Reviews and News:
A 36-foot-long mosaic depicting a chariot race has been discovered in Cyprus. It dates to the fourth century and is one of the most complete of its kind.
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Are we approaching the end of Western democracy? In The Journal of Democracy, political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk "review data from recent World Values Surveys and observe some truly remarkable trends, especially among young people. Young people often reject the traditions of their elders; that's nothing new. What they seem to be rejecting nowadays, though, in increasing numbers, is the tradition of liberalism itself."
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The attack on free speech.
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Adam Kirsch: Lara Vapnyar's new novel, Still Here, is "a peculiarly timely book. It is not that Vapnyar has anything overt to say about politics. On the contrary, this is a determinedly private story, about the eternal themes of personal life—love, mortality, parenthood, career. But its main characters are all, like Vapnyar herself, Russian immigrants to the United States, Muscovites turned New Yorkers, who find themselves living adult lives that are nothing like the ones they expected to have growing up. And so Vapnyar asks, with sympathy and insight, the very question that is so often posed in tones of suspicion and hostility: What does it mean to be an immigrant?"
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Over 60 people who bought scalped tickets to Harry Potter and the Curse Child have been denied entry to the play.
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Essay of the Day:
In Modern Age, Anthony Esolen lashes out at student groups who protest the teaching of Western Civilization at universities:
"The material I teach in the first year of DWC [at Providence College] spans four millennia, from ancient Babylon to the end of the Renaissance. This year's entries were originally written in Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, old French, Italian, German, Spanish, and English. We are in Jerusalem with David, on the coast of half-Christian England with the poet of Beowulf, in Rome with Cicero, in Madrid with Calderón, in exile with the Florentine Dante, and in London with Shakespeare. We have studied the Parthenon and Saint Peter's, Giotto and the stained glass windows of Chartres, Arthurian romance and the poetic philosophizing of Lucretius. It is utterly preposterous to say that we are anything but multicultural. We study cultures, and there are a lot of them, and they diverge far from ours and from one another. A Viking chieftain is not a Roman senator or a Christian friar. Xerxes is not Francis Xavier.
"But I know that none of that really counts. One of the student protesters, abashed, has written in our newspaper that even though a Viking is admittedly 'diverse' from anybody we may meet on the street now, studying the Vikings does not serve 'the larger purpose' of diversity. And thus has he unwittingly given up the ballgame.
"He and the students are not really interested in studying cultures other than ours. What counts for them as 'diversity' is governed entirely by a monotonous and predictable list of current political concerns. If you read a short story written in English by a Latina author living up the road in Worcester, that counts as 'diverse,' but if you read a romance written in Spanish by a Spanish author living in Spain four hundred years ago, that does not count as 'diverse.' It probably does not even count as Hispanic. If you pore over the verb system of Old Icelandic so that you can stumble around in the sagas of Snorri Sturluson, that does not count, despite the fact that the sagas are utterly different from any form of literature now written. But if you collect a few editorials written by Toni Morrison, that does count, despite the fact that they are written in English and that you have read hundreds of such.
"That already is unreality aplenty. But there is more, and this is hard to talk about. I have said that it is absurd to pretend that you can have anything of substance to say about a curriculum in the history of science when you don't know anything about the history of science. But what if you know hardly anything about anything at all? That is an exaggeration, but it does capture much of what I must confront as a professor of English right now, even at our school, which accepts only a small fraction of students who apply for admission. Nor, I'm afraid, does it apply only to freshmen. It applies also to professors.
"I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, 'Your verb here does not agree with your subject.' That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for 'formal' writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man."
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Image of the Day: Meteor
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Poem: Dan Burt, "Worship"
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