Crown of Noble and Virtuous Women page 21, Book 3.
Crown of Noble and Virtuous Womenwas continually printed into the nineteenth century.
Photo of the Day: Red Fox Near Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada
Photo by: Victor Liu (Calgary, Alberta, Canada); Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada
Dreher and Sullivan alike are Christians. I’m not. They assume that Jesus’s call to “turn the other cheek” means that Christianity has acted as a historic brake on violence. As a Jew, I have to question that assumption. After all, the number of Christian countries in history that have been governed according to principles of non-violence is exactly zero. Someone from a religious tradition whose founding texts articulated rules about when violence is justified or permitted might look at the long history of Christian violence – not just violence by Christians, but violence undertaken with the Church’s encouragement and undertaken in the name of Jesus – and say: gee, maybe saying “turn the other cheek” backfires, makes all violence seem equally sinful, and therefore opens the gate to truly horrific behavior?I’m not endorsing that view – I’m just saying that there are perfectly logical arguments that can be made that completely reverse the Christian apologetic claim that because Jesus preached non-violence and Muhammad (like Moses) led an army, therefore Christian civilization is inherently less-violent than Muslim (or Jewish?) civilization. Obviously, if you’re a Christian, you’ll find a Christian apologetic argument congenial. But that doesn’t mean it has analytical value.
On World Gone Wrong Dylan did this astonishing cover of a 1930s song by the Mississippi Sheiks
My writing space has no desk or shelves. There’s no space for books, whether for reference or simply to distract me from the looming deadline in hand. There aren’t even any walls or space to pin up images as inspiration.What my writing space does have though, is windows. Loads of them. 360 degree windows - Imax strength.
What makes these windows even more special is the fact that the view through them changes every second: one minute it’s the electric buzz of Elephant and Castle, the next time I look up, I’m in the shadows of the glorious South Bank and Big Ben.
You see, Heroic, and Saving Daisy before it, were written entirely on the X68 bus: the glorious red chariot that shepherds me to and from work. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
When you combine this trend with the Republican Party’s sharp libertarian turn on economics and modest libertarian turn on civil liberties, you could argue that libertarian ideology has never enjoyed more bipartisan influence than it does right now. And yet a thoroughoing synthesis, of the kind that Lindsey hoped for, between libertarianism’s economic and social ideas seems as unlikely as ever. Instead, the kind of “liberaltarianism” that’s increasingly ascendant is one that combines a highly individualistic view of our social and cultural fabric, and government’s role therein, with a statist understanding of government’s role in providing economic security — and security, period. As Scott Galupo shrewdly puts it, it’s big government as ”a guarantor of personal liberation and self-actualization” — unless your form of self-actualization runs afoul of the national security state, in which case you can be tried in a star chamber and executed by drone.
Learn how conservators at the Harry Ransom Center painstakingly repaired and framed a Norman Bel Geddes poster design for the 1926 Macy’s Christmas Parade.
Last week, one of my college friends, who now manages vast sums at a hedge fund, visited me. He’s the most rational person I know, so I asked him how he would go about deciding whether to go to grad school in a discipline like English or comparative literature. He dealt immediately with the sample bias problem by turning toward statistics. His first step, he said, would be to ignore the stories of individual grad students, both good and bad. Their experiences are too variable and path-dependent, and their stories are too likely to assume an unwarranted weight in our minds. Instead, he said, he would focus on the “base rates”: that is, on the numbers that give you a broad statistical picture of outcomes from graduate school in the humanities. What percentage of graduate students end up with tenure? (About one in four.) How much more unhappy are graduate students than other people? (About fifty-four per cent of graduate students report feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning,” as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.) To make a rational decision, he told me, you have to see the big picture, because your experience is likely to be typical, rather than exceptional. “If you take a broader view of the profession,” he told me, “it seems like a terrible idea to go to graduate school.”Perhaps that’s the rational conclusion, but, if so, it’s beset on all sides by confounding little puzzles; they act like streams that divert and weaken the river of rational thought. Graduate school, for example, is a one-time-only offer. Very few people start doctoral programs later in life. If you pass it up, you pass it up forever. Given that, isn’t walking away actually the rash decision? (This kind of thinking is a subspecies of the habit of mind psychologists call loss aversion: once you have something, it’s very hard to give it up; if you get into grad school, it’s very hard not to go.) And then there’s the fact that graduate school, no matter how bad an idea it might be in the long term, is almost always fulfilling and worthwhile in the short term. As our conversation continued, my friend was struck by this. “How many people get paid to read what they want to read,” he asked, “and study what they want to study?” He paused. ”If I got into a really good program, I would probably go.”
Experience has taught me that the less satisfying the narrative of the day has been, the more likely I am to be unable to let it go. My body keeps me awake until my mind has sculpted something more shapely from the day or I am able to distract it with a more engaging narrative borrowed from the pages of a book. The vigilance of the waking hours is over but so is the magic lantern of event. No matter how glad I am to sink into unconsciousness, this always feels like a loss. Children, who are in so many ways more fully alive than us, understand this intuitively, I think. It’s a rare child who volunteers to go to bed: they too need stories, borrowed narratives to persuade them away from the thrills and puzzles of their own day.
Two boys pose on a balcony with the Tenerife port in the background in Puerto Orotava, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, May 1930.Photograph by Wilhelm Tobien, National Geographic