Новости за 18.07.2016

Tony Schwartz ghost-wrote The Art Of The Deal for Donald Trump; now he worries that, by helping build Trump’s reputation, he has contributed to a national disaster. “I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization” (Metered paywall)

Conversations with street preachers in Las Vegas. “We’re not shoving it down everybody’s throat, but everybody knows who we are and what we’re doing. It’s a warning. If there’s a judgment, if they end up in hell, God will say to them: there was my man, he was available for you, you had questions, he spent his life studying these things to be able to give you the answer — but you thought he was a nut! You treated him the same way people treated Jesus! You see kinda the thinking?”

As a painter Joseph Turner enjoyed prodigious critical and financial success. In person he was “mischievous and mani­pulative, a man on the make and on the take, selfish and sexual”. He hoarded his wealth while living in squalor. He “secreted himself in his final years in a Chelsea hovel where he was known as Admiral Booth”. His mother went mad and died at Bedlam in 1804. “While Turner was being lauded by fellow academicians, his mother was chained to a wall”

Profile of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who is credited with restoring the emotions to a central place in moral philosphy, and is now writing a book about ageing. “Nussbaum is monumentally confident, intellectually and physically.” She “resurrects a version of the Stoic theory that makes no division between thought and feeling. She gives emotions a central role in moral philosophy, arguing that they are cognitive in nature: they embody judgments about the world” (Metered paywall)

The jungle around Angkor Wat in Cambodia was once the site of the largest city in the world. Aerial surveys have “peeled back the forest canopy to reveal meticulous grids of highways and low-density neighborhoods of thousands of houses and pools of water”. Twelfth-century Chinese travellers reported that the Khmer Empire’s great city was “home to almost a million people”. Modern historians thought the accounts wildly exaggerated. “Now, such facts are impossible to deny”