Новости за 28.01.2016

The founders of successful start-ups get rich. That increases inequality; it also encourages smart people to work hard and efficiently. So far so good. But there is a balance to be struck. A system in which founders walk away with billions cannot be the only one that works. When America’s most brilliant graduates aspire to produce trivial pieces of software, it is surely a signal that incentives are not being correctly allocated

A list of expressions from many languages for positive emotional states and concepts, many without immediate English equivalent. “Ah-un (阿吽) (Japanese): Unspoken communication between close friends. Fargin (Yiddish): To glow with pride at the success of others. Gigil (Tagalog): The irresistible urge to pinch a loved one. Sarang (Korean): The desire to be with someone until death. Mudita (Sanskrit): To revel in someone else’s joy”

Report from “the largest gathering of medievalists on earth”, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, where this year’s panels include “Waste Studies: Excrement in the Middle Ages”, and “J. K. Rowling’s Medievalism (I & II)”. “Medievalists, who lead solitary and difficult lives, get together and cavort and dance and talk about the things they love the most in the world, surrounded by people who care about the same things”

An opponent of tuition fees in British universities recants. “The data simply couldn’t be clearer. In the last decade, in spite of rising tuition fees, students are more likely to apply for university, poorer students are more likely to apply for university, and the inequality gap – while still a problem – has closed. We’re not talking about small debatable improvements here – these are massive changes”

Like Darwin’s Origin Of Species, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene changed the course of science and captured the public imagination. “The gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins championed is now central to evolutionary theorizing. A bird or a bee risks its life and health to bring its offspring into the world, not to help itself, and certainly not to help its species.” Forty years later, “Dawkins’s synthesis stands to this day”

Late 19C and early 20C progressives were “often quite appalling racists and eugenicists”. Racism was “built into the professional structure of economics in a fairly fundamental way”. We can relativise such behaviour as a product of its time and alien to us now. But advances in genetics are forcing societies to confront basic questions of eugenics once again, and with better science. What are our moral arguments this time?

Profile of Sir Jeremy Heywood, “the most powerful person in Britain that most people have never heard of”. As cabinet secretary, “He is the person who is always in the room with the prime minister”. As head of the civil service, he has 390,000 subordinates. “Jeremy’s like a drug. People get addicted to him quite quickly. Prime ministers are not sure about him at first. Then they say, ‘Umm, that’s rather good. I need that’”

Interview with Patrick Soon-Shiong, leader of a high-powered American consortium aiming to discover a new science of cancer. “Cancer is actually a part of your physiological normal self. There’s a process called apoptosis by which your normal cells die, like the autumn leaves going brown. Cancer is not just an out-of-control growth — it’s a prevention of death, meaning the cells refuse to die when they should”

Hedged with divinity in his lifetime, clay-footed after his death, T.S. Eliot enters the canon as a great poet and a flawed critic. A new biography by Robert Crawford, and an edition of the poems “massively annotated” by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, illuminate the man and the work. “Eliot was a graceful dancer and expert sailor but was self-conscious about his protuberant ears and a congenital hernia that required him to wear a truss”

Aristotle praised tragedy for its “naturally unfolding story”, while faulting Homeric epic for its episodic structure. But he misunderstood epic. “The episodes aren’t a distraction, they’re the whole point”. The trick is “to keep the framing narrative thin enough to allow for rich side-trips but compelling enough that you don’t get impatient.” Television serial drama is epic in the Aristotelian sense. It doesn’t always succeed, but nor did Homer