Newsletter 1044
Best of the Moment
The Manly Loaf
Sam Leith | Aeon | 28th June 2013
You may balk at the title, but the tongue-in-cheek contention here is that bread-making is indeed a guy thing: "Putting a loaf on the table in front of your family — this beautiful, aromatic, crusty, porous, individual-as-a-snowflake hunk of sustenance — is Neolithic stuff. Our hunting fathers weren’t faffing about with orechiette and tenderstem broccoli. But they were making bread, and making it in exactly the same way"
The Art Of Translation
Vladimir Nabokov | New Republic | 27th June 2013
Republished from 1941. Why almost all translations are bad, the more so when Russian is involved. Rounded off with a homily on the difficulty of rendering even a single line of Pushkin adequately into English. "The tackling process lasted the worst part of the night. I did translate it at last; but to give my version at this point might lead the reader to doubt that perfection be attainable by merely following a few perfect rules"
Bono: Simple But Devastating
Terry Eagleton | Guardian | 27th June 2013
Review of The Frontman: Bono by Harry Browne. "As a multimillionaire investor, world-class tax avoider, pal of Bush and Blair and crony of the bankers and neo-cons, Bono has lent credence to the global forces that wreak much of the havoc he is eager to mop up. His technocratic, west-centred, corporation-friendly campaigns have driven him into one false solution, unsavoury alliance and embarrassing debacle after another"
It’s Good To Be Wrong
David Deutsch | Nautilus | 28th June 2013
Essay on fallibility and the paradoxes to which it leads. "A fallibilist cannot claim to be infallible even about fallibilism itself. And so, one is forced to doubt that fallibilism is universally true. Which is the same as wondering whether one might be somehow infallible—at least about some things. For instance, can it be true that absolutely anything that you think is true, no matter how certain you are, might be false?"
Jimmy Wales Is Not An Internet Billionaire
Amy Chozick | New York Times | 27th June 2013
Profile of Wikipedia founder as a fairly ordinary guy. "Being the most famous traveling spokesman for Internet freedom brings in a decent living, but it’s not Silicon Valley money. It’s barely London money. Wales’s total net worth, by most estimates, is just above $1 million. He looks like a well-groomed version of a person who has been slumped over a computer drinking Yoo-hoo for hours"
Video of the day: People In Sunny Russia
Thought for the day:
"Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor"— Emil Cioran