Daily Office:
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Matins
¶ A study at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy (Harvard) finds that 2004 was the year in which the four principal newspapers in this country stopped referring to waterboarding as “torture.” Kris Kotarski makes short work of the editors’ lame excuses. (Vancouver Sun; via 3 Quarks Daily)
Lauds
¶ JMW Turner’s Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino is bound for the Getty in Los Angeles, having broken the artist’s auction record at £29.7 million. Well, the Getty has pots of money but not many masterpieces. Still Modern Rome is, as you might expect from the title, the pendant to Ancient Rome, a big picture at the Tate. Our suggestion is that the Tate round up a few of its just-ordinarily-marvelous Turners and trade them for Modern Rome.
Prime
¶ Is a college degree worth the financial cost? If so, what’s the financial return? These questions are taken up at The Intersection and Felix Salmon respectively. Sheril Kirschenbaum extracts a drolly hair-raising judgment from an article in Chron Higher Ed:
Colleges are taking on too many roles and doing none of them well. They are staffed by casts of thousands and dedicated to everything from esoteric research to vocational training—and have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people. Higher education has become a colossus—a $420-billion industry—immune from scrutiny and in need of reform.
That’s from a forthcoming book by Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money &c &c.
¶ Meanwhile, Felix Salmon complains about a silly Business Week ranking of the ROI of over eight hundred institutions of higher education. As Felix says, “there’s a lot to dislike,” but what stands out for us, not so much because Business Week got something wrong as because it highlights the poverty of attaching price tags to everything, is the cultural inability to value a liberal arts education.
Tierce
¶ The more we think about Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex piece, “Will I?,” the more well-duh it seems. If you engage with a task, or any experience, really, with an inquiring mind, you are preparing yourself for details that you haven’t foreseen. If you settle down with grim determination to get the job done, in contrast, you’ve left yourself vulnerable to the unexpected. Asking “Will I?” instead of announcing “I will” is the simplest way of admitting the one thing that we know about life: that we don’t know what’s next.
Mr Lehrer’s explanation is of course rather different.
Sext
¶ Plus ça change… At the LRB, Jenny Diski writes about that quaint but deadly powder, arsenic. Reviewing James Whorton’s The Arsenic Century, she notes that liberal economics were far more murderous than desperate spouses. [P]
Ms Diski ends her piece exactly where she ought: in the well-meant but poisoned wells of Bangladesh.
Nones
¶ The Swiss decision not to extradite filmmaker Roman Polanski to the United States appears, in Time‘s Bruce Crumley’s view, to stem from the Americans’ determiantion to withhold testimony by the prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson.
Vespers
¶ Bill Morris reads John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor fifty years on, and writes a beautiful appreciation. (The Millions)
Compline
¶ Also at The Millions, Conor Dillon rhapsodizes about the “jumper colon.” Not Lynn Truss’s cup of tea: the jumper colon starts you off with a little taste of the dish to come.