Joseph Epstein in Commentary:
Fortunate is the person who has reached the age of 50 without having had to grieve. To be among the grieving, the bereaved, is an experience most of us go through, excepting only those who die preternaturally young and are themselves the cause of bereavement. The death of a parent, a husband or wife, a brother or sister, a dear friend, in some ways saddest of all, a child, is among the major causes of grief. May grief be avoided? Ought it to be? Is there any sense in which, as Charlie Brown’s favorite phrase had it, there is good grief?
Socrates held that one of the key missions of philosophy was to ward off our fear of death. Upon his own death, by self-imposed hemlock, he claimed to be looking forward at long last to discovering whether there was an afterlife. Montaigne wrote an essay called “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die,” in which, as elsewhere in his essays, he argues that, far from putting death out of mind, we should keep it foremost in our minds, the knowledge of our inevitably forthcoming death goading us on the better to live our lives.
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The views of the Universe just keep getting better. NASA’s US$10-billion James Webb Space Telescope released four new scientific images on 12 July, including newborn stars sparkling through dramatic ‘cliffs’ of gas, and galaxies interacting in an intricate cosmic dance. A day earlier, astronomers had marveled at 
What is a game? Ludwig Wittgenstein famously chose this nebulous concept to illustrate what he meant by “family resemblance,” where the individual members of a class can be determined to fulfill no necessary and sufficient conditions for admission, and instead only share some traits with some others in the class, others with others. Yet we can at least identify two types of game, which seem not just distinct from one another but very nearly opposite. One class of games, which includes peek-a-boo, charades, and musical improvisation as representative instances, is characterized by free expressivity. It is the manifestation of what Friedrich Schiller called the Spieltrieb, the “play-drive,” which is innate in all human beings insofar as they are free. The other class includes chess, fencing, and wargames as its representative instances. If there is still some dose of freedom operating in this sort of game, it is freedom under severe constraints. The purpose here is to win, and one does so by means of strategy aforethought. In such games, serendipity and spontaneity are disadvantages. While some such games may, like Schillerian free play, be “fun” (especially when you win and the other guy loses), at their outer edge they shade over into a domain of human endeavor that has little to do with leisure at all. At their most serious they can determine the fate of the world.
We describe the world using language — we can’t help it. And we all know that ordinary language is an imperfect way of communicating rigorous scientific statements, but sometimes it’s the best we can do. Linguist N.J. Enfield argues that the difficulties run more deeply than we might ordinarily suppose. We use language as a descriptive tool, but its origins are found in more social practices — communicating with others to express our feelings and persuade them to agree with us. As such, the very structure of language itself reflects these social purposes, and we have to be careful not to think it provides an unfiltered picture of reality.
Last year a book called 
The screen version of Gone with the Wind could not entirely ignore the existence of black people, so it toned down the book’s racist language as well as some of its racial violence. There is a degree of irony in Scarlett, whose ‘magnolia skin’ is heavily fetishised, being played by Vivien Leigh, who probably had Indian ancestry. The producer, David Selznick, and Leslie Howard, who played Scarlett’s first love, Ashley Wilkes, were both of Jewish origin. Howard, says Churchwell, ‘categorically refused to read Gone with the Wind’. Most notably, though, the film’s black cast had to be persuaded to work on a white supremacist project. Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her performance as Scarlett’s maid, Mammy, was born to parents who had both once been enslaved. Her father was a veteran of the Union Army who had fought in the Civil War. McDaniel insisted she had taken the role for the money: ‘she had chosen between $700 a week to play a maid, or $7 a week to be a maid.’ Yet she and Butterfly McQueen, who played Prissy, must have cared a bit about what they were doing. Both lobbied to have one of the novel’s most-used words – rendered by Churchwell as ‘nxxxxr’ – excised completely from the screenplay. Eventually it was, though only after Selznick struck a deal with the censors to eliminate it in return for being allowed to keep Rhett Butler’s final ‘damn’.
Nabokov spoke of shimmers too. “Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him,” he said in a lecture in 1948. “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story, there is a shimmering go-between.” In this view, it seems to me, the writer’s not the wraith who can pass between realms of reality and fantasy. The art itself is the wraith, which the artist only grasps at. Elsewhere, Nabokov writes that inspiration comes in the form of “a prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack.” In his Paris Review interview, Martin Amis describes the urge to write this way: “What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb. A throb or a glimmer, an act of recognition on the writer’s part. At this stage the writer thinks, Here is something I can write a novel about.” Amis also saw images, a sudden person in a setting, as if a pawn had popped into existence on a board: “With Money, for example, I had an idea of a big fat guy in New York, trying to make a film. That was all.” Likewise for Don DeLillo: “The scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place. It’s visual, it’s Technicolor—something I see in a vague way. Then sentence by sentence into the breach.” For these writers that begin from something like hallucination, the novel is a universe that justifies the image, a replica of Vegas to be built out of words.
AS SOMEONE WHO grew up in India in the early 2000s, after the once-colonized country had opened itself to the global economy, one thing was clear to me. Aspiration and English were synonymous. Both were essential. This lesson was drilled into me at my missionary-run English-medium high school in New Delhi. Whether we dreamed of becoming doctors or engineers or corporate hotshots, we were repeatedly told that we needed to have English. Students were penalized for speaking in any language other than English, and our pronunciations were disciplined in preparation for roles no one doubted we would take on. Away from the institutional ear, my peers and I still cherished our other languages, to varying degrees. But, for the most part, we learned to joke, dream, rebel, and obey in English.
In a brief event at the White House on Monday evening, President Biden unveiled an image that NASA and astronomers hailed as the deepest view yet into our universe’s past. The image, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope — the largest space telescope ever built — showed a distant patch of sky in which fledgling galaxies were burning their way into visibility just 600 million years after the Big Bang. “This is the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from 13 billion — let me say that again, 13 billion — years ago,” Mr. Biden said. The president, who apologized for beginning the event tardily, praised NASA for its work that enabled the telescope and the imagery it will produce. “We can see possibilities no one has ever seen before,” Mr. Biden said. “We can go places no one has ever gone before.”
Isabella M. Weber in the Journal of the History of Ideas (photo by Ludwig von Mises Institute):
It is 1919, and a young astronomer turns a street corner in Pasadena, California. Something seemingly humdrum on the ground distracts him. It’s an ant heap. Dropping to his knees, peering closer, he has an epiphany – about deep time, our place within it, and humanity’s uncertain fate. The astronomer was 
It is impossible not to be moved by the final pages of Robert Crawford’s Eliot: After The Waste Land, in which the 20th century’s greatest poet at last finds contentment with his young wife Valerie. Much more than contentment: “I am madly happy in being her husband,” Eliot wrote to his friend Violet Schiff upon the couple’s return from honeymoon in 1957. The wedding – and indeed, the whole courtship and relationship – between the 68-year-old Nobel Laureate and his 30-year-old Yorkshire-born secretary had been a secret from nearly everyone who knew them until the very last moment. The ceremony had been conducted at 6.15 in the morning, by special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury, so as to evade the attentions of the press.
One strand of animal ethics is preoccupied with suffering—suffering that occurs in slaughterhouses, laboratories, and other sites of animal confinement. Another strand counters this focus on the elimination of suffering by urging that we instead emphasize respect for the rights and dignity of animals. While contributions to these strands of animal ethics have contributed to increased recognition of animals’ plights, they mostly presuppose frameworks that obscure the nature of the problem. Many practices that harm animals are embedded in institutions that also systematically harm socially vulnerable human beings. Analyzing these mutually supporting systems of harms to humans and other animals is imperative so that we are equipped to meaningfully intervene in the injustices animals and human outgroups are facing.
While thirty years ago, scholars, pundits, and political leaders were confidently proclaiming the end of history, few now deny that it has returned—if it ever ended. And it has done so at a time of not just geopolitical and economic dislocations but also historic technological dislocations. To say that this poses a challenge to liberal democratic governance is an understatement. As history shows, the threat of chaos, uncertainty, weakness, and indeed ungovernability always favors the authoritarian, the man on horseback who promises stability, order, clarity—and through them, strength and greatness.