You're mean, @stephenfry.
— God (Thee/Thy) (@TheTweetOfGod) September 27, 2022
Very mean. https://t.co/YFCoHR4tjo
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
What would you say at the Gates?
Sunday, September 25, 2022
Agnes Callard encourages students to reflect on humanity’s distant future
...In her speech, Callard embarked upon a theoretical experiment she called the “infertility scenario,” borrowing from philosopher Samuel Scheffler’s book “Death and the Afterlife.” In this hypothetical situation, humanity discovers that every single person alive has been made sterile by a virus that has spread to every corner of the earth, meaning the current population is the last generation of humans.
... the objective of this thought experiment was to feel the full, somber impact of humanity with no future and to unpack the question: Why do we care about future generations?
“I’ll tell you about my reaction: When I really start to vividly imagine us being the last humans, the last generation…when I envision the vast silence blanketing our once chattering globe because the human story has come to an end… my reaction is that I feel sick.”
According to Callard, this response extends beyond an innate fear of death and speaks to something broader: the dread of an unfinished “human quest.”
“The way I would paraphrase the horror is: It only came to this. It only got this far. We didn’t get a chance to finish. We didn’t get there. What’s sickening to me is the thought that the quest we are on—all of us, everyone in this room, but many others for thousands of years now—thousands of years at least, but probably longer, because history only records a fraction of human thought—this human quest has not been brought to its proper endpoint.”
Friday, September 23, 2022
Monday, September 12, 2022
Fwd: [EXTERNAL] Story of the Week (The Hills of Zion)
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H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
The Hills of Zion
A century ago, between 1919 and 1927, H. L. Mencken published six volumes of essays under the title Prejudices. The initial suggestion that he gather his periodical writings in book form came from Richard Laukhuff, a Cleveland bookseller, who proposed such a collection to Mencken's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. Mencken revised the original articles extensively — rewriting, and adding new material — before he submitted his finished work.
In "The Hills of Zion," probably the best-known essay from the series, Mencken visits Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes trial for The Baltimore Evening Sun and describes a religious revival meeting in the nearby hills.
. . . Far off in a dark, romantic glade a flickering light was visible, and out of the silence came the rumble of exhortation. We could distinguish the figure of the preacher only as a moving mote in the light: it was like looking down the tube of a dark-field microscope. Slowly and cautiously we crossed what seemed to be a pasture, and then we crouched down along the edge of a cornfield, and stealthily edged further and further. The light now grew larger and we could begin to make out what was going on. We went ahead on all fours, like snakes in the grass.
From the great limb of a mighty oak hung a couple of crude torches of the sort that car inspectors thrust under Pullman cars when a train pulls in at night. In the guttering glare was the preacher, and for a while we could see no one else. He was an immensely tall and thin mountaineer in blue jeans, his collarless shirt open at the neck and his hair a tousled mop. . . . Read the selection
Above: Thomas Theodore Martin, dean of the School of Evangelism at Union University, sets up a book table in support of William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tennessee, for the opening of the Scopes trial. "There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck-load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place," writes Mencken in "The Hills of Zion." Bettmann Archive / Getty Photos.
Last week's
Story of the Week selection
Wiser Than a God
Kate Chopin
In Chopin's first short story accepted for publication, a pianist just beginning her career falls in love, in spite of her reservations, with a wealthy and handsome (if occasionally self-important) young man.
Previous Story of the Week selections
Portrait of an Immortal Soul
H. L. Mencken
The editor of one of America's leading literary magazines reluctantly agrees to critique a manuscript mailed to him by a complete stranger.The Fifth Planet
Loren Eiseley
A fossil hunter visits with a friend obsessed with a once-held theory that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is the remnants of a "lost" planet.Natural History, the Forgotten Science
Aldo Leopold
Worried that the study of the natural world has been relegated almost entirely to the classroom and laboratory, Leopold urges young zoologists and botanists to return to the outdoors.A Perfect Moment
Maud Wood Park
After the Tennessee legislature became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, suffrage movement leaders still had to fight off desperate last-minute shenanigans by their opponents.
This week's selection is from the Library of America edition
Two-volume boxed set
Clothbound • 1222 pages
List price: $75.00
Web Store price: $55.00
H. L. Mencken:
Prejudices: The Complete SeriesEdited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
H. L. Mencken was the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. To read him is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as those of our own day, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness.
In the six volumes of Prejudices (1919–1927), Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York.
Please note: Because of ongoing warehouse and deliverability issues, we are still unable to ship orders outside the U.S. and its territories.
Story of the Week Indexes
Browse the complete list of previous Story of the Week selections.
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