The most significant thing about the feature on ‘Why Criticism Matters’ is the title. The New York Times would never find it necessary to publish an article on why science, mathematics, medicine, music or art matters. The need to explain why criticism matters emphasizes as clearly as possible the fact that it doesn’t.
Throughout his book, but especially toward the end, Metaxas turns this erudite and at times abstruse theologian into a living and tragic human being. I would be less than honest if I did not admit that bringing this man—and his intransigence on all the important questions of our time—so vividly to life raises awkward questions for the liberalism in which I put my own faith. How, precisely, would a Rawlsian have acted in those dark times? Must we not move beyond this-worldly conceptions of politics as a struggle for power to other-worldly concerns with repentance and days of judgment, if we are to grasp how the Nazis were able to combine their own rational plans to kill millions with satanically inspired ideas about a Thousand Year Reich, and also how some people were able to resist those plans? Is it possible to face death with courage without knowing that a better life awaits? Can one be loyal to one’s collaborators in the resistance without being loyal to some higher power? Can faith help overcome torture? Lurking behind all such questions is the major one: if the problem of evil is not one that humans can solve, have we no choice but to rely on God for help? Does Bonhoeffer’s greatness prove his rightness?Yet when I put this book down, I realized that its author, no doubt inadvertently, had helped me to answer these questions. Bonhoeffer may have been convinced that God was telling him what to do, but I am not convinced. Ironically, Metaxas’s passion, the intensity of his engagement with his subject, wound up persuading me of the importance of the very autonomy that Bonhoeffer believed that we do not possess. Even if God told Bonhoeffer what to do, it was Bonhoeffer who chose God in the first place. It was not a humble servant of the Lord who involved himself in the resistance, but a singular human being who, for whatever reason, was able to know what to do when faced with the problem of evil.
It is important to note in this context that there is no simple relationship between faith and courage. The German Christians who collaborated with Hitler may have abused religion, but they considered themselves religious. At the same time, many—if not most—of the resisters to Hitler were not Christian believers and did not take orders from God. They included Prussian generals, and left-wingers (including even a few communists), and the student movement known as the White Rose. Their bravery had nothing to do with religion. One should come away from the Bonhoeffer story impressed by religion, but not in awe of it. The human picture is more complicated.
In this fine biography, Metaxas stays close to the story and refrains from any efforts at theory. All the more reason to read it: when it comes to the strengths and the limits of post-Kantian liberalism, we already have theory aplenty. But be careful what you read it for. You can understand this book, if you wish, as making the case for belief in an all-powerful God, though a biography is not a work of philosophy. But unless you read it also as a testimony to the capacity for choice that mortal beings may be called upon to exercise when evil looms among them, its larger and most stirring lesson will be lost.
Female (detail) behind the figure of the Bacchante in Scene VII, Villa of the Mysteries, Porta Ercolano, Italy
Apart from being gratified that my book has been filmed by one of the best living English-speaking producer-directors, instead of by some pornhound or other camera-carrying cretin, I cannot say that my life has been changed in any way by Stanley Kubrick’s success. I seem to have less rather than more money, but I have always seemed to have less. I get odd letters from cranks, accusing me of Sin against the Holy Ghost; invariably, I should think, masturbators, who, having seen the film, have discovered the book, used it as an instrument of auto-erotic release, and then fastened their post-coital guilt on me. Generally I am filled with a vague displeasure that the gap between a literary impact and a cinematic one be so great, not only a temporal gap but an aesthetic one.
To insist in the face of all this that Second Life is not a game is to miss out on the way it illuminates what’s becoming of that impulse. Yes, Second Life lacks points, built-in goals, and other features we have long thought definitive of games. But ever since Dungeons and Dragons introduced us to the hitherto unheard-of concept of a game that never ends, we have been living in an era that requires us to constantly revise our definitions. The evolution of video games has been a furious and ceaseless reinvention of the form. We have games now being woven into otherwise utilitarian aspects of social life, like Foursquare, and games like FarmVille that straddle the line between work and play. The future of play has never looked more open-ended, protean, and complex—or, to put it another way, more like Second Life.
Most linguistics departments have an introduction-to-language course in which students other than linguistics majors can be exposed to at least something of the mysteries of language and communication: signing apes and dancing bees; wild children and lateralization; logographic writing and the Rosetta Stone; pit and spit; Sir William Jones and Professor Henry Higgins; isoglosses and Grimm’s Law; Jabberwocky and colourless green ideas; and of course, without fail, the Eskimos and their multiple words for snow.Few among us, I’m sure, can say with certainty that we never told an awestruck sea of upturned sophomore faces about the multitude of snow descriptors used by these lexically profligate hyperborean nomads, about whom so little information is repeated so often to so many. Linguists have been just as active as schoolteachers or general knowledge columnists in spreading the entrancing story. What a pity the story is unredeemed piffle… .
Don’t be a coward like me. Stand up and tell the speaker this: C.W. Schultz-Lorentzen’s Dictionary of the West Greenlandic Eskimo Language (1927) gives just two possibly relevant roots: qanik, meaning ‘snow in the air’ or ‘snowflake’, and aput, meaning ‘snow on the ground’. Then add that you would be interested to know if the speaker can cite any more.
This will not make you the most popular person in the room. It will have an effect roughly comparable to pouring fifty gallons of thick oatmeal into a harpsichord during a baroque recital. But it will strike a blow for truth, responsibility, and standards of evidence in linguistics.
A landmark study published in 2003 in Psychological Science by Iowa State Professor Craig Anderson and other academics, which surveyed significant research on the topic up until that point, found “unequivocal evidence” that violent television and films, video games, and music, along with other forms of media violence, increase the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts. The effects appear more profound when it comes to milder forms of aggression, but they exist for severe forms, too. For example, one study in Anderson’s survey revealed that violent TV exposure at age 14 significantly predicted assault and fighting behavior at 16 or 22 years of age, even after controlling for a host of variables such as family income, parental education, verbal intelligence, and neighborhood characteristics. Anderson’s research also found that large-scale longitudinal studies provide converging evidence linking frequent exposure to violent media in childhood with aggression later in life, including physical assaults and spousal abuse.
If this is correct, then we have to be willing to consider the effects of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto just as seriously as we consider the effects of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Hard to find people who are willing to take all the media equally seriously, or equally lightly. We pick and choose.
How do you navigate content on the iPad? Scroll or flip? In 1987, the biggest neck beards in tech held conference on the Future of Hypertext and there were two camps ‘Card Sharks’ and 'Holy Scrollers’ and they had an epic fight over the following question: Should you scroll or flip pages on the screen? Who won the fight?
I break tablet reading distances into three main categories—Bed, Knee, and Breakfast—and define the categories by generic use case:• Bed (Close to face): Reading a novel on your stomach, lying in bed with the iPad propped up on a pillow.
• Knee (Medium distance from face): Sitting on the couch or perhaps the Eurostar on your way to Paris, the iPad on your knee, catching up on Instapaper.
• Breakfast (Far from face): The iPad, propped up by the Apple case at a comfortable angle, behind your breakfast coffee and bagel, allowing for handsfree news reading as you wipe cream cheese from the corner of your mouth.
So: distances near, medium, and far.