Adam Bradley in The New York Times:
I first saw Ralph Ellison when I was 19 years old and he had already passed away. On a summer evening in 1994, he appeared to me in the attic of an old manor house on the campus of a small college in the Pacific Northwest. I had encountered him — just as I had Langston Hughes and Jane Austen and Geoffrey Chaucer — by more conventional means the year prior, as an attentive reader of his published work. I read Ellison’s 1952 novel, “Invisible Man,” for the first time as part of a class on African American literature and was drawn to his wise-foolish protagonist with whom, looking back now, I shared more than a passing resemblance: a young Black college student with vague aspirations for leadership who stumbles upon writing as a means of illuminating his identity. Nonetheless, Ellison — like Hughes and Austen and Chaucer — remained intangible to me, aloof, distanced both by time and by achievement.
That could have been the end of it. But, as Ellison was fond of saying, “it’s a crazy country” — by which he meant that the diversity of the American experience often occasions unexpected confluences of people and circumstance. Soon after Ellison’s death, on April 16, 1994, at the age of 80, or perhaps 81 (evidence uncovered after his passing suggests he was born in 1913, not 1914, as he always claimed), Ellison’s wife, Fanny, called on their longtime friend John F. Callahan, my professor, to assume the literary executorship of his estate. Callahan asked me to be his assistant — to help him gather research, photocopy documents and sort materials — which explains why I ended up carrying shipments arriving from the Ellisons’ Riverside Drive address up a creaky staircase to the manor house attic on my college campus. My first task was to unpack the boxes and array the pages contained within across a long mahogany conference table, preparing them for Callahan’s inspection. Among the papers were drafts of Ellison’s unpublished second novel, around 40 years in progress; dot-matrix printouts from his computer, some with penciled edits; and handwritten notes scrawled on scraps of paper and on the backs of used envelopes.
More here.
Coming from a long line of Hindu intellectuals and teachers, Amartya Sen enjoyed advantages and freedoms that few others did in a deeply-stratified India of the 1930s, during the waning days of the British empire. Teaching was in his blood, and from an early age, Sen was struck by the stark economic inequities he saw all around him under the British raj. Identifying and understanding the causes and effects that inequalities, like those surrounding poverty or gender, had on people’s lives would become a lifelong intellectual lodestar for the political economist, moral philosopher, and social theorist. Many economists focus on explaining and predicting what is happening in the world. But Sen, considered the key figure at the convergence of economics and philosophy, turned his attention instead to what the reality should be and why we fall short. “I think he’s the greatest living figure in normative economics, which asks not ‘What do we see?’ but ‘What should we aspire to?’ and ‘How do we even work out what we should aspire to?’” said Eric S. Maskin ’72, Ph.D. ’76, Adams University Professor and professor of economics and mathematics.
Ben Bakkum in Macro Chronicles:
The Bone House, published in 2005, is either a decade’s work or a lifetime’s, depending on how you look at it. It is the distillation of an expansive mind that seeks to delve and delve. Her tone is never didactic—rather, discursive, exploratory, delighted, unjaded, alive. To read more than a few pages at a stretch is to travel a long way from where you set out. Sometimes to travel so far as to lose the view of the mountain, only to be brought back via an unfamiliar face of it.
Gödel could go for long walks with his fellow institute scholar Einstein, who sponsored Gödel’s citizenship application and called him the greatest logician since Aristotle, but he was wracked by physical ailments and nervous conditions. A doctor told him he had a bleeding ulcer, which he strangely refused to believe, even though he was also a self-medicating hypochondriac. He subscribed to all sorts of conspiracy theories, insisting that “nothing happens without a reason,” and that the reason was almost always a hidden one. The unlimited freedom he had at the institute proved to be double-edged, Budiansky observes. In one sense, it saved Gödel’s life; but it also allowed his consciousness to wander into the darkest places, without the checks on his expansive anxieties that interactions with the ordinary world might have otherwise provided.
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Just over five years ago, Inky the octopus became a folk hero because of his escape from a New Zealand aquarium. After squeezing through a narrow chink in his tank, he crawled across the floor and found an opening to a 164-foot-long drainpipe that led to the ocean. As much as I enjoyed the film based on Stephen King’s “The Shawshank Redemption”, which climaxes in Tim Robbin’s daring prison break, I only wish that a gifted animation team like the one that made “How to Train Your Dragon” could tell Inky’s story.
In Delhi, Shahid also became aware of the city’s Mughal and colonial history, and was impressed by its architecture. In the early ’60s, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz had visited New Delhi and had been charmed by its architecture. He wrote numerous poems about the city and about all that he had witnessed here. He found Delhi’s “aesthetic equivalent” in “novels, not in architecture”, and to him, wandering the city was “like passing through the pages of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, or Alexandre Dumas”.
In the past years, media coverage of climate change has noticeably shifted. Many outlets have begun referring to it as “climate crisis” or “climate emergency”, a mostly symbolic move, in my eyes, because those who trust that their readers will tolerate this nomenclature are those whose readers don’t need to be reminded of the graveness of the situation. Even more marked has been the move to no longer mention climate change skeptics and, moreover, to proudly declare the intention to no longer acknowledge even the existence of the skeptics’ claims.
To those who still harbor doubts about the justness of this war, who continue to question the scientific consensus on global warming and the ravages it promises, I ask only that you entertain, if there is a chance you are right, that there is also a chance you are wrong. Let us even say, for argument’s sake, that the virtual certainty of scientists were reduced to 50 percent confidence and the forecasted effects of climate violence were reduced in severity by 50 percent as well. That would still justify the most massive mobilization of human energy and resources the world has ever seen, because the likely outcome would still be far worse than any threat we have faced in the past.
Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa once said that his films were about “the decay and disintegration of the former Russian Empire.” With 29 titles under his belt, ranging from fiction to observational and archival documentaries, Loznitsa demonstrates a keen interest in form, particularly in using fictional devices within documentary. He also opposes the recent tendency in Eastern Europe to frame histories with war and authoritarianism in heroic or rosy terms.