I think it’s important to realize that what happened in the Swartz case happens it lots and lots of federal criminal cases. Yes, the prosecutors tried to force a plea deal by scaring the defendant with arguments that he would be locked away for a long time if he was convicted at trial. Yes, the prosecutors filed a superseding indictment designed to scare Swartz evem more in to pleading guilty (it actually had no effect on the likely sentence, but it’s a powerful scare tactic). Yes, the prosecutors insisted on jail time and a felony conviction as part of a plea. But it is not particularly surprising for federal prosecutors to use those tactics. What’s unusual about the Swartz case is that it involved a highly charismatic defendant with very powerful friends in a position to object to these common practices. That’s not to excuse what happened, but rather to direct the energy that is angry about what happened. If you want to end these tactics, don’t just complain about the Swartz case. Don’t just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country — mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring.
I kept writing through the summer, and in August the baby was born and I’d cradle him in my left arm while writing melodies at the piano with my right, and I said, let Osiris the keeper of the gates be my witness, other songwriters may go soft when they get to be parents but I am going to keep going all the way down into the inner darkness, it will set a good example for the baby, and besides, what am I going to do, suddenly start writing songs about cute things instead of songs about how to wrest cries of triumph from the screaming places? Please. May the baby grow up to spit in my face if I should pose that hard.
Best postage stamp that ever will be, obvsly.
Pace Roger Kimball, my patron, my host, my colleague in literature: political stand-off, not some conspiracy against civilization, was and is depriving almost all the pupils at Liberty and Milton Elementary Schools of the most distant chance at Kipling, leaving the author a rather puny permanence in the company of people like me.If we want a strong, uniting culture, we have to build it on functional politics. The best thing Kimball could do for the traditions he loves is to withdraw any support for his partisans’ intransigence. The same thing has to happen on the Left, but it is fitting that someone on the Right should lead, since the “Christian nation” rhetoric is over there. Talk about ideology: it’s much more fundamentally part of the West’s principles and its genius to reconcile with opponents than to be “righteous overmuch.”
Photo by Marcin Ryczek, via @brainpicker on Twitter.
Academy of American Poets. A lovely poster, though the Rilke quote is the surest recipe I can think of for really bad verse.
So the argument about the adaptiveness of stories, in Pinker, Gottschall, and Boyd alike, goes something like this: we are evolutionarily wired to be receptive to stories because receptiveness to stories gave our ancestors reproductive advantages. Those who could think narratively had a fund of virtual experience that they could use to anticipate problems, or to respond more constructively to them when they arrived unexpectedly. This led to longer lives and more offspring, offspring who inherited whatever cognitive equipment is associated with story-sensitivity, which over several thousand years produced our cultural environment, positively awash in every kind of narrative.It is in light of this account that Gottschall affirms that “Story is the counterforce to social disorder, the tendency of things to fall apart. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold.” As someone who has devoted much of his life to reading, teaching, and writing about stories, this account certainly captures my attention—but is it true? And how would we know if it is true? Presumably not all people love stories equally; some, I imagine, are quite indifferent to stories. Are those people less likely to pass along their genes than the story-lovers among us? Imagine a society made up almost wholly of story-disdainers: would such a society fail to thrive? How might we correlate love-of-story with other traits we today have inherited from our distant ancestors, for instance, selfishness, or altruism, or competitiveness?
Lindisfarne Gospels
This is one of the very few pages on which Eadfrith’s original 7th century script can be admired almost entirely free of the gloss added by Aldred in the 10th century. Clear and black, very assured and regular in form, this script, designed for formal use, is known technically as insular majuscule. The page gives details of particular passages in St John which are to be read on specific feast days.