Forgetting Cervantes in Spain (El Pais)
“All the recent Spanish governments have been contemptuous of culture, but the current one is downright aggressive towards it” - Arturo Pérez Reverte
1
02, 2016
25
01, 2016
The Two Cultures of Scientists and Non-Scientists
In fact, the separation between the scientists and non-scientists is much less bridgeable among the young than it was even thirty years ago. Thirty years ago the cultures had long ceased to speak to each other: but at least they managed a kind of frozen smile across the gulf. Now the politeness has gone, and [...]
16
01, 2016
Medicine, neurology, and Sherlock (BBC)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the doctor from Edinburgh, teaches new doctors about the mind.
7
01, 2016
Sakharov, Pushkin, and the prison camp
Pushkin brings a desire for spiritual fulfillment between prisoners and their guard.
30
12, 2015
Times old and new: “objective” creative engagement vs. “subjective” inward regression
"As long as poets express merely their puny subjective impressions, they are not worth the name; but as soon as they know how to appropriate and express the world, they are poets. For then they are inexhaustible and can be constantly new, as opposed to a subjective nature, which quickly expresses its meagre inner life [...]
16
12, 2015
Society’s True Aristocrats
Every society is based on aristocracy, because this one, the true one, is demanding with regard to itself, and without this demand every society would die. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1954
7
12, 2015
Joseph Conrad’s Terrorist
The stoicism of his thought could not be disturbed by this or any other failure. Next time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be delivered – something really startling – a blow fit to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious [...]
5
11, 2015
Language and the sciences
How language lends itself to the sciences.
28
10, 2015
The peasant and the vine
Seeing how useful the vine was, the peasant supported it at a height with many props. Then, once he had harvested its grapes, he raised the stakes and let it fall, building a fire with the props. Leonardo da Vinci, Fables
12
08, 2015
Losing Greece
Losing Greece: its meaning for Europe, past and future. Overheard in a train station at the height of the Greek financial crisis, between two men of business. One, in middle age, is wearing a light-grey suit. The other, somewhat younger, is dressed in a blue coat and red bow-tie. They speak in German over their [...]