Reviews and News:
A history of Jerusalem's early 20th-century architects.
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According to Emma Smith, John Kerrigan's book on religious and legal oaths, and other forms of "binding language," in Shakespeare is a "tightly drawn virtuosity."
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A linguistic analysis of Trump's "Second Amendment people" remark.
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In our essay of the day (below), Matthew Crawford writes about Greek frankness. Eleanor Dickey explains when and why the Greeks became more polite: "Classical Greece (or at least the portions of it from which most of our surviving literature comes, particularly Athens) was fiercely egalitarian and democratic. Neither the equality nor the democracy extended to everyone – women and slaves formed two major classes of exceptions – but those who had the good fortune to be included valued their equality highly and made sure it was maintained. Men who revealed greater-than-average wealth were quickly relieved of the excess by being assigned to fund an artistic or military enterprise, and those who thought themselves better than the rest were often sent into exile. This egalitarian culture was reflected in the classical Greek language, in which adult male citizens addressed each other all in the same way – and made requests without saying 'please'. This situation came to an abrupt end in the late fourth century BCE, when Greece was conquered by the Macedonian king, Philip II."
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"Aristocratic 18th-century England was one long picnic of boating, archery, feasting and amateur dramatics."
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Is addiction a disease? "The 'disease model' remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people."
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Essay of the Day:
In The Hedgehog Review, Matthew Crawford takes a closer look at the Hellenic virtue of "frank speech":
"In Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, a central term of pride in the democratic self-understanding was parrhesia, which meant 'frank speech.' It is sometimes translated as 'free speech,' but this rendering isn't quite apt in our contemporary American setting because it triggers for us the notion of a right, as in the First Amendment, whereas frank speech is a virtue. The role of frank speech in democratic culture is something worth considering, especially in light of the renewed ferment over political correctness.
"The Greeks, justly famous for their ethnocentrism, took frank speech to be a distinctly Hellenic virtue, in contrast to the flattery of those (in the East) who were content to live under despotism. The Athenians drew the circle of their ethnocentrism even smaller, and claimed frank speech as that which distinguished their own radically democratic city from others in the Hellenic world that never rose up to throw off their local tyrants, or that had to abide rule by a council of old men, as in Sparta. These distinctions were often parsed in gendered terms: Flattery was effeminate or effeminizing, while speaking frankly was the distinctly democratic form of manliness.
"Of course, these self-understandings came in for critique and ridicule from contemporary philosophers and comedians. What the democratic soul experiences as his own frankness might appear to others as a self-aggrandizing form of moral aggression based on resentment…Still, frank speech was an ideal not only of politics in the narrow sense but also of democratic social relations; it was a way Athenians had of addressing one another that enacted their freedom, based on the political equality of citizens. It resonated with another Hellenic ideal: exercising naked in public."
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Image of the Day: Snake in the grass
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Poem: Fred Chappell, "Fox and Crow"
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