I'm way behind on sharing these. I know you guys have been waiting. Here they are!
Writers have rituals. But what exactly constitutes a ritual in this case?
Pretty granular piece, from 2014, about the philosophers Janet Radcliffe-Richards and Derek Parfit, and their “remarkably intellectual” marriage.
Brian Vickers takes apart a new Shakespeare edition:
For many readers this is the fundamental weakness of quantitative attribution study, that it abandons meaning. The 100 or 500 words used most frequently by the target author(s) are reduced to mere items to be counted, without consideration of context or meaning. But many words have many meanings, which can only be construed by the context of use, and poets create unique contexts. Romeo’s first words on seeing Juliet – “O she doth teach the torches to burn bright” – yields one word for the dataset, torches. Cleopatra’s words on Antony’s death – “The soldier’s pole is fallen” – yields two, soldier and pole. In her mouth that is not just any pole but a metaphor for their intimacy. Abandoning the sequential interplay between words and treating them as separate items for computation destroys the possibility of meaning, and of those extra meanings that are the life of drama. Of course, given the exponential increases in computing power and data storage over the past sixty years, it may well be that computerized textual analysis will ultimately go beyond treating word frequencies in isolation and will be able to cope with the full range of language. But that time has not come, as the Authorship Companion shows only too well.
A vehement piece, not without some reason, regarding some recent suggestions about Shakespeare’s authorship. I’m most interested in the idea that scholars are hiding their inevitably subjective judgments, not least from themselves, behind a veneer of “quantifiable” evidence.
This is a pretty gripping account of one couple’s decision to commit suicide together for fear of one of them being left behind, in the wilderness of an Alaskan island. There’s a bit of outdoorsy posturing by the author, and she definitely has an angle on the piece, but she allows it to be mostly about the couples them selves, and their friends. It’s worth reading.
Economics is sort of? maybe? coming to attempt to prepare itself to get ready to address its massive racial cluelessness in the wake of the George Floyd murder.
What Robinson Crusoe can teach us about life in, and before, and after, the Pandemic.
This is a really good discussion with Steven Holmes, now author (with Ivan Krastev) of The Light that Failed: a Reckoning, about the fate of liberalism in Eastern Europe, and beyond, since 1989. It is searching, unsparing, and the best kind of self-critique. I would have liked to have heard Holmes talk about how certain liberal thinkers—Trilling, Niebuhr, even John Stuart Mill in his essays on Coleridge and Bentham—anticipated some of his concerns. But still, very good. I'm especially interested in the idea that emigration from Eastern Europe has played something of an analogous functional role to the "deaths of despair" in white working class America.
Nuclear bomb tests we performed in the 1950s and 60s have now been used to show that Whale Sharks can live to a very old age—more than 100 years, in fact. That is, if they are not caught up in the nuclear bomb tests we have undertaken that teach us that.
A nice, if somewhat begrudgingly so, review of Grace Hale's new book about Athens GA in the 70s and 80s, in the NYTimes. Grace is a colleague and friend of mine, so this is cool to see for multiple reasons.
This is powerful, but sad: a reflection on the experience of what some call “ecological grief” by a scientist.
Nobody has ever suggested to me that I follow my biographies of Russell and Wittgenstein with one of Moore.…who was GE Moore and why is there such a gap between his reputation now and his reputation in the first decades of the 20th century? And what does his fall from such exalted heights tell us about the sorts of intellects that do—and do not—shine brightly for posterity?
I think this is a little unfair, though only obliquely; Monk downplays the importance of Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy,” but it seems to me the rampant anti-realism of today’s bien-pensant thought is a weird grandchild of Moore’s non-naturalist realism about goodness; in that way Moore’s thought has had, and continues to have, a tremendous influence on our world. The critics of this construal of the relationship between goodness and the world, like John McDowell, will be fortunate if in seventy or so years their views have the kind of broad cultural influence that Moore’s do today. (That may be a bit obscure.)