Новости за 30.06.2016

Arguably Wallace’s best essay. Roger Federer at Wimbledon. “In men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their ‘love’ of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s”

England’s greatest living wine writer discusses the best books in her field, and offers tips for spotting humbug: “I’m very sceptical of any tasting note that has more than four flavours in it.” The French make the best wine, the British make the best critics. “A grand French writer would not devote a book to wine. It would be like devoting a book to potatoes. There are one or two lovely books on Burgundy. But they are more workmanlike, something for a professional, rather than a great read”

The loss of a child was “a minor event” until quite recently. When the parents of a toddler sued a US railway company for causing their child’s death in 1896, the judge ruled that the child had no “earning capacity” and dismissed the case. Nowadays courts award huge sums for loss of a child, citing “emotional pain”. How and why did we change our view of children from “un-sentimentalized but economically useful little people to economically useless yet emotionally priceless treasures”?

Problems in Western philosophy concerning the concept of mind trouble Chinese philosophers much less, perhaps because the Chinese language is more at ease with verbs and less insistent on nouns. “Ancient Chinese philosophers did discuss ‘being’, but to do it they used the words you, ‘there is’, and wu, ‘there is not’, both of which are fundamentally verbs. By contrast ancient Greek thinkers often conceived their puzzles in terms of nouns: What is ‘justice’? ‘Beauty’? ‘The good’? And so on”

Professor of behavioural genetics discusses the role of genetics in behaviour. Forty years ago the subject was almost taboo; genetics was associated with a “right-wing agenda”. Advances in technology now force us to recognise that genetic inheritance, along with environment, plays a big part in our abilities and our dispositions. But we resist the implications. People “shy away from genetics”, especially in education. “You go to educational conferences and it’s as if genetics does not exist”