Apr 1, 2011

Friday's Notes

by Cliopatria

History Carnival XCVII is up at Alan Flower's History and the Sock Merchant.

Four Stone Hearth LXV, the anthropology/archaeology carnival, is up at Mick Morrison's, um, Mick Morrison.

Biblical Studies Carnival LXI is up at Darrell Pursiful's Dr. Platypus.

Tim Wu,"Bit by Bit," Slate, 28 March, reviews James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.

Hubert Dreyfus's and Sean Dorrance Kelly's All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to find Meaning in a Secular Age has positive reviews from Michael Roth and Eric Ormsby. But the authors, a senior philosopher at UC, Berkeley, and his student, who chairs the philosophy department at Harvard, take shellackings from Garry Wills,"Superficial & Sublime," NYRB, 7 April, and, now, David Mikics,"All Whooshed Up," The Book, 29 March. The review by Wills is so critical that it gets extended discussion here and here.

Dirk Huylebrouk,"Lost in Triangulation: Leonardo da Vinci's Mathematical Slip-Up," Scientific American, 29 March, considers Rinus Roelofs's claim to have found an error in a drawing by Leonardo.

On its 400th anniversary, Ann Wroe,"In the Beginning was the Sound," more intelligent life, Spring, looks at the lyrical rhetoric of the King James translation of the Bible.

Adam Nagourney,"Nixon Library Opens a Door Some Would Prefer Left Closed," NYT, 31 March, examines the Nixon Library's coming to grips with Richard Nixon's demise.