John M. Owen IV at The Hedgehog Review:
For someone who craved attention, who cultivated reporters and published several memoirs, Henry A. Kissinger liked secrecy. Or better put, he wanted others to keep secrets so that he could reveal them when and how he chose. The lengthy obituary in the New York Times recalls that in 1969, his first year as Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, he was so infuriated by leaks from the White House on the war in Indochina that he had the FBI tap the phones of a number of aides. “If anybody leaks in this administration,” he declared, “I will be the one to leak.”
The story is revealing. Kissinger the scholar studied power. Kissinger the statesman acquired power, guarded it, and wielded it—in the White House, in the State Department, and around the world. But his death at age 100 leaves us with a puzzle. How is it that this brilliant student of the liberal philosopher Immanuel Kant, this one-time refugee so grateful to America for taking his family in, misunderstood the force of democracy?
More here.
Once a body is given over to Harvard, that’s meant to be its final destination, where various parts are studied by Ivy League students suited up in surgical gowns and latex gloves. Future doctors and dentists work carefully on their assigned embalmed cadavers, learning about, say, the collection of nerves in the upper arm, or the tiny ligaments and bones that come together at the knee. They’re taught and tested and trained, and the donor’s ashes are usually handed back over to their family, their final sacrifice complete. The donors are generous people like Mazzone, who opted to give up traditional burials in the name of science.
“MANET/DEGAS,” the fall blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, begins with an unabashed, double-barreled bang: Édouard Manet’s last great self-portrait, paired up alongside one of Edgar Degas’s first. The juxtaposition provides a thrilling object lesson in the stolid compare-and-contrast curatorial methodology that defines the exhibition, but if it’s meant to show the two artists on an equal footing, it doesn’t stage a fair fight. Forty-six years old when he executed Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), ca. 1878–79, Manet is at the height of his painterly power, looking backward and forward at once. In an act of supremely confident artistic self-identification, his pose explicitly recalls the Diego Velázquez of Las Meninas, 1656, his lodestar and confessed maître, while his bravado brushwork nods to the advanced painting of the day (Impressionism) and beyond. Degas—two years younger than Manet on the calendar, but a tender twenty in his 1855 Portrait of the Artist—is, on the other hand, just at the beginning of his career. He, too, casts a historical glance, but to local tradition embodied by J.-A.-D. Ingres, and does so more timidly. Charcoal holder in hand as if ready to start (drawing coming before painting in any artist’s education at that time), Degas pictures his aspirations more than his accomplishments. Nevertheless, a piercing gaze already portends the intense psychological depths he would plumb over the next half century. This coupling alone makes a visit to the Met worth the trip.
Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist who is often called “the godfather of A.I.,” handed me a walking stick. “You’ll need one of these,” he said. Then he headed off along a path through the woods to the shore. It wound across a shaded clearing, past a pair of sheds, and then descended by stone steps to a small dock. “It’s slippery here,” Hinton warned, as we started down.
When I first came across Chomsky’s linguistic work, my reactions resembled those of an anthropologist attempting to fathom the beliefs of a previously uncontacted tribe. For anyone in that position, the first rule is to put aside one’s own cultural prejudices and assumptions in order to avoid dismissing every unfamiliar belief. The doctrines encountered may seem unusual, but there are always compelling reasons why those particular doctrines are the ones people adhere to. The task of the anthropologist is to delve into the local context, history, politics and culture of the people under study – in the hope that this may shed light on the logic of those ideas.
When we think about the food we ate when we were younger, we might be inclined to say that it was tastier and healthier than what we eat today. And while we may be saying this out of a nostalgic tendency, researchers have been looking for a more scientific answer. In several papers, researchers have used food tables – country-by-country compendia of historical information on the mineral composition of foods – to report an apparent decline in micronutrients such as iron, vitamins and zinc in fruit and vegetables over time.
Construction of the mosque-cathedral of Córdoba began in the late 8th century under the first Umayyad emir of Córdoba, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, and then later expanded several times during the 9th and 10th centuries. From its inception, the mosque—with its red-and-white-striped arches—was built to resemble the Great Mosque of Damascus, on the other side of the Mediterranean. But the mosque went through a more local transformation in the 16th century, by which point Catholic Spain had driven out the Muslims who had inhabited the south for seven centuries. Now, the mosque was renovated into a cathedral, with a large transept and choir added to its center. Seeing the Christian addition to the nearly thousand-year-old structure, Emperor Charles V allegedly remarked: The architect has taken something extraordinary and made it ordinary.
Every year is probably an interesting one for an artist as restless and inquisitive as David Byrne, but I’m willing to bet that 2023 was especially so. In September, a newly restored edition of “Stop Making Sense,” the landmark 1984 concert film by Byrne’s former band, Talking Heads, returned to theaters to much (richly deserved) ballyhoo. Before that, “Here Lies Love,” a musical based on the life of the former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos, began a five-month run on Broadway. That show featured lyrics by Byrne and music written by him and Fatboy Slim, and was staged in such a way that a regular old theater was transformed into a shape-shifting disco. The film is a rock concert as joyous celebration of community; the musical a seductive portrait of power’s distorting effects. “Rather than be told this is what the world can be like,’’ says Byrne, 71, about his work, “it’s kind of like, ‘We’re going to show to you how things could be.’ ”
DUMMERSTORF, GERMANY
Writing in 2005, Andrew Delbanco observed, in his critical biography Melville: His World and Work, that the author of Moby-Dick “seems to renew himself for each new generation.” Since the mid-twentieth century, Delbanco notes, “there has been a steady stream of new Melvilles, all of whom seem somehow able to keep up with the preoccupations of the moment.” He lists a few:
The nature of consciousness is one of the hardest problems in biology. What exactly is it? Where did it come from? And are non-human animals conscious? Philosophers and scientists range from ascribing consciousness to all life (biopsychism), or even all matter (panpsychism), to attributing it exclusively to humans. Seemingly beyond the purview of empirical science due to its subjective nature, there is a lack of “intuitively attractive solutions” (p. xiii). In the opinion of Walter Veit, an assistant professor in philosophy, that just will not do. In this slim but advanced-level book, he outlines a mightily interesting thesis of how consciousness could have gradually evolved, which aspect of it likely appeared first, and why we urgently need to step away from taking human consciousness as our yardstick.
Danielle Allen’s Justice by Means of Democracy represents a major, and much-needed, shift in perspective. In the book, she locates the work of establishing justice not in the philosophy seminar room but in real-world discussions with diverse, everyday people: “talking with strangers” with intention to co-create a more democratic and more just society together. Fifty years on from Rawls’s foundational A Theory of Justice, Allen has set out to articulate not simply a new theory of justice but a new way of thinking about justice: one that trades Rawls’s abstract thought experiments for real-life ones. And equally importantly, it offers us the concrete tools for getting from thinking about to practicing democracy, however imperfectly, in messy situations in which the needs and future prospects of real people are concretely implicated.
It’s one of the great mysteries of music history, as high in the ranks as “Who wrote the Renaissance lover’s tribute ‘Greensleeves’” and “How did