the master
Walk into any bookstore these days and one finds yard upon yard of Wodehouse, much of it in fresh editions. Why is he so imperishable, fresh as a Wooster boutonnière, when so many other writers of his generation have vanished, long since past their sell-by date? A writer with an eye to literary immortality would do well to consider the Wodehousian oeuvre.It’s not rocket science. The Master revealed the secret himself in a 1935 letter to Bill Townend, his old Dulwich school chum and the recipient of most of the letters here. It was a question, he said, of “making the thing frankly a fairy story and ignoring real life altogether.” Wodehouse’s admirer and defender Evelyn Waugh framed it perfectly; or as Jeeves might say, quoting Plautus, Rem acu tetigisti. (“You have hit the nail on the head.”)
topography of faith
From the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, surveying 35, 556 adults in 2007.
bait and switch
What we have here looks like a classic bait and switch: announce that you will show that we don't have freedom in the ordinary sense required by moral responsibility, and then proceed to argue that we don't have freedom in the sense of maximal autonomy. It is certainly true that we don't have freedom in that sense: not even God could have that kind of freedom. That is not because God could not have performed infinitely many actions—no doubt he could have—but because God is necessarily all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good. This means that God has not freely chosen to have that character; there never was a time at which he had both the power to bring it about that he had that character, and also the power to bring it about that he did not have that character.
Alvin Plantinga on Sam Harris.
caring for the poorest
Gates is also mortal, although some of his admirers may find that hard to believe, and as they say, there are no pockets in shrouds. So he is now engaged in the process of ridding himself of all that money in the hope of extending the lives of others less fortunate than himself.
“I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes,” he says, redundantly. “Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organisation and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world.”
That “certain point” is set a little higher than for the rest of us – Gates owns a lakeside estate in Washington State worth about $150 million (£94 million) and boasting a swimming pool equipped with an underwater music system – but one gets the point.
self-awareness
During the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School (and now, at 89, a professor emeritus) began to research what happens to organizations and people, like Mr. Chang, when they find obstacles in their paths.Professor Argyris called the most common response single loop learning — an insular mental process in which we consider possible external or technical reasons for obstacles.
LESS common but vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we — like Mr. Chang — question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases and deeply held assumptions. This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals.
the king & i
“You’ll bring the board?” asks Mrs Aruna Anand over the phone, “for we don’t have one at home”. Viswanathan Anand, the world champion doesn’t own a chess set. I am not surprised. Over the last decade, computers have taken over India’s greatest export, storing billions of games in giant databases. Long before you can set up the pieces, you can click through to positions going back to 10th century Baghdad. Or you could fire up your browser and play “blitz”, chess at steroidal speeds, with an opponent across the globe.I had emailed Anand, saying it would make an interesting story to play against him and write about the experience. He agreed, and now his wife is on the phone to discuss the conditions of play, just as she has with the likes of Kramnik and Topalov.
Jaideep Unudurti describes the experience vividly. When the dust settles, he reflects on how Anand plays.
I am struck how he rarely refers to individual moves. Instead he simply sees the correct squares for his pieces, and works backward from there. It is a marriage of imagination and calculation – he does deep calculate but there is an underlying cosmic awareness of which pieces should occupy which squares. Is that an accurate model of his thinking? “Pretty much. I feel White’s structure is wrong,” he says. “The thing is when you started playing g4 Nf4 (referring to my attempted attack on his king) I knew that something would creak. But I wasn’t into details.” Like Michelangelo who saw the sculpture in a block of marble, he seems to see the game beneath the morass of variations in one preordained shape.