this is a must-see.

Were the ancients in the habit of reading silently, or did they normally read out loud? Three weeks ago, discussing certain famous passages in St Augustine's Confessions, I mentioned that St Ambrose's habit of silent reading was clearly unique to him and a novelty to Augustine when he encountered it in Milan. Soon afterwards I received a letter from Myles Burnyeat of All Souls, Oxford. "I fear," says Professor Burnyeat, "you are one of numerous victims of a widespread myth, a serious misreading of Augustine. Since it has been a minor mission in my life to combat this myth, I take the liberty of enclosing two articles designed to set the record straight."

via The Guardian.

THE OCTOBER 2008 issue of SuperYacht World confirmed it: money cannot buy happiness. Page 38 of “the international magazine for superyachts of distinction”—if you have to ask what it takes for a yacht to qualify as “super,” you can’t afford to be in the showroom—presented the Martha Ann, a 230-foot, $125 million boat boasting a crew of 20, a master bedroom the size of my house, and an interior gaudy enough to make Saddam Hussein blush. The feature story on the Martha Ann was published just as the S&P 500 suffered its worst week since 1933, shedding $1.4 trillion over the course of the week, or about 2,240 Martha Anns every day. Still, one of the captions accompanying the lavish photos betrayed the status anxiety that afflicts even the highest echelons of wealth. “From these LOFTY HEIGHTS,” the caption promised, “guests will be able to look down on virtually any other yacht.” Virtually any other yacht! One imagines the prospective owner wincing at this disclaimer, pained by the knowledge that the world would still contain superyachts more super than his own, that at least one gazillionaire in Saint-Tropez harbor would likely be able to peer over his gunwales and down at the Martha Ann. The lesson that Mammon is a false or inadequate god goes back a long way, and a glossy spread in SuperYacht World is just one place to relearn it. Another is Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, which since 1970 has minted a diverse array of studies of the wealthy. For four years, the Gates Foundation has supported an effort by the center to determine exactly how the American wealthy think and live—and in particular how, when, and to what degree they make the shift from accumulating fortunes to giving them away philanthropically. (The John Templeton Foundation, which is concerned with spiritual matters, kicked in additional funding to study correlations between wealth, philanthropy, and religion.) The project has produced one of the most remarkable documents in the center’s history: a survey that invited the very rich to write freely about how prosperity has shaped their lives and those of their children. From the anonymity of their home computers, the respondents wrote anything from a few words to a few pages, volunteering not only their net worth and sources of wealth but also their innermost hopes, fears, and anxieties.

The responses, which run to 500 pages and fill three plastic binders on the fifth floor of Boston College’s McGuinn Hall, constitute what the center’s director, the sociologist Paul G. Schervish, calls “an extraordinary sample of confession, memoir, and apologia” from the super-rich. (The researchers admit that this sample is not representative, being inevitably skewed toward those wealthy people who are willing to offer their confessions to a computer screen.) Roughly 165 households responded, 120 of which have at least $25 million in assets. The respondents’ average net worth is $78 million, and two report being billionaires. The goal, say the survey’s architects, was to weed out all but those at or approaching complete financial security. Most of the survey’s respondents are wealthy enough to ensure that in any catastrophe short of Armageddon, they will still be dining on Chateaubriand while the rest of us are spit-roasting rats over trash-can fires.

The results of the study are not yet public, but The Atlantic was granted access to portions of the research, provided the anonymity of the subjects was strictly maintained. The center expects to present the full conclusions gradually at upcoming conferences and to publish them over the next several months. The study is titled “The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth,” but given that the joys tend to be self-evident, it focuses primarily on the dilemmas. The respondents turn out to be a generally dissatisfied lot, whose money has contributed to deep anxieties involving love, work, and family. Indeed, they are frequently dissatisfied even with their sizable fortunes. Most of them still do not consider themselves financially secure; for that, they say, they would require on average one-quarter more wealth than they currently possess. (Remember: this is a population with assets in the tens of millions of dollars and above.) One respondent, the heir to an enormous fortune, says that what matters most to him is his Christianity, and that his greatest aspiration is “to love the Lord, my family, and my friends.” He also reports that he wouldn’t feel financially secure until he had $1 billion in the bank.

via The Atlantic.

Some scholars say early versions of the Bible featured Asherah, a powerful fertility goddess who may have been God's wife. Research by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, unearthed clues to her identity, but good luck finding mention of her in the Bible. If Stavrakopoulou is right, heavy-handed male editors of the text all but removed her from the sacred book.

What remains of God's purported other half are clues in ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in an ancient Canaanite coastal city, now in modern-day Syria. Inscriptions on pottery found in the Sinai desert also show Yahweh and Asherah were worshipped as a pair, and a passage in the Book of Kings mentions the goddess as being housed in the temple of Yahweh.

J. Edward Wright, president of The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, backs Stavrakopoulou's findings, saying several Hebrew inscriptions mention “Yahweh and his Asherah." He adds Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors.

"Traces of her remain, and based on those traces... we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant," he told Discovery News.

via TIME.

Some American Hindus have recently argued that Hindus should “Take Back Yoga”. The Hindu American Foundation insists “that the philosophy of yoga was first described in Hinduism’s seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching”, that yoga is the legacy of a timeless, spiritual “Indian wisdom”. Other Americans agree that the Hindus should take back yoga – from the many Christians who embrace it: R. Albert Mohler Jr, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if they value their (Christian) souls. This fight evokes for me the Monty Python skit in which Greek and German philosophers compete in a football game (which ends with Marx claiming that the Greek goalscorer was off-side). Declaring the Southern Baptists (or at least the Revd R. Albert Mohler) off-side, we may still ask, why do so many American Hindus care so much whether yoga is Hindu? And is it? One reason for the Hindu concern is suggested by the capitalist overtones of phrases used by Dr Aseem Shukla, a urologist who is co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation: Hinduism has “lost control of the brand” of yoga and has been the victim of “overt intellectual property theft” by people who have “offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism”. In other words, yoga is a sacred cash cow: about 15 million people in America practise (and generally pay for) something that they call yoga, making it a multi-billion-dollar industry.

But a deeper casus belli lies in the two-fold historical claim made by activists of Hindu American identity politics: that yoga (a) was first described in the ancient Vedic texts of Hinduism and (b) has always been the core of Hinduism. Hindu Americans’ deep investment (to continue the financial metaphor) in these claims about history has its own history. For, given the human obsession with roots, those claims generally take the form of arguments about the origins of yoga, a quest for purity of lineage, for undefiled racial descent, here as always a mad quest, since the history of yoga is, like most histories, a palimpsest.

via TLS.

Muammar Gaddafi warned the rebel stronghold of Benghazi he would storm the city in the night showing no mercy, while the United Nations moved toward a resolution allowing air strikes to stop him. "We will come zenga, zenga. House by house, room by room," he said in a radio address to the eastern city.

Thousands of residents of Benghazi gathered in a central square, waving anti-Gaddafi tricolour flags and chanting defiance of the man who has ruled the country for four decades.

"It's over. The issue has been decided," Gaddafi said, offering pardon to those who lay down their arms. "We are coming tonight...We will have no mercy and no pity with them."

via Reuters.

Angels fell to earth, in augmented reality at least, in a recent campaign for Lynx in London. On March 5, the Unilever-owned brand (known as Axe in the U.S.), put signs in the Victoria railway station telling travelers to look up to a giant video screen. On the screen, they saw an image of themselves plus the angels, who are featured in both the English and U.S. ad campaigns. As this video shows, the reactions ranged from surprised to somewhat lewd.

via mashable.