Daily Office:
Friday
¶ Matins: The Awl‘s Abe Sauer is in touch with some medical people who are running out of supplies in a town ten miles west of Port-au-Prince. A helicopter would be helpful.
¶ Lauds: The Online Photographer’s Michael Johnston is far too nice a guy to lay down the law about building a collection of pictures, but, with a little help from his commentariat, he’s taking a stab or two at it. Here, at least, is what a collection is not:
¶ Prime: Well, that didn’t take long: Felix Salmon contests Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that John Paulson’s investment strategy was risk-averse.
¶ Tierce: A cognitive psychology study of flattery: if it makes you feel good about yourself, no matter how resistant you think you are to its explicit claims, it will work. (Scientific American; via Arts Journal)
¶ Sext: Edan Lepucki, of The Millions, purges her library.
¶ Nones: In case you thought that bananas are an innocent pleasure, think again: Rebecca Cohen, at Science Creative Quarterly, lays out the very high costs of making bananas cheap. (via The Morning News)
¶ Vespers: In the course of a tagging match last night, we encountered a dandy Web log: Latin Poetry Podcast. Christopher Francese, an associate professor at Dickinson, talks about his selection, sketches a translation, and then reads aloud. We haven’t looked into where he got his accent, but it sounds weirdly right, and quite unlike the Oxford-don recordings that used to come out on Caedmon LPs.
¶ Compline: Even Justin Smith has made a donation to Yéle Haiti. So have we! So ought you! And, in the end, you have to love Pat Roberton, doncha?
One of the reasons I chose Tulane for grad school was the Latin American Library there, at the time considered one of the best of its kind. Its existence, I was told, was due to gifts from banana company executives, who would buy whole libraries from impoverished families in Central and South America and ship them north, eventually to be donated to various institutions.