96 Years Ago, This $310-Billion Man Revealed the Secrets To His Success

It's an era of lists, and here's one from Alex Banayan at Pulse.

"How did Andrew Carnegie, the man with the world’s largest steel empire, rise from no money, no opportunity, and no connections — to the richest man alive?

"I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching Carnegie’s success, and here are the 5 best lessons from the man himself."

They Began a New Era

James Salter reviews The Wright Brothers by David McCullough at The New York Review of Books.

The End of Our World

Rabbi Jeremy Rosen posts,

"We are in the process of leaving a relatively peaceful and secure time for one of desperation and division. The next generation will experience a new and very different world. It will be one of science fiction, where huge numbers of people will be on the move because of climate change, terror, and relative poverty. They will use modern methods of transport, held off either by physical or natural boundaries."

The End of the Ambitious Summer Reading List

'For more than a century, Americans saw their vacations as a semisacred space for tackling challenging books. Not anymore'

Lee Siegel in The Saturday Essay feature at The Wall Street Journal

Walk and read

Sharon Udasin at The Jerusalem Post.

"Israel National Trail hikers will soon be able to borrow and return library books along select points of the path, which runs from Tel Dan in the country’s North to Eilat in the South.
[...]
"Shalem College’s Shalem Press, which translates major works of Western philosophy into Hebrew, has contributed the books for the project."

'The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933 – 1973' by Mark Greif – review

Brian Dillon at The Guardian.

"... Greif is a good reader of the tensions in works such as Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: novels where assumptions about universal human experience in the middle of the century run up more or less dramatically against race and religious or cultural identity. But the most intriguing of these chapters is on Flannery O’Connor, whose southern gothic was schooled, Greif shows, on certain staples of the crisis-of-man debate: the 'great books' programme at the University of Chicago, the new centrality of Catholic and Protestant theology in arguments about post-war civilisation."

The 100 best novels in English? Irish writers and critics have their say

Martin Doyle at The Irish Times.

"Starting with The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan in 1678 and concluding with True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey in 2000, the list is peppered with a fair few Irish classics, as you might expect..."

Effective Altruism: Where Charity and Rationality Meet

The Upshot featured this Economic View by Tyler Cowen at The New York Times,

"From the standpoint of effective altruism, the problem behind a lot of charitable giving is that individuals often make donations without doing much analysis. They simply think the best of charities that interest them and accept at face value that these charities are doing a terrific job. Accountability is never considered."

Go ask Alice

This is the author of the third-most-quoted work of literature—after the Bible and Shakespeare http://t.co/blRjjbhsN1 pic.twitter.com/PfZKOYXJxe

— Intelligent Life (@intlifemag) August 15, 2015

How to debunk a study

Y.Y. explains at The Economist.

"So which kind of statistical test should be used for a social-scientific study? Amazingly, there is no one right answer, particularly when multiple disciplines are involved and the data are messy."

Oxford’s online Bodleian archive: illumination for all

Jonathan Jones reports at The Observer.

"One way libraries are opening their secret worlds to everyone is by putting some of their most curious or majestic items online. Oxford’s Bodleian, one of Europe’s greatest and oldest libraries, is the latest to do so with digital.bodleian giving users unprecedented opportunities to browse precious volumes and their wondrous illustrations from our armchairs, if anyone still has armchairs, or cafe stool or even in a punt (it’s Oxford after all)."

Common Sense: If Only It Could Be As Simple As That

Moyenda Mutharika Knapp at Gonzalez Saggio & Harlan LLP, Chicago, with a reminder for lawyers who handle discrimination cases that non-lawyers might also find of some interest. It comes from a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

"Miller [v. St. Joseph County] is a reminder that even though courts must apply the frameworks that they are required to apply, the ultimate question for judges deciding cases is often simpler and more grounded in common sense. Although the burden-shifting framework still applies, at the end of the day, the 'big picture' question is: Could a 'rational jury' decide that there was discrimination? It is a common-sense question that can get lost in legal minutiae, but for employers everywhere (especially in the Seventh Circuit), it is one they should not forget when considering whether to ask the court to grant them judgment in place of trial in a discrimination case."

Great Ideas Program - Author/Title Index

The Great Ideas Program (1959-1963) is a ten volume companion set to Great Books of the Western World (1st ed. 1952). The Program provides 135 guides to selected readings in Great Books.

We had already prepared and posted a table of contents to the entire Program here, since it was published only with tables of contents for individual volumes. One guide sometimes discusses several selections, and selections from a single work are sometimes the subject of several of the guides.

Particularly now that Great Books is out of print, someone wishing to use the Program might want to find alternate editions of the works discussed. We’ve provided a list of Authors and Titles below. In the reading guides, some selections are complete works, others a part or parts.

The Bible is treated as part of Great Books but the set did not include its own edition. Considering it and the other works by multiple authors as if by a single author, the list totals 64 Authors.

From the Center: Adler on happiness, and on Man

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on the meaning(s) of happiness
• Adler on Man as one of the Great Ideas

Here at the weblog, added The Open Library to the sidebar blogroll.

Coursera Partners With Tech, Financial Firms for Online Classes

Douglas Belkin reported at The Wall Street Journal.

"One of the largest providers of massive open online courses is teaming up with several major financial and technology companies to offer new classes this fall, the latest sign MOOC providers are scaling back their ambitions to upend the world of academia to make a profit.

"Coursera’s new offerings are sponsored—and partially designed by—several major financial and technology corporations. Instead of the Great Books, they focus on skills training and professional development. ..."

Become a fan

William Kenower in The Blog at Huff Post Books,

"Hemmingway [sic] said he knew he had read a great book if he felt changed after reading it. I think everyone who reads regularly has experienced this. However, whether the great books you talk about are on your own personal list, or the cannon [sic] with which we're all familiar, I would encourage you not to discuss them as if they were somehow a triumph of craft."

For Sale: 'Great Books of the Western World'

We don't normally follow the resale market for the various Britannica's Great Books sets, but this came to my attention; $125 for what I assume is a complete set of the 1952 edition, at Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

In defense of the Western canon

Patricia Hagen reviews Dead White Guys, by Matt Burriesci, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

"Matt Burriesci wrote the book as letters to his daughter Violet, or more precisely to the 18-year-old self she will be in 2028, in order to defend, explain and pass along his love for the great books of Western culture — works by Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, St. Augustine, Locke, Machiavelli, Marx, Jesus [sic] — authors he believes his daughter is unlikely to encounter in 21st-century schools."

The 94th Element

Jeremy Bernstein at LRB Blog,

"On a visit to the test site in Nevada in 1957, I was given the pit of a plutonium bomb to hold. It was warm to the touch because of the alpha decay but I was assured that I would not suffer any permanent damage. I was also told not to drop it."

Visit to the World's Fair of 2014

Isaac Asimov in the August 16, 1964 issue of The New York Times

(via Intel)

A Writ Against Lit Crit

Steven Hayward at PowerLine,

"yesterday wandering through the fabulous bookstore at St. John’s Santa Fe (where they still teach the Great Books the old fashioned way), a book caught my eye in the used section: Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Now, there is a lot to be learned about political life from Shakespeare’s plays, and there are several great books about Shakespeare and politics, the most notable being Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa’s Shakespeare’s Politics, which remains in print. Political Shakespeare, published in 1985, is not still in print. It isn’t hard to figure out why."

The Talking Cure: How Constitutional Argument Drives Constitutional Development

Ken I. Kersch at Boston University Law Review 94 (May 2014): 1083-1108

'The Problem of Our Laws', by Franz Kakfa

Translated from the German ('Zur Frage der Gesetze') by Michael Hofmann, in the Short Cuts feature at London Review of Books

From the Center: Adler on diversity cont.; Danies on Shaw;

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• More from Mortimer Adler on relativity to individual and cultural differences
• Anthony Daniels on George Bernard Shaw

Here at the weblog, added The Electric Typewriter to the sidebar blogroll.

The Routledge Guides to the Great Books

These guides are available in a somewhat expensive paperback edition and very expensive hardcover edition, as tends to be the case with academic publishers like Routledge.

Maurice A. Finocchiaro reviewed The Routledge Guidebook to Galileo’s Dialogue at The Catholic Historical Review.

Myth Makers

Michael Nelson on 'The long reach of a famous circle of Oxford scholars' at The Weekly Standard

(via Grace Paine Terzian)

What's consciousness like?

If consciousness and experience can ever be explained with scientific precision, what of the humanistic lens? http://t.co/zogS6LuD4l

— Arts & Letters Daily (@aldaily) July 14, 2015

What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?

Edmund S. Phelps at The New York Review of Books,

"Of the concrete steps that would help to widen flourishing, a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand. (Experts have urged greater education in STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—but when Europe created specialized universities in these subjects, no innovation was observed.) The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.

"It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations. This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education."

The Fraudulent Professor

Reviews by Regis Courtemanche and Eleanor Courtemanche of ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1988), by Charles Sykes, in The University Bookman, posted at Stormfields

If the Children Dared to Speak

Hugh Pennington on Dickens’s weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round at LRB Blog,

"the lucky purchase by the book dealer Jeremy Parrott of a bound set of All the Year Round with handwritten marginalia identifying nearly all the anonymous contributors of its 2500 articles, stories and poems has generated much excitement. ..."

Analytic Office

Analytic Office - http://t.co/mDzlSYiCna pic.twitter.com/akocfAbDgp

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) July 13, 2015

Are You a Philosopher or a Filing Cabinet?

Benjamin Idzik at Intercollegiate Review

"knowledge, like the universe which it represents, cannot be divided. Philosophy is the great connector, uniting all the specialized and particular sciences. Noted thinker Daniel Sullivan summarized the philosopher’s role as 'seek[ing] to view the whole of reality in a single and comprehensive glance, to organize all aspects of [it] into a unified world view.'

"This shouldn’t only be the goal of the philosopher—it should also be our goal."

Slavery All the Way Down

Allen C. Guelzo reviews The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward E. Baptist, at Claremont Review of Books.

"'Enslaved African Americans were the world’s most efficient producers of cotton'—not because of any invisible hand, but because of the all-too-visible whip, which 'was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain.'"

Great Book Series to highlight Chomsky

Chip Chandler reported on a recent selection in a Great Books Series, at the Amarillo Globe-News.

"This reading club — sponsored by West Texas A&M University’s department of English, philosophy and modern languages — will discuss Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, published in 1957 and the basis of the American linguist’s work."

That sponsorship is interesting as a kind of extension or outreach by the university, and perhaps incidentally public relations in a time of financial pressure in higher education. That last point might also be indicated by the apparent consolidation of departments, though that might also reflect declining student interest in these fields.

‘Brief visual pattern’

At the Movies column by Michael Wood at London Review of Books,

"In a memo about Touch of Evil, Orson Welles asked Universal Studios to pay attention to the ‘brief visual pattern’ he had drawn, suggesting improvements for the film. ...
[...]
"In 1998, Walter Murch, using the Welles memo, re-edited all the material he could find into a work coming closer to what he saw as the director’s intentions, and it is this version that the BFI is now making available again. ..."

T.S. Eliot, American

The importance of T.S. Eliot's American identity has been obscured by the author's later life. http://t.co/xIdJHTCdND

— AmericanConservative (@amconmag) July 21, 2015

New Law School Courses Explore Nietzsche, Guns and Bible

Jacob Gershman in the Law Blog at The Wall Street Journal

(via Althouse)

A Dastardly Application of the Prisoner's Dilemma

Robbie Gonzalez at io9

"The problem is a multi-player variation on the classic two-person prisoner’s dilemma, one in a handful of games designed to illustrate how individuals, by drawing on a common resource out of self-interest, can behave contrary to the best interests of society by collectively depleting the shared resource. (The larger concept was described by ecologist Garret Hardin in an influential essay, published in Science in 1968, as 'the tragedy of the commons.')"

[here]

(via James Taranto)

What Makes A Leader?

Travis Bradberry in Pulse at LinkedIn

We'd all love to see the plan

A man reduced to a single instinct: dismantling the bourgeoisie's control over the means of production. pic.twitter.com/omHuY7ZMf7

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) July 9, 2015

Also

#marx pic.twitter.com/Cj3fjjdJyO

— Critical Theory (@Crittheory) July 14, 2015

The Mystery of ISIS

The Anonymous author of this review essay "has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country" according to the editors of The New York Review of Books.

"I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise."

Studying My Friends, 'Dead White Males'

Frank H. Wu, Chancellor and Dean of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, at the Huffington Post.

"why study the work of "dead white males." In our diverse democracy, that is a threshold query. The liberal arts cannot rightly be reduced to the phrase 'dead white males.' But even those themselves enthusiastic about the endeavor of reading Plato's Republic acknowledge the vulnerability.
[...]
"In replying, I could not improve on the words of W.E.B. DuBois. A 'race man' through and through, among the founders of the NAACP, and the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University (the apocryphal story about which confirms as much his erudition as ego), he proclaimed, 'I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.'

"DuBois pondered the meaning of hyphenated identity before the term was current. He was American and Black, talked about by others in his presence as the 'Negro problem."' Yet he would not have allowed anyone to mark anything worth thinking about as off-limits. He embraced the Western Canon, the Great Books, the cultural heritage others would have denied to him."

Climate change 101—and beyond

Sean Carr at The University of Chicago Magazine,

"Undergraduates in David Archer’s Core class, Climate Change: Understanding the Forecast (PHSC 134), don’t have a choice: they have to do the math. ...

"For the more casual learners in his online course Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change, launched in fall 2014 and open to anyone with a fast enough internet connection and a curiosity about climate science, Archer is more lenient. He doesn’t avoid math altogether but says, 'I would hate to have you get turned off by not wanting to deal with math.' The online version also skips over quantum mechanics; otherwise the two courses cover much of the same information."

[link to course fixed --ed.]

How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines

Tim Flannery reviews

• Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable, by Paul G. Falkowski, and
• A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries About the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth, by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink

at The New York Review of Books.

From the Center: Adler on diversity, and on love; Morson on the study of literature;

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included: ­­

Mortimer Adler on relativity to individual and cultural differences

Adler on Love as one of the great idea

Gary Saul Morson on the state of college literature programs

Availability of The Idea of Freedom (2 vol.)

The Third Nuclear Age?

Patrick J. Garrity at the Claremont Review of Books

Life in death

Pamela Grace G. Lico at the Philippine Daily Inquirer

"Death gives life direction and urgency. Without an end, we’d all be walking aimlessly, counting on Little Orphan Annie’s never-ending tomorrow. Consider if you had a thousand years to live: Would you really make the most out of it? Read all the great books? Visit the seven continents? Try to make a difference?"