via OUP Blog by Sophie Thérèse Ambler
Detail of a miniature of John, king of Scotland, being brought before Edward I. Public Domain via the British Library.
The thirteenth century saw the reigns of several rulers ill-equipped for the task of government, decried not as tyrants but incompetents. Sancho II of Portugal (1223–48), his critics said, let his kingdom fall to ruin on account of his “idleness,” “timidity of spirit,” and “simplicity”. The last term, simplex, could mean straightforward, but here it meant only simple-minded, foolish, stupid. The same term was used to describe the English king Henry III (1216–72), as well as John Balliol, the hapless king of Scotland (1292–96) appointed by England’s Edward I. As the élites of these kingdoms knew too well, it could happen on occasion that a man rose to office – whether he had been born to claim it, had won the right to hold it, or had found it thrust upon him – who did not have the intelligence to wield power.
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It could, of course, have been a woman who rose to high office who did not have the intelligence to yield the power of that office. But perhaps not in the thirteenth century.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Simon Goldhill in the Times Literary Supplement
Friedrich Nietzsche was an alienated man and saw alienation all around: “We are no longer at home anywhere”, he wrote of modern life. This high priest of disenchantment nonetheless knew where he would feel at home – ancient Greece. “We want to go back”, he insisted, and added triumphantly that “day by day we are becoming more Greek”. Becoming Greek meant, first, thinking like the ancient Greeks; but the ultimate goal, more bizarrely, was literally to embody an antique ideal: “one day – or so we hope – we will also become more Greek in our bodies” – though I suspect Nietzsche never went to the gym to work his abs into a sculptural six-pack, or shaved off his luxuriant and very unclassical moustache.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Conventional wisdom: If you eat a lot of salt, you will get thirsty to dilute the sodium level in your blood. The excess salt will be excreted in your urine.
But a new study of Russian cosmonauts is challenging this long-held belief. When the cosmonauts ate more salt, the became less thirsty. And their appetite increased - they had to eat 25 percent more to maintain their weight.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Matthew James Seidel at The Millions
At 28, Fyodor Dostoevsky was about to die.
The nightmare started when the police burst into his apartment and dragged him away in the middle of the night, along with the rest of the Petrashevsky Circle. This was a group made up of artists and thinkers who discussed radical ideas together, such as equality and justice, and occasionally read books. Madmen, clearly. To be fair, the tsar, Nicholas I, had a right to be worried about revolution. The Decembrist Revolt of 1825 was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and it was obvious throughout the world that something was happening. In addition to earlier revolutions in America and France, revolutionary ideas were spreading like a virus around the world through art, literature, philosophy, science, and more. To the younger generation and Russians who suffered most under the current regime, it was exhilarating. For those like Nicholas I, whose power depended on the established order, it was terrifying.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
The Klencke Atlas is a massive 350-year old bound book that has graced the entrance of the British Library maps room. Now it’s being digitized with the latest technology, and the process is remarkable.
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via 3 Quarks Daily by Carl Pierer
Much has been written about how the political centre today can be characterised by offering a choice between two spins of the same idea. Essentially, a choice that is not a really choice. But this point is nothing new. Indeed, this very mechanism can already be found in the 1938 film You Can't Take It With You.
In line with his other films, Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You excels in a sentimentality and heart-warming humour that has won much popular appraisal. It is a film that is easy to watch, easy to enjoy and thus precisely of the charming sort that attracts fervent criticism. Too comforting, too nice, but most importantly too ideological. Capra's films are often seen to hide, behind a humanist façade, a stifling defence of the status quo and an outmoded idea of Americanness. This is not least due to his own descriptions in his autobiography. Against this sort of criticism, without defending Capra's non-existent ideas, it is possible to appreciate his You Can't Take It With You as a staple of ideological presentation of a pseudo-choice.
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via OUP Blog by the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online marketing team
“The Storm, Shakespeare” by chaos07. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay
William Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius (the great stoic philosopher and emperor) have more in common than you might think. They share a recorded birth-date, with Shakespeare baptized on 26 April 1564, and Marcus Aurelius born on 26 April 121 (Shakespeare’s actual birth date remains unknown, although he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His birth is traditionally observed and celebrated on 23 April, Saint George’s Day). But aside from their birth month (and a gap of over a thousand years), what links these two venerated writers? Shakespeare’s plays are a famed source of creative and dramatic inspiration, but are also mined for their astoundingly insightful commentary on human nature. In a similar fashion, Marcus Aurelius is best remembered for his Meditations, a set of pithy aphorisms on Stoic philosophy and guidance on life.
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via Interesting Literature
The greatest poems by Louis MacNeice
The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-63) is often associated with the Thirties Poets, along with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Yet unlike Auden, who left us ‘Stop All the Clocks’, MacNeice can be more difficult to pin down to one or two ‘best poems’ or ‘best-known poems’. ‘Prayer Before Birth’? Perhaps. That classic poem, and nine others, are included below in our pick of Louis MacNeice’s finest poems.
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via Big Think by Frank Jacobs
Please nobody show this map to the President. He might get the wrong idea and bomb the bejeezus out of Lisbon. Because the Portuguese capital – that red dot in the bottom left corner on the map below – is labelled Pyongyang. And that’s the name of another country’s capital. North Korea, to be exact.
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Capybaras relaxing in a spring-fed hot tub
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Sometimes I suspect that Capybaras are horses that haven't yet realized they've been transformed into giant gerbils.
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