Friday Notes
Ed Brayton and Brandon Watson mix it up over a proposal to build a canal that would damage limestone shoals between India and Sri Lanka. The BJP opposes it on religious grounds. The World Monuments Fund fears the canal will damage a cultural property.
Philip Kennicott,"What a Piece of Work ...," Washington Post, 21 September, reviews"Marketing Shakespeare: The Boydell Gallery (1789-1805) and Beyond," an exhibit at Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library. It showcases the"dizzy and appallingly sentimental craze for all things Shakespeare at the end of the 18th century."
Bernard Porter's"Trying to Make Decolonisation Look Good," LRB, 2 August, reviewed Ronald Hyam's Britain's Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-68, Peter Clarke's The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire and Sir Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper's Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire. It is behind the LRB's firewall, but Manan Ahmed's"Porter on Decolonization," Chapati Mystery, 19 September, reproduces a large part of it, with chapati annotations.
Mark Edmundson,"Freud and Anna," CHE, 21 September, ponders Freud's emotional vulnerability in his last days.
John Bridcut,"The KGB's Long War Against Rudolf Nureyev," Telegraph, 17 September, tells the high cost of defection. Hat tip.
David Garrow reviews Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine on the Supreme Court for the LA Times, 18 September.
Michael Bérubé and Peter Wood debate the AAUP's report,"Freedom in the Classroom."
Eric Rauchway,"California Dreamin': Chermerinsky, Summers, and Academic Freedom," TNR, 19 September, clearly addresses recent academic freedom issues in the UC system.