Новости за 28.06.2016

Most critics of technology are not nearly critical enough. They assume that the technology will work. They take the manufacturer’s side, in effect, and disagree only about the results. Yet we know from personal experience that things often break down. Caveat emptor. “We may face some version of Oscar Wilde’s dilemma, where the only thing worse than the moral economy of technology working as advertised is the moral economy of it not working as advertised”

The International Olympic Committee maintains the division between men’s and women’s events, but relaxes its definitions of “men” and “women”. Athletes who have transitioned to another gender may compete without sex reassignment surgery. “You can still have your old parts, which is very forward thinking”, says Caitlyn Jenner. Athletes who have previously identified as female can compete in male events without restriction; but not the other way round

High time to ditch the British monarch as Canada’s head of state. “We are the grown-ups now”. Britain, stripped of its dignity as well as its power, has nothing more to offer. The British Royal Family is “a pisspoor symbol for Canada as it stands”. Queen Elizabeth represents an “old, racist, inward-looking England”. Her likely successor, Prince Charles, is “the idiot toff lord of a small piece of an island famous for its poor weather. Canada deserves better. So does England, for that matter”

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”, said Adam Smith — while expecting his dinner from his mother. Where is she in his theory? Katrine Marçal argues in Adam Smith’s Dinner that Smith and other great thinkers are half-blind: They do not see the part of women in the world. “Only a man would imagine independence rather than dependence as the basis for the human condition”

Suffering in war “changes people for the better, making them more cooperative and more trusting”, according to a counter-intuitive paper from three highly-regarded social scientists, drawing on 19 earlier studies. “The positive effect of war didn’t seem to fade. Some of the studies had been conducted over a decade after conflict had ended, yet they still found that the scars of war had made people more generous, more politically active and more likely to be leaders in their communities”

It costs about $10 billion to stage an Olympic games if you don’t go overboard, and you get about $4 billion back in direct revenues. But as a host government you want to claim that the Games are a good investment. So what do you do? You fudge. You exaggerate the “spillover benefits” alleged to come from the spending of foreign visitors during the games and the boost to tourism for years afterwards. “The rule of thumb among serious economists is to divide all such benefits by 10”

Mark Morris’s revival of Frederick Ashton’s La fille mal gardée is “perfection”, “music of the spheres”, “a kind of cosmic bliss”. The stage seethes with butter-churns, wine-bottles, carts and ponies, batons and scythes, clog-dancing, a maypole, and yards of pink ribbon. The ballet tells of a peasant girl’s struggle to outwit her mother and marry a shepherd. “There can’t be another work in the repertory of such joy, innocence and charm. If paradise exists, this ballet is playing there in an endless... Читать дальше...

Now that the making of basic goods in Britain has tapered away almost to an ending, we can see more clearly the effects of the Manufacturing Age. The “fleeting visitation” of industrialism has made life more comfortable. Its dismantling has “liberated millions from choiceless occupations”. But this “spectacular improvement” has been very unequally shared. In the former pit villages and derelict factory towns of Britain, the “ravages of drugs and alcohol and self-harm show convergence with other ruined... Читать дальше...

Remembering the Battle of the Somme, which began one hundred years ago with a massacre that the British brought upon themselves. Troops were ordered to walk towards the German trenches and told that the enemy had already been bombed into submission. “The Army suffered 57,470 casualties that first day, of whom 19,240 were killed. It remains the bloodiest day in British military history and the totals exceeded the losses in the Crimean, Boer and Korean Wars combined”

The late Michael Herr’s Dispatches is one of the best books ever written about war, and “one of the greatest nonfiction works of its time”. An early work of new journalism, already it transcended the genre. Herr told an “unrelenting tale like the Ancient Mariner” with the same “stricken urgency” and spell­binding power, “moving like a magician over the unlucky country of Vietnam and in one blinding shell-burst after another revealing some new field of sorrow, disfigurement, or death”

Famed as a critic and a poet, William Empson shambled through life with “a weird, sordid nobility”. When scandal drove him from Cambridge, he taught in China. He wrote his “lost masterpiece”, The Face of the Buddha, about Buddhist art, while wandering through Asia in the 1930s. The manuscript, which vanished one drunken night in Soho, has surfaced 60 years later. We may hesitate now to talk of genius, but “it is hard to know how else to describe Empson’s astonishing originality of mind”