"Why did anyone begin work on a doctorate in the humanities in those days? Why does anyone do it now? They did it in the past—and their academic grandchildren do it now—for reasons that are not dreamt of in the philosophy and theology of the market. Becoming a humanist, let us remember, is not just signing up for a job. It certainly does not open the way to power or wealth: scholar has never rhymed with dollar. To become a trained humanist, rather, is to join a tradition, which has usually been embattled, while parents scream “No, for God’s sake go to law school!” (That is what Petrarch’s father said to him, thereby inaugurating a great tradition.) In the old days, a professor did not receive a job offer, but a “call”—as ministers and rabbis did. To enter this tradition, you have always needed intellectual ability and technical skills, but even more you need conviction and passion and determination. One might say that you need a vocation. And the vocation of scholarship is hard, as Weber warned in times worse than these.
One reason graduate school demands so much time, so much effort, and so much difficulty is that it is designed—badly, and clumsily, but not insanely—to attract and then to test people who think they have this sort of calling. Graduate study is nothing less than a quest—and you cannot undertake a meaningful quest without trials. Menand does not grasp this existential reality. As long as graduate school is this sort of place—and it still is, and it still has to be, or the traditions that it preserves will wither and die—its intellectual demands will be high, and its psychic ones higher, and it will require long years of study."
Anthony Grafton, Humanities and Inhumanities
20 March 2010
Big Bosoms And The Big Bang: Did The Human Condition Really Emerge In Europe?? | The New Republic
Big Bosoms And The Big Bang: Did The Human Condition Really Emerge In Europe?? | The New Republic
John McWhorter
John McWhorter
There they go again.
This week in Nature we learn of the discovery of a 35,000 year old erotic figurine in Germany, 5000 years older than previously known such work by early humans.
We are to take from this that evidence for an artistic mindset - i.e. modern, abstract thought - mysteriously "exploded" into the human endowment at this time. "The Big Bang," some call it, an apparent Great Leap Forward in toolmaking, burial rituals and art among European peoples at this time. Scholars of human evolution have taken a cue from this and supposed that the Big Bang was the result of some genetic mutation that led to humanity of a modern cognitive level.
John Noble Wilford at the Times notes the fascination over the "inspiration and symbolism behind the rather sudden flowering" that figurines of this period...The Great Grocery Smackdown - Magazine - The Atlantic
The Great Grocery Smackdown - Magazine - The Atlantic
I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.
The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.
I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.
The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.
the sun rises every morning
“The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
19 March 2010
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