’s genuinely good news that well-educated opinion — as opposed to just well-educated behavior — has been moving in a more conservative direction on divorce. (48 percent of college-educated Americans now agree that ‘divorce should be more difficult to obtain,’ up from just 36 percent in the 1970s.) When social conservatives try to envision public policy responses to the crisis of the American family, they’re almost inevitably stymied by the fact that our upper class (which is, by extension, our policymaking class), while increasingly conservative in the way its members arrange their own private lives, remains intensely allergic to the kind of legal and cultural paternalism that certain earlier elites practiced as a matter of course. I’ve suggested before that America would benefit if its upper class showed 'a willingness to translate some of the more conservative habits they’ve embraced (or partially embraced) in their personal lives into law and public policy,’ but I’ve never seen much reason for optimism that our elite might actually move in this direction. So the fact that there’s been an uptick in college-educated support for reforming divorce laws is better news than I expected — and a sign, perhaps, that the educated class’s present mix of private conservatism and public permissiveness isn’t set in stone.