Новости за 17.06.2016

Virginia Woolf’s biographer discusses the rise, and fall, and renewed rise in Woolf’s reputation. Her influence as a writer and as a feminist is stronger than ever. She can be seen now as a precursor of Elena Ferrante and of Karl Ove Knausgaard. In her own day she was a troubled modernist. She outgrew the conventions of her 19C childhood, but missed the certainties that went with them. She “lost a sense of solidity and gravitas and rootedness, and she struggles with that”

Humans and other big animals get smaller — very quickly by evolutionary standards — when confined to islands. Body size can reduce significantly within 3,000 years. Remains of a “tiny human relative” from 700,000 years ago have been found on the Indonesian island of Flores. There are two main theories, not necessarily exclusive, as to why islands encourage dwarfism: One is that species optimise for fewer resources, the other that they optimise for fewer predators

Excavation of Ancient Greek naval bases in Piraeus yields an astonishing view of Athenian sea power. Some 80,000 sailors and soldiers maintained and manned the fleet of 400 triremes. The sheds used to store the ships in time of peace covered one million square feet, the size of 17 football fields. The bases were built between 520 BC and 480 BC, in time for the Battle of Salamis at which the Greeks defeated a much larger Persian fleet, a decisive moment in European history

A drink and a smoke with Michel Houellebecq, France’s best-selling novelist, whose most recent book, Submission, depicted France under an Islamist government. “In most of his publicity portraits, Houellebecq looks revolting. But in the flesh he is rather elegant, even handsome.” He is also, in his own view, the world’s greatest living writer – though he thinks Balzac was better. “I’m still at a good age. In general, one does best at 60. I can still do one great book. Not two”

For all that has been written about the Nazi concentration camps, Nikolaus Wachsmann’s new history, KL, is the “first comprehensive study, based on mastery of a huge literature and stupendous research”. Wachsmann “writes of the camps as places where people lived.” Prisoners become “individuals, not just objects of terror”. KL offers a “corrective” to the modern view that Germans generally and spontaneously supported Hitler: The camps were there to coerce those who did not

You need rules in financial markets, but you cannot live by rules alone. You also need common sense, and morality, and judicial oversight. If you live by rules alone the rules get so complicated that nobody can understand them and everybody misses the loopholes. This is already a problem in derivatives contracts. It is going to be an even bigger problem with blockchain technologies, which rely entirely on computer code. When the code gets hacked — and it will get hacked — you need recourse

Frustratingly incomplete, but still highly readable. O’Hagan shadows the confused Australian near-bankrupt hacker, Craig Wright, who claims to be Satoshi Nakomoto, inventor of Bitcoin. Canadian investors are supposedly bankrolling Wright, on the unlikely basis that he can generate patents for technologies already in the public domain. Wright seems very frightened of something — but what? Somewhere in here are the signs of an elaborate confidence trick. But what is the trick?