Author Archives: Editors

Western Renaissance myth-by Brown Williams

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Culture and the universal genius were not the only things to thrive in this supposed golden age – so too did slavery and warfare.

We still use the word “medieval” as a term of opprobrium: all sorts of things, from Islamist terrorism to faulty plumbing, are described as such when we want to signal a range of negative aspects. Something “medieval” is archaic, life-denying, sub-rational, obstinately ill-informed or incompetent, and so on. And by contrast, “renaissance” is usually a sunnier word. It evokes exuberance and creativity, intellectual freshness. A “renaissance man” (and it usually is a man) is someone endowed with an almost superhuman galaxy of qualities and skills.

As many scholars have pointed out, this odd bit of chronological snobbery is largely a 19th-century creation, from the days when the Renaissance was seen as the precursor of the Age of Reason, the moment somewhere around the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century which saw the beginnings of Western civilisation’s liberation from dogma and bigotry. It is not news for historians that the story is more complex than this – or that it was also a period (particularly in Italy) of ceaseless and destructive warfare.

The publishers of Catherine Fletcher’s book have described it as an “alternative history of the Italian Renaissance”, but it is in fact a finely-written, engaging and clear essay in rather straightforward narrative history. It is none the worse for that, but is it really the case that we have failed to notice the “stranger and darker” side of Italian politics in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as they suggest?

Professor Fletcher’s introductory chapter quite rightly notes that we are familiar enough with the stereotype of violent and corrupt machinations in Italian courts of the period (thanks to historical soaps about the Borgias and the Tudors), and that we need to penetrate more fully those systemic aspects of the society that colluded with or promoted slavery, sexual exploitation and the like. This book succeeds admirably in highlighting some of the features and figures of the period that have indeed slipped below (or never been spotted on) the radar.

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There could be 36 communicating intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, study says

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( Shared by Dr. Shoeb Amin)

Earth has proven unique in its ability to host life in the universe so far, leading us to question if we’re truly alone.Maybe we’re not.Scientists have calculated that there could be a minimum of 36 active, communicating intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy, according to a new study. However, due to time and distance, we may never actually know if they exist or ever existed.The study published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal. Previous calculations along these lines have been based on the Drake equation, which was written by astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake in 1961.

“Drake developed an equation which in principle can be used to calculate how many Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent (CETI) civilizations there may be in the Galaxy,” the authors wrote in their study. “However, many of its terms are unknowable and other methods must be used to calculate the likely number of communicating civilizations.”So scientists at the University of Nottingham developed their own approach.”The key difference between our calculation and previous ones based on the Drake equation is that we make very simple assumptions about how life developed,” said study coauthor Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, in an email to CNN.”One of them is that life forms in a scientific way — that is if the right conditions are met then life will form. This avoids impossible to answer questions such as ‘what fraction of planets in a habitable zone of a star will form life?’ and ‘what fraction of life will evolve into intelligent life?’ as these are not answerable until we actually detect life, which we have not yet done.”

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On Father’s Day, I want to tell my dad something I neglected to mention-Maureen Dowd in NYT

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I never told my father I was proud of him.

I grew up in the ’60s, another era filled with tears and tear gas and violent clashes about race and class.

I didn’t want to be a hippie, but I certainly didn’t want to be a fascist. I was sheltered in my demure blue school uniform and saddle shoes, watching the world burn.

The National Guard slaughtering students at Kent State. The Chicago police billy-clubbing yippies at the ’68 Democratic convention. Soldiers in Vietnam getting denounced as “baby killers,” and radicals vowing to “barbecue some pork” and spill the blood of “pigs.”

When our school newspaper published an anti-Vietnam War cartoon, the principal, a nun, dumped all the copies into the incinerator.

As a 16-year-old in 1968, I found it hard to balance hating the Vietnam War and wanting racial justice with being part of a family, baked in patriotism, taught to revere uniforms. As Bill Clinton wrote in that infamous 1969 letter, the cool kids were all about “loathing the military”; I was making pocket change by ironing my brothers’ Coast Guard uniforms, being careful to make sure the creases were sharp.

I never told classmates about my father’s long stretch as a police detective. I just talked about his second career, after retirement, as a special assistant to a senator and congressman.

When it was time for the father-daughter lunch at Immaculata, I didn’t sign up. As an Irish immigrant with little formal education, my father had worked terribly hard to afford that fancy girls’ school. But I didn’t tell him about the lunch. I don’t know if it was the cop thing or because he was older and didn’t seem that into raising a teenager. (The day I was born, the other cops at roll call teased him about becoming a new father at 61.)

As it turned out, one of my dad’s closest friends was the speaker at the lunch and called him to find out why he wasn’t there. My dad, hurt, asked my mom why I didn’t want to take him.

And that is something I’m ashamed of.

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The Fed is addicted to propping up the markets, even without a need-By Steven Pearlstein

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On Monday, the Federal Reserve announced it was expanding its program to get more credit into the hands of large corporations by buying a broad cross-section of investment-grade bonds, part of its pledge to inject $4 trillion into the global financial system to lessen the blow of a pandemic-induced recession.

Why, exactly, the Fed feels it necessary to inject more dollars into the corporate credit market is hard to fathom. The interest rate at which investment-grade companies can borrow on the bond market is now below 4 percent, about as low as anyone can remember. And the pace of bond issuance so far this year, at over $1.2 trillion, has been double that of last year’s torrid pace. Indeed, there’s so much capital sloshing around that investors are lining up to lend money to companies such as Boeing and Macy’s and the cruise-line operator Carnival, although these companies’ revenue has plummeted with along revenue in much of the travel and retail sectors. And this flurry of borrowing and lending comes despite warnings from Standard & Poor’s that the number of companies facing a downgrade in its credit ratings is at an all-time high.

The best explanation for this confidence is the widespread belief on Wall Street that the Fed will do “whatever it takes” — that is, print money to buy as many bonds as necessary — to keep credit flowing to the business sector, no matter the risk. By placing a floor under bond prices, the Fed makes it possible for over-indebted, sales-starved companies to borrow even more to cover operating losses, or refinance existing loans, allowing them to avoid, or at least delay, the day when they cannot pay their bills.

It’s not just creditors, however, who benefit from the Fed’s bond buying — by shielding shareholders from the risk of being wiped out through bankruptcy, their shares are also worth more. And it is that, more than the prospect of a quick recovery or the day-trading of individual investors, that has allowed what had been an overpriced stock market to regain almost all that it lost during the scary early days of the pandemic, despite an unemployment rate that is expected to remain close to double digits for the rest of the year. Things have become so crazy that Hertz stock, which should have become worthless when the company filed for bankruptcy last month, was trading at $6 a share at one point last week. The company has since announced plans to raise $1 billion to pay creditors by issuing new stock.

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