Новости за 13.10.2016

On bringing up a child bilingually. Short-term drawbacks, long-term gains. “Like all bilingual kids, Henry sometimes uses the words or grammar of one language in the other. Kom herned is perfect Danish, but come heredown is goofy in English. Bilinguals hit developmental milestones at the same rate as their monolingual peers. But they are prone to errors, and their total vocabulary is divided between two languages. So they usually lag behind slightly in the schooling language”

“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old. For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. No one knows if a serious effort could have saved the reef, but no such effort was made. The Great Barrier Reef was predeceased by the South Pacific’s Coral Triangle, the Florida Reef off the Florida Keys, and most other coral... Читать дальше...

After the siege of Sarajevo and the horrors of the Bosnian civil, the West said: “Never again”. But it is happening again now in the siege of Aleppo and the horrors of the Syrian proxy war. “I don’t remember cannibalism in Sarajevo, but I do remember a bleak day in the winter of 1993 when a dog with a human hand limped by from the site of a nearby shelling. Similar hideous scenes occur daily in Eastern Aleppo, where 250,000 people have been under government siege since September”

Dada was an attitude, more than a school or a doctrine. It began as entertainment before widening and deepening into art. Its founders in 1916 Vienna saw frivolity as a means of defying the “butchery” of World War One. They wanted laughter. “Traditionalists see Dadaists as silly people. To a degree, they are right. Silliness was liberating from the constraints of reason. Silliness has the potential to provoke laughter. To Dadaists, Charlie Chaplin was the greatest artist in the world”

“Blonde On Blonde was, and remains, a gigantic peak in Dylan’s career. From more than a dozen angles, it describes basic, not always flattering, human desire. It never degrades or mocks primary experience. Its doomed, hurtful love affairs do not negate love, or abandon efforts to remake love, to liberate it: quite the opposite, as in the litanies of its concluding psalm to the mysteriously wise Sad-Eyed Lady. Blonde On Blonde, as finally assembled, is a disillusioned but seriously hopeful work of... Читать дальше...

The era of Western enthusiasm for military intervention is over. “The central failing of military inter­vention is not coordination, secretiveness, or dishonesty, though these certainly exist. The problem is the iron law of organised violence: intervention is war, and war commands those who choose to fight, however much they believe they are its masters. This became evident in both Iraq and Libya. In each instance, those who believed in quick, clean applications of force were deluded”

The founder of Grove Press tells how he successfully challenged US censorship by publishing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The first step was to import a copy, and so force a prosecution. “When I received the airmailed copy, I wrote the Customs Service informing them that they had let Lady Chatterley slip through. Shame on them. I then promptly redelivered it to their New York office to make sure they knew that this dangerous book had indeed arrived on our shores”

Euclid refounded mathematics on the basis of definitions and self-evident axioms that needed no proof, and so revolutionised our approach to knowledge: “A person of reason would have to accept a proven fact, no matter what their personal beliefs or convictions were”. Euclid’s logic reshaped science and the arts. “What’s less recognised is its role in the creation of modern politics: The distance from proofs about equilateral triangles to the foundations of democracy turned out to be two millennia”