September 2007
how Jains live by impossible ideals
How then, is it possible to live by impossible ideals? The advantage for addressing this question to Jainism is that the problem is so very graphic there. The demands of Jain asceticism have a pretty good claim to be the most uncompromising of any enduring historical tradition: the most aggressively impractical set of injunctions which any large number of diverse families and communities has ever...
James Wood on Alter
The Psalms (like the Book of Job) were relentlessly Christianized by the King James translators. Nefesh, meaning “life breath” and, by extension, “life,” was translated by Jerome in the Latin Vulgate as anima and then as “soul” in the K.J.V., even though, as Alter points out, soul “strongly suggests a body-soul split—with implications of an afterlife—that is alien to the Hebrew Bible and to Psalms...
Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
In grass meadows He makes me lie down,
by quiet waters guides me.
My life He brings back.
He leads me on pathways of justice
for His name’s sake.
Though I walk in the vale of death’s shadow,
I fear no harm,
for You are with me.
Your rod and Your staff—
it is they that console me.
You set out a table before me
in the face of my...
Google and "the bookish character of books"
The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on the brief evidence given here, a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate. The editions offered (by search or by...
philology and nationalism
In 1848, the year of revolutions, a “National Assembly” was convened at Frankfurt, to discuss unification of the German lands, civil rights and a constitution for a future Reich. The strangest thing about the assembly was its seating plan. Delegates were placed in a semi-circle facing the Speaker, but there was one seat in the centre of the semi-circle, directly opposite the Speaker, set apart...
Stephen King on the American short story
What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind...
O Lord, let it be true . . . O please, please . ....
Don’t you find it funny that the foods in many traditional diets - starting with breast milk and moving on to coconut oil, butter, eggs, and pork fat - are loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol, yet people who eat these traditional foods liberally don’t get heart disease? Nor are they fat or diabetic.
I belive the conventional wisdom on traditional foods is mistaken. The...
the Hitchens makeover
I’d noticed a touch of decline here and there, but one puts these things down to Anno Domini and the acquirement of seniority. A bit of a stomach gives a chap a position in society. A glass of refreshment, in my view, never hurt anybody. This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for? Smoking is a vice, I will...
integrating the country club
After the literary critic Anatole Broyard died in 1990, his family arranged a memorial reception at a suburban Connecticut yacht club. It was a club that claimed to have no black members until, after Mr. Broyard’s death, his mixed racial lineage was made known. After that, the club cited him as evidence of integration.
[here]
Alter's Psalter
If many of the Psalms express a powerful longing for the divine presence, they register it as an acute somatic experience, the whole body thirsting for the experience of closeness to God. Psalm 63, as I have rendered it, begins: “God, my God, for You I search./ My throat thirsts for You./ My flesh yearns for You/ in a land waste and parched, with no water.” The King James version,...
Brooklyn Books of Wonder
… certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if...
an end, at last, to the suffering
A patriotic pensioner has been given an Asbo for playing his Vera Lynn records too loudly.
George Large, 66, was handed the court order after neighbours complained about the constant repetition of Forces favourites ‘There’ll Be Bluebirds Over (The White Cliffs of Dover)’ and ‘We’ll Meet Again.” He has been banned from playing the music for two years.
...
Reihan's Facebook etiquette 101
Last week, I launched the Great Facebook Purge of 2007. In one fell swoop, I whittled down a list of 274 “friends” to a more manageable … um, 258. Even weeding out this tiny amount of people was difficult and unpleasant. Almost every subtraction made me wince. While my intention had been to de-friend every hanger-on and casual acquaintance, I just couldn’t do it. All I could...
learning to forget
IMAGINE CARRYING AROUND an entire research library on an iPod. Such a feat suddenly seemed feasible as of earlier this month, with the news that IBM physicist Stuart Parkin is close to perfecting an advance called “magnetic random access memory,” or MRAM, which will enable us to store exponentially more data on the tiniest of hard drives.
Parkin’s development, which should...
then why am I doing this to myself??
Just last month, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine published joint guidelines for physical activity and health. They suggested that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to “promote and maintain health.” What they didn’t say, though, was that more physical activity will lead us to lose weight. Indeed, the best they could say...
history as written by the dissenters
[In The Lost City] Alan Ehrenhalt writes about how history is written. It is a commonplace, and therefore a suspect notion, that “history is written by the winners.” Ehrenhalt suggests that, more often than not, it is written by the dissenters… .
[Jack] Kerouac and his fellow Beats were forever going on about the emptiness of daily life in America. Yet there they were, situated squarely in...
Evan Coyne Maloney's Automatic Bob
According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. “For several months now,” Kruh writes, “as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon.”
What...
the modes of human thinking
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of...
Stephen Bates's farewell to his religion beat
This week’s meeting between Rowan Williams and the American bishops will be my swan-song as a religious affairs correspondent, after eight years covering the subject for The Guardian. I’d have been less keen to attend had the venue been Detroit, but where better to end it? It is time to move on for me professionally, and probably for Anglicans too and this marks a suitable place to stop. There is...
the Jews
That Christ is more than idea - no Christian can know this. But that Israel is more than an idea, the Christian knows, because he sees it. For we live. We are eternal, not in the way that an idea might be eternal, but we are eternal in full reality, if eternal we be at all. And thus we are the one thing that Christians cannot doubt. The parson argued conclusively in response to Frederick the...
I wish I had a pi room
I also had one little side room we called “the pi room,” because on its walls were 53,000 digits of pi, done in pale green on black, a “Matrix” homage. But a very funny thing happened once it was up — people would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed — to the point where if someone was getting stressed about the installation deadline, we’d say,...
Theodore Dalrymple on addiction
Dalrymple is a cultural conservative; he firmly believes that human beings should be held morally accountable for their actions. For him, addiction is not only “a moral weakness par excellence,” but, even worse, the addicts themselves “tend to be bad people (if bad people are those who consistently behave badly)…. Their lives are usually selfish and self-centered…. Addicts should...
I'm a sucker for stories like this. . . .
Very late last night I found myself in the City Hall subway stop with 8 other stragglers waiting for a non-existent R train. We were all spread out across the platform, all standing, but after half an hour everyone had migrated to the benches and we were all sitting in a row. Nobody had anything to read, cellphone service wasn’t working, and most unusually, no one was attached to an ipod.
...
on lectures
H. L. Mencken: I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.
Question following a lecture on Mencken: Do you think it’s possible that come January of 2009, Bush could decide to ignore the election results and keep himself in power?
spray-fire atonement
Fasting aside, most non-Jews I know envy Yom Kippur, holiday of atonement. While not intended as the only day for Jews to expiate their sin against God and man (the daily prayer of tachanun, or supplication, is supposed to give you annual coverage), Yom Kippur exists in the popular imagination as a kind of concentrated power-cleanse for the soul—the spiritual equivalent of the detox diet....
Meghan O'Rourke on Madeline L'Engle
While the physics at work here were totally exotic to me as a young reader, the metaphysics somehow weren’t: Meg’s growing intimations that the world she lives in is full of a global darkness mirrored many fears that kids, myself included, felt. As the children travel across planets via the tesseract on their way to Meg’s father, they are made newly aware of an ongoing...
"the most beautiful mechanical objects in the...
These days, Leica makes digital compacts and a beefy S.L.R., or single-lens reflex, called the R9, but for more than fifty years the pride of the company has been the M series of 35-mm. range-finder cameras—durable, companionable, costly, and basically unchanging, like a spouse. There are three current models, one of which, the MP, will set you back a throat-drying four thousand dollars or so;...
talking 'bout my generation
What experts label “adolescent risk taking” is really baby boomer risk taking. It’s true that 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for violent death was 15 to 24. But those same boomers continue to suffer high rates of addiction and other ills throughout middle age, while later generations of teenagers are better behaved. Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including...
marmalade to Marmite: a tragic tale of greed
The creator of Paddington Bear has defended himself against accusations that he has sold out by allowing the famous character from Darkest Peru to ditch his beloved marmalade.
Paddington appears in a television advertisement which shows the curious bear for once trying Marmite instead of his usual breakfast spread.
Michael Bond insists he did not know about the decision to use his creation...
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which...”
– Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler
John Crace summarizes In God We Doubt, by John...
It was to reconcile these contradictions that I broadcast my now famous series of groundbreaking interviews, God in Search of Humphrys, on Radio 4. Who better to ask for proof of my existence than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and the leading Muslim academic, Tariq Ramadan?
I could rewrite these encounters, but that would take too much effort so...
“At fifteen hours, “The War” is too much of a not good enough thing.”
– Nancy Franklin
"a manifesto for a new environmentalism"
Increasing energy use is the primary cause of global warming, but it is also a primary cause of rising prosperity, longer life spans, better medical treatment, and greater personal and political freedom. Environmentalists can rail against consumption and counsel sacrifice all they want, but neither poor countries like China nor rich countries like the United States are going to dramatically reduce...
