Thursday Notes

So, you thought that Thomas Aquinas pondered the issue of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin? Brandon Watson's"Telephone Game," Siris, 16 April, shows that you only think that because of Isaac D'Israeli's parody.

Timothy Hyman,"Cranach's Golden Age," TLS, 16 April, reviews"Cranach," an exhibit at London's Royal Academy of Arts.

Christopher Hitchens,"Flaws of Gravity," Vanity Fair, 14 April, and Sara Lippincott,"Sir Isaac, Briefly," LA Times, 13 April, review Peter Ackroyd's Newton.

Alexander Cockburn reviews John Hemmings's Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon for the London Times, 13 April. Hat tip.

Tim Arango,"Films Revisit Overlooked Shootings on a Black Campus," NYT, 16 April, features film makers' inquiry into the Orangeburg, South Carolina, Massacre of 8 February 1968. State police killed three unarmed students and wounded 28 others at South Carolina State College. Cleveland Sellers, national program director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was among the wounded. He was subsequently convicted of"riot" and served seven months of a year's sentence in prison. Pardoned in 1993, Sellers joined the faculty of the University of South Carolina two years later and is now a member of its history department and directs the African American Studies program.