(New Yorker) – Alex Ross:
He was falsely cast as Mozart’s murderer and music’s sorest loser. Now he’s getting a fresh hearing. …
newyorker antonio-salieris-revenge
Archive for May, 2019
Antonio Salieri’s Revenge
2019-05-31The Day I Met AOC
2019-05-31(The Intercept) – Aída Chávez:
A little more than a year ago, I was sitting across from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Queens diner for an interview. She had just qualified to be on the ballot in her race against one of the most powerful Democrats in the country. This was before anybody outside of her immediate community in New York City knew her name. Nobody wanted a selfie with her. Most Americans hadn’t spent much time thinking about the idea of a Green New Deal, a 70 percent marginal tax rate, or an obscure congressional budget rule known as pay-go. She wasn’t the target of death threats and conservative hate-thirst, and up until two months before I met her, she was still going by “Sandy” and working at a Union Square bar. …
theintercept 2019/05/30 campaign
The Massacre at Paris
2019-05-30(Good Tickle Brain) – Mya Gosling:
It’s the 426th anniversary of Christopher Marlowe getting stabbed rather fatally in the face in a tavern in Deptford, aged 29. He wrote seven plays, possibly collaborated on more, and heavily influenced Shakespeare. Let’s pour one out for Kit as we take a look at The Massacre at Paris. …
goodticklebrain massacre-at-paris
Swimming
2019-05-30(xkcd) – Randall Munroe:
I love swimming, but occasionally I realize I don’t know how deep the water under me is and it freaks me out. …
Edward II
2019-05-29(Good Tickle Brain) – Mya Gosling:
I’m a sucker for history plays, and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is basically the prequel to Edward III, and, by extension, all the rest of Shakespeare’s histories. …
Hummingbirds and Hawks
2019-05-29(Patheos::ATP) – Bert Bigelow:
I have been a casual bird watcher for most of my adult life. You can learn a lot from watching birds. Some of what you learn can be instructive about life. Birds understand about property, and defending it. Like humans, they can be aggressive when they feel their “ownership” is threatened. …
tippling hummingbirds-and-hawks
Don’t Blame ‘Washington’
2019-05-29(WP) – Paul Waldman:
The Republican agenda has gotten quite narrow, and it contains almost nothing that’s affirmative in any way. Republicans want to dismantle regulations on the environment and labor rights. They want to take health insurance away from as many people as they can. They want to attack abortion rights and make life more miserable for transgender Americans. And, of course, a giant meteor could be headed to destroy the Earth in 48 hours and they’d try to force through one more tax cut for the wealthy and corporations before we’re all vaporized.
But in terms of actually doing anything positive, they’re not really interested. …
washingtonpost 2019/05/27 blame
Berlin, Home for China’s Artists
2019-05-28(Atlantic) – Melissa Chan:
The German capital not only offers freedom, but also invites people to provoke and challenge orthodoxy. …
Pilate Released Barabbas. Really??
2019-05-28(Rational Doubt) – Bart Ehrman:
Is Pilate the sort of person who would kindly accede to the requests of his Jewish subjects in light of their religious sensitivities? In fact he was just the opposite kind of person. Not only do we have no record of him releasing prisoners to them once a year, or ever. Knowing what we know about him, it seems completely implausible. I should point out that we don’t have any evidence of any Roman governor, anywhere, in any of the provinces, having any such policy.
And thinking about the alleged facts of the case for a second, how could there be such a policy? Barabbas in this account is not just a murderer, he is an insurrectionist. If he was involved with an insurrection, that means he engaged in an armed attempt to overthrow Roman rule. If he murdered during the insurrection, he almost certainly would have murdered a Roman soldier or someone who collaborated with the Romans. Are we supposed to believe that the ruthless, iron-fisted Pilate would release a dangerous enemy of the state because the Jewish crowd would have liked him to do so? What did Romans do with insurrectionists? Did they set them free so they could engage in more armed guerilla warfare? Would any ruling authority do this? Of course not. Would the Romans? Actually we know what they did with insurrectionists. They crucified them. …
Why Faith Isn’t a Virtue
2019-05-27(Patheos::Godless in Dixie) – Neil Carter:
Every moral belief should be subject to scrutiny. That’s the only way to ensure we haven’t simply internalized someone else’s value system as our own. I would argue that is a primitive, less mature way of approaching life. Maybe it’s okay for very small children, but a good parent tries as early as possible to teach their children why something is good or bad. That’s the only way to equip your child to make their own decisions when presented with newer, more complicated moral questions as they grow older. There will come a day when you won’t be around to tell them what to do, and they will likely face complex situations you could never have anticipated so many years before. …
godlessindixie faith-isnt-a-virtue
The Invisible City Beneath Paris
2019-05-27(New Yorker::Page-Turner) – Robert Macfarlane:
Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.
My last sight of the sun is a westerly blaze under rain clouds. At dusk, we push through a door in a wall marked “Interdit d’entrer,” slip through a hole in a chain-link fence, scramble down to a railway line, and crunch along the tracks toward the brick arch of a tunnel. The cutting banks are tangled with acacia trees and wild clematis. Apartment blocks rise above the cutting on both sides. Once in the railway tunnel, we keep between the tracks, because what little light there is glints on the metal and shows us the way. …
God Almighty, and AWOL
2019-05-26(Debunking Christianity) – David Madison:
Calvinism, no doubt about it, is a chilling brand of Christianity, but others have preferred to rhapsodize about God’s love. This, supposedly, matters more than anything else; hence his failure to stop the Black Plague and slavery can’t be allowed to diminish God’s love and are waved off as mysteries of the faith. This is a way of saying, “We don’t want to think about it.”
If there was ever an empirical refutation of the Christian belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God, the problem of evil is it. It speaks like a megaphone against the existence of God. …
Led by Donkeys
2019-05-26(Guardian::Politics) – Harriet Sherwood:
The four men behind the nationwide Brexit billboard phenomenon finally reveal their identities – in the pub where it all began. …
theguardian 2019/may/25 led-by-donkeys
Strike across World over Climate Crisis
2019-05-25(Guardian::Environment) – Matthew Taylor:
Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren across the world have gone on strike in protest at the escalating climate crisis. …
On Friday Greta Thunberg, and leading youth strikers across the world, called for all adults to join the protests and stage a global general strike on 20 September. …
theguardian 2019/may/24 strike
The Wrong Tears
2019-05-25(Guardian Comments) – Suzanne Moore:
A walk-in freezer has more warmth. Interesting necklaces do not make a personality. More importantly she doesn’t do dialogue, she simply repeats her lines and her mantras until people are so bored they possibly agree with her. Or she pretended they did. …
theguardian 2019/may/24 britain-broken
The Worst Prime Minister
2019-05-25(Guardian Comments) – Owen Jones:
Deceit and dishonesty were hallmarks of her doomed reign. From her Brexit dealings to the Windrush scandal, she has failed. …
theguardian 2019/may/24 worst-prime-minister
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