Alan Jacobs

Sullivan’s statement was a missive from the bureaucratic bowels of an accounting machine. It was surely manufactured by public relations specialists and lawyers whose interests are simply fiduciary, concerned only with legal liability and fundraising. There are no people, just “interests”; no judgments, just “initiatives”; no moral failures, just “issues.” There were, as one of my colleagues put it, no rapes, no victims, no women, no perpetrators—just “issues related to sexual misconduct.” And the only response is more policies, more initiatives, more accounting.

The captains of erudition are firmly at the helm at the modern American university. With their phalanx of managers, they are guiding us into seas of indistinction, into a future where the university is just another modern bureaucracy without ends, without purpose. And the faculty is asleep on the deck.

According to a report by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, the top ten leading causes of injury in the workplace are as follows:

• Lightning strikes
• Unknown
• Predation
• Betrayal
• Curses (ancient + modern)
• Ant bites
• Falling
• Spider bites
• Bites (other)
• Natural causes

I am not particularly interested in the book as object, or in the technology of the transmission of the text. Cuneiform, papyrus and codex, Linear A and B, the invention of movable type, all that sort of stuff. These have been recurrent topics in the new field since the 1970s, and the focus seemed almost wilfully to disregard the content of the texts that were transmitted. Do these new book historians actually love reading?

One of them, Frederick G Kilgour, has defined the book as “a storehouse of human knowledge intended for dissemination in the form of an artefact that is portable – or at least transportable – and that contains arrangements of signs that convey information. The information may comprise stories, myths, songs, and reality; the signs may be representations of human speech or graphic presentations of such things as maps, musical notes, or pictures.” The definition hardly trips off the tongue. No one, encountering such a formulation, is likely to get excited and set off in search of one of those. Give me Kafka’s definition of a book any day: “the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Admittedly that wouldn’t help you to find one of them in an attic, but you recognise immediately that Kafka gets it, and Kilgour does not.

[gallery] Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Megaliths, featured in Adam Thorpe’s On Silbury Hill. Image: Lauren McLean/V&A Images, via the New Statesman

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houghtonlib:

Poster for a 1917 production of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, a play written for Shakespeare’s tercentenary by Percy MacKaye. An outgrowth of MacKaye’s belief in community theater, it was first performed in St. Louis in 1914 with a cast of 7,000.

MS Thr 412

Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Not long ago an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank’s rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: a rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That’s not all that surprising; it’s what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. ‘All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier,’ says Norton. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: the happiness will come from the money they don’t yet have. To the general rule that money, above a certain low level, cannot buy happiness there is one exception. 'While spending money upon oneself does nothing for one’s happiness,’ says Norton, 'spending it on others increases happiness.’

‘Social justice’ is an awkward term for an immensely important project, perhaps the most important project, which is to make the world a more equitable, fair, and compassionate place. But the project for social justice has been captured by an elite strata of post-collegiate, digitally-enabled children of privilege, who do not pursue that project as an end, but rather use it as a means with which to compete, socially and professionally, with each other. In that use, they value not speech or actions that actually result in a better world, but rather those that result in greater social reward, which in the digital world is obvious and explicit. That means that they prefer engagement that creates a) outrage and b) jokes, rather than engagement that leads to positive change. In this disregard for actual political success, they reveal their own privilege, as it’s only the privileged who could ever have so little regard for actual, material progress. As long as they are allowed to co-opt the movement for social justice for their own personal aggrandizement, the world will not improve, not for women, people of color, gay and transgender people, or the poor.

In his latest speech, Archbishop Welby acknowledged for the first time that the Lambeth conference—a once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops—might never happen again. Nor, he made clear, was it even certain whether the basis existed for convening another “primates’ meeting"—a global gathering of slightly lesser status which would normally take place every couple of years. In any case, he was no longer prepared to take sole responsibility for deciding such matters; instead there should be a "collegial model of leadership” with Anglican leaders from around the world deciding which meetings were worthwhile. Despite all this, the archbishop gallantly insisted, reports of the global club’s death were exaggerated. “The Anglican Communion exists and is flourishing in roughly 165 countries.”

That may be sort-of true as far as it goes, but it is rather like the Queen saying that the Commonwealth exists. Of course it does, in the sense that nobody has abolished it, and not many people have left it. But post-imperial arrangements can lose salience very very gradually, to the point where the boundary between existence and non-existence becomes almost imperceptible.

[gallery] smithsonianlibraries:

“not compatible with iOS devices”

from Animal mechanism: a treatise on terrestrial and aerial locomotion (1874)

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Austin Kleon:

David Hockney, on his favorite drawing:

There’s a drawing by Rembrandt, I think it’s the greatest drawing ever done. It’s in the British Museum and it’s of a family teaching a child to walk, so it’s a universal thing, everybody has experienced this or seen it happen. Everybody. I used to print out Rembrandt drawings big and give them to people and say: “If you find a better drawing send it to me.”

And:

“I used to say to people, ‘I have a reproduction of the best drawing ever made in my pocket’ and I would pull it out and I would convince them, within a minute, that it was the best. It is a Rembrant from the British Museum of a little family teaching a little girl to walk. Everybody at home has a picture like that. The Rembrant, for me, tells me about who you are. I’m looking at the marks and I can feel his arm. That wouldn’t be possible with a photograph – it would be a performance. Rembrant was not intervening in any way, meaning it is the greatest work of art. You don’t see it at first. It is a virtuoso drawing but it doesn’t shout out.”

And:

When I look at these marks, I know a Chinese master of the seventeenth century would recognise instantly that this drawing was the work of a master. Very few people could get near this… The tenderness this drawing shows is not possible with photography.