For The Love Of Bob Marley
Something about summertime makes Bob Marley music pop up everywhere, but I recently realized I don’t actually know very much about Marley. The following is from The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin.
August 2010
The End of Discovery
By Russell Stannard
How many of us appreciate just how fortunate we are to be living at a time of scientific discovery? How many realise that the scientific age is but a brief, transitory phase in the evolution and development of humankind? One day it will all come to an end.
Suffering for Suffrage, 90 Years Since
I have a younger brother, so as a little girl, I was the boss. The authority I exerted was based on age and size, so it never occurred to me that gender could be an influencing factor. I think it was actually School House Rock or Mary Poppins that taught me women had to fight […]
The Price of Praise and Prizes, or Prizing up an Etymological Bottle
By Anatoly Liberman
In an essay posted a few months ago, I spoke about the origin of the verb allow and noted its insecure ties with Latin laudare “to praise.” “Allow” and “praise,” as it turned out, form a union not only in English. At that that time, I promised to return to the idea underlying the concept of praise and the etymology of the verb praise. Every man, it is said, has his price, and so does every praise.
What on Earth is The Wind in the Willows?
By Peter Hunt
To judge from a quick poll of friends, acquaintances, students, and the ladies in the village shop, The Wind in the Willows is fondly remembered, even by those who don’t actually remember reading it. It is a children’s book, it is about small animals – and it is somehow quintessentially English: for almost everyone I spoke to, it conjured up endless summer, boating on a quiet river, large hampers of food, a peaceful, unthreatening way of life.
While You Are/n’t Sleeping
Dr. Rosalind Cartwright has dedicated her life’s work to the study of sleep, and in her new book The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives she proposes a new theory on the confluence of our dreaming and waking selves. Cartwright discussed the film Inception with us a few weeks ago, and here she answers a few more questions I had about the unconscious mind.
The “Ground Zero Mosque” and An Ode to Political Correctness
By Elvin Lim
Last Friday, President Barack Obama communicated his support for the building of a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero, saying, “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.” This seemed harmless enough until he found out that over two-thirds of America disagreed with him. Chastened, the President went off-message…saying, “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.” Tsk, Tsk, Barack Obama.
The Beatles Arrive in Hamburg, August 1960
By Gordon Thompson
Although Americans often talk about a “British Invasion” that started in February 1964, the groundwork for that cultural phenomenon may actually have begun fifty years ago this month when, on 17 August 1960, the Beatles began performing at the Indra, a small club in red-light district of the West German city of Hamburg. The van and ferry ride to Hamburg with manager Allan Williams had the Beatles arriving at night in one of Europe’s most decadent enclaves. The St. Pauli district thrived on sex
Is it “Ms.” or “Miss”?
By Dennis Baron
A rare occurrence of “Ms.” in 1885 suggests that the term is an abbreviation of “Miss.” Ever since “Ms.” emerged as a marriage-neutral alternative to “Miss” and “Mrs.” in the 1970s, linguists have been trying to trace the origins of this new honorific. It turns out that “Ms.” is not so new after all. The form goes back at least to the 1760s, when it served as an abbreviation for “Mistress” (remember Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly?) and for “Miss,” already a shortened form of “Mistress,” which was also sometimes spelled “Mis.”
The Appeal of Prop 8 and the Long Road Ahead
By William N. Eskridge Jr. and Darren Spedale
“Judge Walker’s opinion exposes these longstanding claims for that they have always been—desperate efforts to justify a longstanding discrimination that a persecuted minority was no longer willing to tolerate. Every American should read Judge Walker’s opinion, not so much for its fine constitutional analysis, but rather for its remarkable factual findings. These findings are profound and ought to be debated publicly as well as judicially.”
Lives of the Artists
By Alana Salguero, Grove Art Editorial Assistant
From van Gogh and his notorious left ear to Salvador Dalí with his legendary moustache, the art world boasts a colorful cast of characters whose unorthodox behavior has generated as much public interest as its artistic oeuvre. It appears that creativity often begets eccentricity (or vice versa, the age old chicken-and-egg conundrum), blurring the boundaries between art, performance, and life.
Linked Up: Kittens, Tattoos, Pop-Up Books
Today is Friday the 13th AND Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday (1899) AND Fidel Castro’s birthday (1926) AND William Goldman’s birthday (1931) (y’know, he wrote The Princess Bride) AND Annie Oakley’s birthday (1860). Craz-ay. Here are some other tidbits I found amusing.
Technology Update: Flying Books Can Be Dangerous
One of the big news stories this week was about JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, who famously unleashed an expletive-ridden rant over his plane’s PA system, then pulled emergency-evacuation chute lever and made a dramatic sliding exit onto the JFK tarmac. It is only appropriate, I think, that we take this moment to consider the intersection between e-readers and airplane safety. Please pull your desk chairs into the full, upright position and enjoy the following musings from Dennis Baron.
OMG IT’S FRIDAY THE 13TH!!!
In case you didn’t know.
The State of ‘Judenpolitik’ Before the Beginning of the War
Peter Longerich is Professor of Modern German History at Royal Holloway University of London and founder of the College’s Holocaust Research Centre. His book, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, shows the steps taken by the Nazis that would ultimately lead to the Final Solution. He argues that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of Nazi political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses. Rather, from 1933 onwards, anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement’s attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule. In the excerpt below Longerich analyzes the state of Jewish citizens of Germany right before the start of the war.
Are you ready for rebuses?
By Alexander Humez
Largely gone from the funny pages but alive and well on the rear bumper of the car, the rebus is a visual puzzle that, in its various forms, encapsulates the history of alphabetic writing from ideograms (pictures designating concepts or things) to pictographs (pictures representing specific words or phrases) to phonograms (pictures representing specific sounds or series of sounds). Dictionaries struggle to define the term in such a way as to capture the range of shapes a rebus can take, typically focussing on its pictographic and phonogrammic attributes, forgoing mention of the ideographic.