Parrots, Cities, Phoenicians, Espionage, Auden
Birds Of A Feather
Miisha Nash | Topic | 8th May 2018
On relations between humans and parrots. Thanks to speech, they get close. “Poe loathed the color purple; a certain pair of socks evoked prolonged cries of terror. She flung unwanted food at walls. A veterinarian prescribed Prozac, instructing me to mix a few drops into her water. Pets were supposed to quell anxiety, but she had the opposite effect on me; I worried that my anxiety was another thing she’d learned to mimic, until she’d internalized it and made it real” (1,540 words)
City As Character
Tyler Malone | Lapham's Quarterly | 30th April 2018
Joyce’s Dublin, Balzac’s Paris, Döblin’s Berlin are not only the settings for great novels but also the principal actors in those novels. The city dictates the plot, too, by virtue of its “intrinsic inability to adhere to a tidy narrative”. The reader “drifts from page to page as if from street to street”. Virginia Woolf did something similar for London, but to a lesser degree; we see the city through the eyes of her characters, whereas we see Joyce’s characters through the eyes of the city (2,070 words)
Phantasmic Phoenicia
Josephine Quinn | Aeon | 4th April 2018
Every nation demands a history, preferably one extending back into ancient times, which accounts for the popularity of the Phoenicians as imagined ancestors. Medieval English historians traced their country’s lineage back to Phoenicia; as did Irish nationalists in the 18th century; as did Lebanon’s nation-builders in the early 20th century. But the Phoenicians were an invention of the Greeks. “There is no known instance of a Phoenician ever calling themselves a Phoenician” (3,100 words)
Breaking The Zimmerman Telegram
John Bull | Lapsed Historian | 18th January 2018
When World War One broke out, and Britain cut Germany’s transatlantic telegraph cable, Germany shifted its diplomatic traffic to the neutral American cable — apparently unaware that the American cable crossed British soil. The British tapped the cable, and in 1917 decrypted a German telegram urging Mexico to make war on the United States. This was enough to bring America into the war. But how could the British reveal the telegram, without revealing that they tapped the American cable? (4,700 words)
Hannah Arendt On W.H. Auden
Hannah Arendt | Literary Hub | 21st February 2018
“I met Auden late in his life and mine — at an age when the easy friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained. We were good friends but not intimate friends. There was a reserve in him that discouraged familiarity. I gladly respected it as the necessary secretiveness of the great poet, one who must have taught himself early not to talk in prose, loosely and at random, of things that he knew how to say much more satisfactorily in the condensed concentration of poetry” (3,100 words)
Video of the day Berlin In June 1945
What to expect:
Documentary footage of the German capital immediately after the Nazi surrender. Original colour restored (7’04”)
Thought for the day
We think in generalities, but we live in details
Alfred North Whitehead
Podcast Fitness In A Bottle | Flash Forward
What if there was a pill that made you fit? Would you still go to the gym? Rose Eveleth and guests discuss
(53m 25s)