Reviews and News:
Arnold Kling on cultural intelligence: “Thanks to work in a number of related fields, collected in some exceptionally important books published in just the past few years, it is becoming increasingly apparent that progress tends to arise from the evolution of decentralized trial-and-error processes more than from grand schemes launched by planners and revolutionaries.”
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What a great time for a book on Americans’ drinking habits.
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A. Scott Berg’s 1978 book on the man who edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe – Max Perkins: Editor of Genius – has been turned into a film starring Colin Firth, Jude Law, and Nicole Kidman. It’s released in the U.S. today.
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Queen Elizabeth II’s ten favorite pieces of music.
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David Attenborough on one of the great expeditions of the 18th century: “We tend to take it for granted these days that an expedition setting out for a little-known part of the world will bring back detailed observations and collections of all the new things it encounters. But that has not always been so. The first expedition to do such a thing on any scale was HMS Endeavour, which set out from Plymouth for the Pacific in 1768.”
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The best outdoor cinemas.
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Chuffah “is the random nonsense characters in a scene talk about before getting to the meat of it that leads to story.” Why are today’s movies so full of it?
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If you’re an untenured academic in the humanities, and you happen to be a religious or social conservative, Mark Bauerlein has some advice for you.
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Essay of the Day:
The Scottish writer James Meek has written a long and thoughtful essay on British farms and farming in the run-up to the Brexit vote on June 23rd.
“Between its towns and cities, the rumpled skin of lowland Britain is covered and pierced in many ways, by church steeples, nuclear reactors, safari parks, six-lane highways, ruined monasteries, radio telescopes, wind turbines, landfill sites, golf courses. Mostly, though, it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by hedges and lines of trees and narrow lanes. Farmed fields, in other words. We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so much else has changed?
“To the traveller passing at speed, even to the hiker or dog-walker, farmed fields are anonymous elements that contribute to a pattern. It’s the landscape the eye seeks, not any of the fields making it up. Most fields have no individuality to a stranger; at best, a fine oak in the middle, or a pretty horse grazing. Few can tell crops apart, or estimate a field’s size in acres. Visitors to the countryside see farms without seeing them. They see the odd farmyard, and they see a mass of fields. A passer-by can’t connect a field to a particular farm.”
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Image of the Day: They’d been forgotten until recently, but two small windows in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, depict Confederate flags. They have to go.
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Poem: Sarah Ruden, “King David Refuses to Mourn His Son”
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