Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 2 (Friday 06 January 2023)
Reading
The realisation that one might be show-offy in a good way is among Donne’s chief bequests to English literature, a salutary corrective to the 16th-century cult of Sidneian sprezzatura. The embrace of effort – the wish to impress, to delight, to dazzle, to convince or convert, and the willingness to be seen working at it – is the secret to the deathless charm of ‘The Flea’ and the pathos of the ‘Holy Sonnets’.
Who or what was Rimbaud? What is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems straight – that seeks to ‘strain meaning to the very limits’? Can history live by metaphors alone?
Q: Can we get ice cream? (Age 2)
A: Sure, honey! But the word “cream” incorrectly suggests that this is a dairy product. In reality, it’s a congealed mass of artificial gums and pastes that are almost certainly not permitted for human consumption in any other major democracy. Enjoy!
Q: What happened to Mufasa? (Age 3)
A: He’s sleeping.
Q: Can we get a puppy? (Age 4)
A: Maybe in a few years, when Daddy’s ability to say no—along with his overall sense of self—has been sufficiently worn down.
Q: Where does rain come from? (Age 5)
A: Good question. First, water on the ground evaporates up into the sky. There, it collects in clouds until it falls to the ground as rain, and the whole pattern starts over again. It’s called the water cycle, the only thing I learned as a child that I still remember. Seriously. I don’t know the different types of triangles or how to write in cursive or what hopscotch even is, but the water cycle? I could write a dissertation on it, baby.
To accuse Henry ‘Chips’ Channon of snobbery or social climbing is almost absurd: society was what gave his life meaning, and it’s thanks to his fascination with the rich and the grand that he left such an intimate record. The life Channon describes with such loving relish now seems as remote as Saint-Simon’s Versailles.
Generating the electricity to get just one ad to appear on your screen can produce a puff of carbon dioxide sufficiently large that, if it were cigarette smoke, you would be able to see it. Showing a single digital ad to a single user involves, on average, emitting between roughly a tenth and a whole pint of carbon dioxide. And the digital ad business puffs on quite a scale.
What is going to happen – it is indelicate to ask, but we need to know – to all that shit? The torrents of water from simultaneous ablutions, micturitions, power showers? And the steady autumn downpours of our rainy season.
Now the gap between the lowest and highest paid in the UK is one of the highest in the OECD, Iain Overton looks at the role of public sector pay in widening the disparities
Peter Kim Schotch, emeritus professor of philosophy at Dalhousie University, has died. The following memorial notice was written by Gillman Payette (Calgary): Peter Kim Schotch, age 76, died on December 22, 2022 at his home in Brookside Nova Scotia. Peter was born on July 26th, 1946, in Montreal, Quebec. He attended the University of Waterloo, getting a BA and finally a PhD in Philosophy writing a dissertation in modal logic in 1973 under the supervision of J.S. Minas. (Interestingly, his external examiner was C. West Churchman). In 1972 he was hired by the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University and only fully retired in 2019. At the end of his time at Dalhousie he had reached the rank of full professor and was the Munro Chair of Metaphysics. Despite being a logician or perhaps because of it, Peter liked teaching existentialism, philosophy of literature, and philosophy of art. He was also a dedicated union-supporter, serving on the Dalhousie Faculty Association’s bargaining team for the second, third, fifth and sixth collective agreements and sharing duties as Chief Negotiator for the 1984-87 agreement. He also shared the position of DFA president in 1997-98. P. K.
There has been a fair amount of concern over the threats that ChatGPT and AI in general pose to teaching. But perhaps there’s an upside? Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) entertains the possibility: Without wanting to diss the underlying neural network, but ChatGPT is a bullshitter in the (Frankfurt) sense of having no concern for the truth at all… I have seen many of my American colleagues remark that while ChatGPT is, as of yet, unable to handle technical stuff skillfully, it can produce B- undergraduate papers.
New data from the Metropolitan Police shows the scale of sexual violence in London's hospitals
In a recent post, we introduced the Multivariate Core Trend (MTC), a measure of inflation persistence in the core sectors of the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price index. With data up to February 2022, we used the MCT to interpret the nature of post-pandemic price spikes, arguing that inflation dynamics were dominated by a persistent component largely common across sectors, which we estimated at around 5 percent. Indeed, over the year, inflation proved to be persistent and broad based, and core PCE inflation is likely to end 2022 near 5 percent. So, what is the MCT telling us today? In this post, we extend our analysis to data through November 2022 and detect signs of a decline in the persistent component of inflation in recent data. We then dissect the layers of inflation persistence to fully understand that decline.
Why Ukraine may be under even more pressure than Russia to Do Something when the ground finally freezes in Ukraine.
Looking at the oft superficially discussed population and consumption levers in the climate change debate.
Patsy Stevenson believes the country's largest force must be held accountable for its conduct at the event to remember the 33-year-old woman murdered by a Met Police officer
The Marc Sanders Foundation has announced the winners of its 2022 Early Modern Philosophy Prize and its 2022 Philosophy of Mind Prize. The Early Modern Philosophy Prize was awarded to Gabriel Watts, a graduate student at the University of Sydney, for his “Hume’s Gambit: Irreligion, Animals, and Truth”. Here’s the abstract of the paper: In this paper I develop an irreligious reading of Hume’s decision to return to philosophy after his sceptical crisis at the end of Book One of A Treatise of Human Nature. Any irreligious reading of Hume’s epistemology must articulate Hume’s epistemic grounds for preferring his experimental science of human nature to sophisticated superstitious anthropologies. I argue that Hume believes his use of animal analogies to confirm his hypotheses offers him the best possible “security” against positing false causal claims about the nature of our “mental operations”, and that the superior security of this experimental method of reasoning provides him with epistemic grounds for preferring his science of human nature to superstitious metaphysics, even though both have title to our assent.
Big energy companies are piling money into increasingly inefficient oil and gas investments, reports Thomas Perrett
Andrew Gronek and many young FTX investors were tricked into believing the crypto exchange was as stable and protected as a typical bank account.
I watched Keir Starmer give his 'vision speech' this morning. My initial reactions were tweeted as follows: The sound quality throughout this broadcast was dire:
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Democrats fear the committee on "Weaponization of the Federal Government" will become a partisan cudgel.
The post Republican Freedom Caucus Pushes for New Committee to Investigate the Surveillance State appeared first on The Intercept.
Thursday is the most Thursday of days. Also I have a dentist appointment.
- by Carolyn Eichner