Search Results for: Harvard

The College Syllabi That Shaped ‘The Waste Land’

Indeed, the famous eclecticism of “The Waste Land,” which incorporates quotations from multiple languages and literatures, can be seen as a tribute to the educational philosophy that governed Harvard during Eliot’s time there…

Yet as Crawford shows in the impressively researched Young Eliot, the “melange of topics” that Eliot explored in college “mightily enriched his poetry.” Eliot’s studies with the philosopher George Santayana planted the seeds of the idea that later emerged in his criticism as the “objective correlative”—the notion that poetic images function as a formula to evoke an emotion. In the recently founded Comparative Literature department, Eliot studied with scholars who “encouraged people…to connect literary works through anthropology to supposedly primitive rituals.” This would become a major technique of “The Waste Land,” which uses the Grail legend, as interpreted by scholars like James Frazer and Jessie Weston, as a structuring myth.

Crawford even manages to track down the moments when Eliot first discovered images and individual words he would later employ in his verse. As a junior, for instance, he took a class on the Roman novel that included Petronius’s Satyricon; years later, the novel’s image of an undying Sibyl appeared in the epigraph of “The Waste Land.” In Eliot’s own annotated copy of the novel, which Crawford examines, the poet glossed the Latin word for mushrooms, tubere in the text—a word that returns in “The Waste Land,” where he writes of winter “Feeding/a little life on dried tubers.” There is something thrilling about the way Crawford locates such moments in time and space, showing how a poem as mysterious and complex as “The Waste Land” draws on something as familiar as a college syllabus.

Adam Kirsch writing in Harvard Magazine about how T.S. Eliot’s time at Harvard shaped his life and career.

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The Young T.S. Eliot

Longreads Pick

How T.S. Eliot’s time at Harvard shaped his work, and what he was like as a young poet.

Published: Jul 1, 2015
Length: 11 minutes (2,878 words)

‘America’s Best Investment Ever,’ According to ‘Bowling Alone’ Author Robert Putnam

 America’s best investment ever, in the whole history of our country, was to invest in the public high school and secondary school at the beginning of the 20th century. It dramatically raised the growth rate of America because it was a huge investment in human capital. The best economic analyses now say that investment in the public high schools in 1910 accounted for all of the growth of the American economy between then and about 1970. That huge investment paid off for everybody. Everybody in America had a higher income.

Now, some rich farmer could have said, “Well, why should I be paying for those other kids to go to high school? My kids are already off in Chicago and I don’t care about [other kids].” But most people in America didn’t. This was not something hatched in Washington – small town people got together and said, “Look, we ought to do this for our kids… We ought to have a high school so that every kid who grows up here — they’re all our kids — gets a good high school education.”

Robert Putnam, in conversation with PBS NewsHour‘s Paul Solman. Robert Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone and a Harvard professor; he appeared on NewHour’s Making Sen$e to discuss his new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.

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The Fabulous (and Sometimes Dead-End) Opportunity of Being an Assistant

Photo by Peas

Nearly every exclusive field runs on assistants. The actor James Franco, like Buddha before him, had an assistant keep track of his meals and school assignments. The critic and writer Daphne Merkin has employed a steady stream of Ivy-educated elves. They’re tasked with everything from editing to returning dead houseplants. Bestselling novelist John Irving (The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany) has an assistant who types up his roughly twenty-five pages of handwritten manuscript a day. He recruits exclusively from liberal arts schools in cold climates like Middlebury and Vassar, to ensure his hires can survive the winter at his home in Dorset, Vermont. During the 2008 presidential season, recent Harvard grad Eric Lesser impressed senior advisor to the president, David Axelrod, with his color-coded system for tracking Obama’s campaign luggage. Lesser was taken on as Axelrod’s “special assistant,” assuming responsibility for everything from supervising his boss’s diet to organizing the first-ever presidential Seder.

—At Dissent, Francesca Mari examines the rise of the personal assistant. Creatives take assistant positions to network with professionals in their fields and to go behind-the-scenes in their craft. But it can’t last forever: Whereas internships might one day result in full-time employment, the role of the assistant stagnates in the end: “The worst thing to be called,” [Darren] Aronofsky’s assistant told me, long after he’d moved on, “is a really good assistant.”  (h/t Michelle Legro)

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A Very Naughty Little Girl

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Rose George | Longreads | March 2015 | 21 minutes (5,358 words)

 

 

She was a name on a plaque and a face on a wall. I ate beneath her portrait for three years and paid it little attention except to notice that the artist had made her look square. There were other portraits of women to hold my attention on the walls of Somerville, my Oxford college: Indira Gandhi, who left without a degree, and Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel prize-winner in chemistry. In a room where we had our French language classes, behind glass that was rumored to be bulletproof, there was also a bust of Margaret Thatcher, a former chemistry undergraduate. Somerville was one of only two women’s colleges of the University of Oxford while I was there, from 1988 to 1992, and the walls were crowded with strong, notable women. (The college has since gone co-ed.) Read more…

How U.S. Spies Dug Up Hitler’s Sex Secrets

Earlier this week Mother Jones published a fascinating sampling from the CIA’s psychological profiles of various international figures. In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services (the WWII-era CIA predecessor) tasked a Harvard psychologist with drafting a profile of Hitler’s personality. Below is an excerpt, as compiled by Dave Gilson of Mother Jones:

There is little disagreement among professional, or even among amateur, psychologists that Hitler’s personality is an example of the counteractive type, a type that is marked by intense and stubborn efforts (i) to overcome early disabilities, weaknesses and humiliations (wounds to self-esteem), and sometimes also by efforts (ii) to revenge injuries and insults to pride…

Sexually he is a full-fledged masochist…Hitler’s long-concealed secret heterosexual fantasy has been exposed by the systemic analysis and correlation of the three thousand odd metaphors he uses in Mein Kampfand yet—Hitler himself is Impotent. [original emphasis] He is unmarried and his old acquaintances say that he is incapable of consumating the sexual act in a normal fashion.

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Giving Visibility to the Invisible: An Interview With Photographer Ruddy Roye

Lucy McKeon | Longreads | February 2015 | 18 minutes (4,489 words)

 

With over 100,000 Instagram followers, photographer Ruddy Roye came of age in Jamaica, and has lived in New York City since 2001. He has photographed dancehall musicians and fans, sapeurs of the Congo, the Caribbean Carnival J’ouvert, recent protests in Ferguson and in New York, and the faces of the many people he meets and observes every day. Roye is perhaps best known for his portraits taken around his neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn—pictures of the homeless, the disenfranchised, and those who Roye believes aren’t often fully seen.

In Roye’s Instagram profile, he describes himself as an “Instagram Humanist/Activist,” and when looking at his portraits, the phrase that comes to mind is “up close.” Roye is closer to his subjects—who he calls his “collaborators”—than is typical in street photography, in terms of actual proximity as well as identification. Each picture, he says, contains a piece of him. With this closeness, Roye creates images that can be harrowing, disturbing, joyful and striking. If they are sometimes difficult to look at, one has more trouble looking away. Read more…

Blast Force: The Invisible War on the Brain

After the First World War, family and friends said that sometimes, boys came back from overseas “not right in the head.” Nearly 100 years later, the American military is only just starting to understand the effects of bomb blasts on soldiers’ brains and the prescience of those casual observations. Caroline Alexander reports in National Geographic on Traumatic Brain Injury and its devastating effects on soldiers and their families.

“Most of our medical research on blast injuries was either on fragmentation wounds or what happens in gas-filled organs—everyone was always concerned in a thermonuclear explosion what happened to your lungs and your gastrointestinal tract,” Lt. Col. Kevin “Kit” Parker, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at Harvard, told me. “We completely overlooked the brain. Today the enemy has developed a weapon system that is targeted toward our scientific weak spot.”

Parker, a towering figure with a shaved head and booming voice, is also a former U.S. Army infantry officer who served two tours in Afghanistan, where he saw and felt the effects of blast force. “There was a flash in the sky, and I turned back toward the mountains where the fighting was,” Parker said, recalling the day in January 2003 when, in the hills of Kandahar, the shock wave from a distant explosion passed through his body. “It just felt like it lifted my innards and put them back down.”
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Link Rot, or Why the Web May Be Killing Footnotes

The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,” and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.

The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?

Jill Lepore, writing for the New Yorker about the Internet Archive and the difficulties of preserving information on the Web.

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‘Did We Have the Sense that America Cared How We Were Doing? We Did Not’

In The Atlantic in 2014, James Fallows examined how Americans and political leaders became so disconnected from those who serve in the military—and the consequences of that disconnect:

If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.

Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the military. Confidence in the military shot up after 9/11 and has stayed very high. In a Gallup poll last summer, three-quarters of the public expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. About one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and only 7 percent in Congress.

Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “Did we have the sense that America cared how we were doing? We did not,” Seth Moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the Iraq War. Moulton became a Marine Corps officer after graduating from Harvard in 2001, believing (as he told me) that when many classmates were heading to Wall Street it was useful to set an example of public service. He opposed the decision to invade Iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades. “America was very disconnected. We were proud to serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s work.”

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