Raphael, Interrupted
James Hankins | New Criterion | 20th May 2020
Raphael lived long enough to secure immortality as a painter; but in architecture, the profession that he sought to master as a protégé of Pope Leo X, he was still unproven when he died at 37. “As an architect Raphael practiced the same kind of recombinant classicism, choosing elements from innumerable antique structures but reassembling them in harmonious, creative ways. He understood, as modern educational theory does not, that creativity is the child of knowledge” (2,020 words)
Splendid Isolation
John Gapper | How To Spend It | 23rd May 2020
Delightfully discursive account of the cherry blossom in Japanese history and culture, explaining en passant how Japan’s cherry trees blossom each year with the perfect sequencing of a Mexican wave from the north to the south of the country. “The trees cannot self-pollinate and are only propagated by grafting. As a result, they are clones with identical DNA which tend to bloom at the same time. The timing varies around the country but the five-petalled flowers appear en masse in each region” (2,200 words)
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The New Economics Of Chess
Tyler Cowen | Marginal Revolution | 20th May 2020
Chess is winning the lockdown as the most time-tolerant, context-indifferent, high-status, bettable, loggable, analysable and discussable pastime — with Magnus Carlsen leading the historic re-grouping. “Most chess players have a relatively low opportunity cost of time. What they do in their spare time is to play chess, often on-line. It is also the case that a chess player can play many days in the year, perhaps not every day, but you really can play a lot without tearing your rotator cuff” (560 words)
Not In Spanish
Michael Hofmann | LRB | 21st May 2020
Metered paywall; if you have a free click, this is the right use for it. Virtuoso review of Bilingual Brain, by the late Albert Costa, about language and brain-function. “[Costa] sounds at times like an amateur, drawing materials from the breakfast table, and at others like the gifted neurologist or psycholinguist he was, advancing provisional conclusions, to be overturned by the research of others or himself. There were moments when I didn’t understand him, but I suspect that the fault was all on my side” (1,290 words)
Art Of The Vinaigrette
Bill Buford | Literary Hub | 5th May 2020
On the history, geography, and “cultural magnificence” of the vinaigrette — a much-travelled term that in Italy has always meant a salad dressing, but in medieval France was commonly used to mean a meat sauce or offal stew. Taillevent’s 14th-century French cookbook, Le Viandier, offers recipes for several variants of “vinaigrette”, the first requiring a spit-roasted pig’s spleen. A sheep-based vinaigrette “calls for the head, stomach, and feet”. A cow vinaigrette “insists on using all four stomachs” (2,500 words)
Video: The Future | Microsoft. Animated explainer. How we teach computers to learn languages (4m 55s)
Audio: Don’t Call It A Brain In A Dish | a16z. Stanford neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca discusses new frontiers in brain research, including the experimental use of lab-grown human-type brain-tissue (33m 29s)
Afterthought:
“All knowledge degenerates into probability”
— David Hume