Finished reading: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow 📚
Currently reading: Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins 📚
12 Get Back Moments You Need to Know to Act Like You Watched the Whole Thing — I mean, yeah, if you’re into the whole TL;DW thing. But the chief point of the film, as I see it, is the way that moments of brilliance can emerge unexpectedly from a miasma of boredom and tension.
My colleague Perry Glanzer is 100% correct:
The reality is, when it comes to faculty formation, the Christian mission is not a high priority at Baylor University, compared to other goals like becoming an elite “R1” research institution. Thus, although millions have been poured into helping Baylor become R1, there are no specific financial incentives to help faculty do Christian scholarship, learn more about Christian teaching (versus teaching and learning in general) or to encourage Christian service. Moreover, there is no clarity about what “Christian” even means at Baylor, despite the administration’s constant insistence that our school is “unambiguously Christian.”
David Brooks with a shrewd inquiry:
Donald Trump is the near-opposite of the Burkean conservatism I’ve described here. How did a movement built on sympathy and wisdom lead to a man who possesses neither? How did a movement that put such importance on the moral formation of the individual end up elevating an unashamed moral degenerate? How did a movement built on an image of society as a complex organism give rise to the simplistic dichotomies of manipulative populism? How did a movement based on respect for the wisdom of the past end up with Trump’s authoritarian campaign boast “I alone can fix it,” perhaps the least conservative sentence it is possible to utter?
Keep reading for his answers, which I think are spot-on.
James Hankins: “One clear change [in historical scholarship] was the coverage of what my colleagues call the ‘deep past,’ meaning anything that happened before 1700. In 1992, 17% of sessions were devoted to the deep past, in 2022 only 8%. History as it is done in 2022 is almost entirely devoted to the history of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Here in Waco we get “SpaceX thunder”: reverberations from the rocket testing site fifteen miles away in McGregor. Last night we had the strongest thunder I’ve experienced in my eight years here – the entire house rattled. Maybe related to this?
Lovely New Yorker -ish image on the cover of the LRB.
I argue that how we configure the birth of the genre [of science fiction] has consequences for how we read the mode today. If we say SF begins with Frankenstein then we are saying that it is, at root, a Gothic mode, and that one of its shaping myths is the scientific advance and the unintended consequences thereof, ‘hubris clobbered by nemesis’ as Aldiss puts it. If we say: ‘SF begins at the end of the 19th-century and the beginning of the 20th’ then we’re saying SF is about modernity: industrialisation, technological acceleration and the deracinated nature of contemporary life.
By saying ‘SF begins with Kepler’ I am saying something with large consequences for how we read SF nowadays, for the way it figures — or so I believe. To be specific I am saying: SF is born out of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and its rise coincided with two other things themselves closely tangled-up with that social and cultural earthquake: the scientific revolution, and the rise of Capitalism.
I’ve read Adam’s book, and he makes this case powerfully. I like to think that it converges in interesting ways with an essay of mine on fantasy.