Category: ideas

With John Milton’s 400th birthday arriving next month, a number of universities are organizing marathon readings of his greatest work (all twelve books of it). Jennifer Howard sits in on one of them (all twelve hours of it), and reports back. Conclusions: (1) “Milton is not as boring as you think.” (2) “Milton is not that hard to read out loud.” (3) “Milton is really hard to read out loud.” But (4) “It’s worth it.”

A recently discovered inscription dating from 644AD, the oldest ever found in Arabic, isn’t much more than graffiti. But it has potentially serious implications for the study of Islam. Why? It all comes down to diacritical marks.

Memorializing the dead has always led to some creative thinking, but using ashes to create art? The artist offering the service “paid his way through Philadelphia’s Hussian School of Art by working as a gravedigger at a local cemetery.” Now, he mixes cremated remains with his paints to create textured paintings for grieving families.

Mark Harris looks at the place of Bellevue Hospital in the popular imagination of New York and the country at large – and at how the reality of the hospital and its image relate to and affect each other.

“It turns out that digital cameras leave a telltale fingerprint buried in the pixels of every image they capture. Now forensic scientists can use this fingerprint to tell what camera model was used to take a shot.”

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

“Punk’s reach extends far beyond that original fistful of fast, loud bands, and its influence goes much deeper than a rebellious musical moment. Punk’s legacy is vast. From the do-it-yourself philosophy that informs indie rock to the anti-elitism that fuels the blogosphere, the spirit of authenticity and embrace of amateurism that were the pillars of punk now permeate modern art and culture.”

“Monty Python’s famous Dead Parrot sketch is actually a lot older than thought – 1,600 years older. An ancestor of the comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century.”

In the U.S., “atheists are less charitable than their God-fearing counterparts: They donate less blood, for example, and are less likely to offer change to homeless people on the street.” Yet “the Danes and the Swedes [are] probably the most godless people on Earth. They don’t go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don’t believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they’re nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality.”

That would be Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose 1530 Handbook on Good Manners for Children has been published in a new translation. Some things never change: “His basic tenet is that good manners will spring from ‘the ability to ignore the faults of others and avoid falling short yourself’.” On the other hand, among his prescriptions are “Do not indulge in hysterical mirth, [and] do not stagger in the theatrical manner favoured by bishops and Swiss soldiers.”