As Rhodri Lewis points out, the evidence that Hamlet is young is overwhelming: “Claudius counsels Hamlet that his enduring display of grief for his father is ‘unmanly,’ a term whose persuasive force depends on Hamlet aspiring to, rather than already having attained, the condition of manliness; Laertes thinks of Hamlet as ‘A violet in the youth of primy nature’; the Ghost tells Hamlet that if he were to describe the afterlife in detail, the effect would be to ‘freeze thy... Read more
Haiku is the most mockable poetic form. It seems easy, and a lot of bad haiku gets written. The best haiku exemplifies the nature of poetry, which I have described as a “concentrated excess of language.” Reading a well-constructive haiku is like viewing a scene in a flash of lightening or under a strobe light: The scene becomes visible then instantly fades, but leaves you with sensation of glimpsing a larger story in the midst of its unfolding. The words... Read more
Haiku is the most mockable poetic form. It seems easy, and a lot of bad haiku gets written. The best haiku exemplifies the nature of poetry, which I have described as a “concentrated excess of language.” Reading a well-constructive haiku is like viewing a scene in a flash of lightening or under a strobe light: The scene becomes visible then instantly fades, but leaves you with sensation of glimpsing a larger story in the midst of its unfolding. The words... Read more
Darian Leader notes in What Is Madness? that the various theories of madness that have been developed over the past fifty years are “more or less unknown outside a very narrow professional field” (2). That research has been undertaken within a psychoanalytic framework, and is barely known even to “most psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health workers” (3). One reason for this neglect is a bias against psychoanalysis, or a bias against the caricature that passes for psychoanalysis. Leader things that... Read more
Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra reports in Christianity Today on efforts to change laws concerning church construction in Egypt: “Current laws, which have been in place since 1856, require Christians to get the consent of the local Muslim community—and the country’s president—before building a church.” At times, “Christians were required to gain the approval of local Muslims and to make sure the proposed church was at least 340 feet from the nearest mosque. They also couldn’t build near schools, village canals, railways,... Read more
Ninety-five-year-old Walter Laqueur has an interest in thinking that the aged are still useful. In an essay in The American Interest, he assembles ancient evidence in support: Foolish people, Cicero says, blame old age for their own faults and shortcomings, but Enius did not do so. As an old man, he compared himself to a gallant and victorious racehorse. Nor does old age prevent an active life: Appius Claudius was not only old but blind when he gave a magnificent... Read more
MIT’s Technology Review reports on research by computer scientist Andrew Reagan of the University of Vermont that uses data-mining to determine the most common story-arcs of 1700 English stories and novels. Their method is: “words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity... Read more
MIT’s Technology Review reports on research by computer scientist Andrew Reagan of the University of Vermont that uses data-mining to determine the most common story-arcs of 1700 English stories and novels. Their method is: “words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity... Read more
Patrick Deneen argues that liberal order is incompatible with limited government. Liberalism is devoted to the protection of rights, including the right to happiness; its ends are limitless, and so the scope of liberal government is likewise unlimited. At the end of the essay, Deneen quotes this illuminating passage from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where Locke discusses the relativity of goods under the heading, revealingly enough, of “On Power”: All men seek happiness, but not of the same sort.... Read more
It’s the puzzle of the 2016 Presidential race. It’s the question that’s dominating European politics in the aftermath of Britain’s exit from the EU and after a summer of immigration turmoil. Everything was going so swimmingly toward a global future. Everyone seemed so happy. Suddenly, so it seems, nationalism, patriotism, Firstism are breaking out all over. It used to be Obama and Clinton and Cameron and Merkel; now it’s all Trump and Farage and Le Pen. What happened? Immigration has... Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In