Simplifying People

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Louis, the dying, grasping, hateful narrator of Francois Mauriac’s Vipers’ Tangle believes the “tangle of vipers was outside myself,” forming a “hideous circle” consisting of his wife and children. He has occasional moments of lucidity when he recognizes that the satanic nest is really within, as in this self-reflection following a rare, frank conversation with his wife, Isa: “Is it possible for us, for nearly half a century, to observe only one side of the person who shares our life?... Read more

Are We Stupid about Smart?

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“Smart” has become the encomium of contemporary culture, and the elevation of smart has real-world consequences. IQ is strongly correlated with financial success. David Freedman reports in the Atlantic, “many employers now ask applicants for SAT scores (whose correlation with IQ is well established); some companies screen out those whose scores don’t fall in the top 5 percent. Even the NFL gives potential draftees a test, the Wonderlic.” Besides, “our fetishization of IQ now extends far beyond the workplace. Intelligence... Read more

Dickens Meets Dostoevsky

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The TLS recently republished a delightful piece of literary detective work by Eric Naiman, first published in 2013. In 2002, one Stephanie Harvey published a piece in the Dickensian describing an encounter between Dickens and Dostoevsky. It’s a hoax. There is no real evidence for the meeting, but Naiman is more interested in unmasking the obscure scholar who invented the incident. He argues that Stephanie Harvey is actually independent historian AD Harvey, and presents evidence that the latter has published... Read more

Earth’s Oceans

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

A fascinating article in the Economist asks, What would we see if we could see through the sea? A few highlights: On plankton: “The world’s stock of phytoplankton, tiny photosynthetic algae and bacteria. Its total mass is far less than that of the plants that provide photosynthesis on land, but every year it takes 50 billion tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere, turning it into organic matter for the ocean’s inhabitants to eat. Scant though the planktonic biomass is,... Read more

Renunciation and Delight

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Wise words, as usual, from Gilbert Meilaender: “Christians can . . . adopt and recommend no single attitude toward possessions. When they attempt to understand their lives within the world of biblical narrative, they are caught in the double movement of enjoyment and renunciation, Neither half of the movement, taken by itself, is the Christian way of life. Trust is the Christian way of life. In order to trust, renunciation is necessary, lest we immerse ourselves entirely in the things... Read more

China’s Christian Future

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

If you haven’t yet read Yu Jie First Things piece on “China’s Christian Future,” do it now. It’s a first-rate piece of political-religious analysis, a moving story of faithful witness, a powerful brief for the Christian future of the world’s most populous country, which will, by 2030, be the country with the largest Christian population. Among other things, the article offers concrete examples of how the church forms civil society and shapes politics. A few samples: “to this day the... Read more

Lonely Made Visible

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In The New Yorker, Hanya Yanagihara situates photography among the arts: “if love belongs to the poet, and fear to the novelist, then loneliness belongs to the photographer. To be a photographer is to willingly enter the world of the lonely, because it is an artistic exercise in invisibility.” The photographer isn’t in the frame: “To practice this art requires first a commitment to self-erasure.” And what is in the frame of the best photographs, “the ones we linger on... Read more

Don’t Break My Name

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ben Lerner discovers the power of linguistic repetition in childhood games: “every kids know the phenomenon that psychologists call ‘semantic saturation,’ wherein a word is repeated until it feels emptied of sense and become mere sound – ‘to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind,’ as Poe describes it in his story ‘Berenice.’ Your parents enforce a bedtime and, confined to your bed, you yell,... Read more

Words in Search of Meaning

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ben Lerner remembers his youthful play with half-understood words, and finds there a clue to the meaning of poetry: “I remember my feeling that I possessed only part of the meaning of the word, like one of those fragmented friendship necklaces, and I had to find the other half in the social world of speech. I remember walking around as a child repeating a word I’d overheard, applying it wildly, and watching how, miraculously, I was rarely exactly wrong. If... Read more

Sad Tales of the Death of Kings

Last updated on: July 28, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When Shakespeare’s Richard II disembarks in Wales, he learns that Henry Bolingbroke has usurped his throne and that three of his most trusted allies have turned Judas—“three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas!” (3.2.132). Villains, vipers, dogs, and snakes have become his courtiers. The most shocking blow, though, is the blow to Richard’s confidence in his kingship. When he steps onto the shore, he touches the ground with his royal, anointed hand, and calls on mother earth to stand... Read more

Who interpreted Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a statue of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay?