The Ledes

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

The New York Times is live-updating developments in the progress of Hurricane Helene. "Helene continued to power north in the Caribbean Sea, strengthening into a hurricane Wednesday morning, on a path that forecasters expect will bring heavy amounts of rain to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and western Cuba before it begins to move toward Florida’s Gulf Coast."

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To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

     ~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Sunday
Jun122011

Off-Topic

Professor of Philosophy Costica Bradatan has an interesting essay in the New York Times "The Stone" on "philosophy as an art of dying." We're not talking batik here; Bradatan examines the famous death of a few famous philosophers, centering on the most famous of all -- Socrates. Bradatan posits, "Perhaps that to be a philosopher means more than just being ready to 'suffer' death, to accept it passively at some indefinite point in time; it may also require one to provoke his own death, to meet it somehow mid-way." Undeterred by the seriousness of the subject, I dashed off a comment, which at this writing has not been published. Here ya go:

Dying is just half of the job; the other half is weaving a good narrative of martyrdom and finding an audience for it.
-- Costica Bradatan

Quite right. Of course most people's favorite martyr-philosopher is the Jesus character of the gospels. The narrations are superb! I don't think there's any question but that the story of Jesus's death, particularly as told by the author of Mark, who wrote the first gospel (no, really, it wasn't Matthew!), is based in part on Plato's narration of Socrates' death. 

But I should say my favorite martyr-philosopher's death was that of the Roman Seneca (the Younger). Philosophers & theologians of the day were much enamored of the idea of the "noble death." In the Socratic tradition, Cynic and Stoic philosophers began to see political martyrdom as a sort of bona fide for philosophers.  Persecution and execution, they reasoned, were proofs that the victim had sought justice and was righteous to the end.  Persecution was a badge of honor.  Martyrdom became the equivalent of a Ph.D. in philosophy. Using this "logic," a person didn’t even have to be very smart or very thoughtful to become a philosopher. Seneca saw the athletes' and gladiators' suffering and deaths as moral triumphs: a "reward [that] is not a garland or palm or a trumpeter ... but rather virtue, steadfastness of soul, and a peace that is won for all time...."

 Seneca also saw brotherly love as an incentive for a noble death.  Here he is in De beneficiis [7.12]:

But my end of friendship is to have one dearer to me than myself, and for the saving of whose life I would cheerfully lay down my own....

If you think that sounds an awful lot like a saying by the subject of the later-written gospels, you'd be right. (See John 15:13.) Presuming Seneca wrote "Hercules at Oeta" (scholars debate the authorship), he also wrote a play which not only extolled the noble death but also hypothesized that a resurrection might ensue if the dying philosopher were noble enough.

So how did Seneca himself die? In 65 C.E., Seneca earned his badge of courage in a personal tragicomedy.  The Roman Emperor Nero, whom Seneca had taught and counseled, accused Seneca of conspiring to kill him. Nero ordered Seneca to commit suicide. Eager to oblige, Seneca first tried slitting his wrists, but that didn’t kill him. Then he drank hemlock a la Socrates. That didn’t work, either. He finally succumbed in what may have been the original accidental hot-tub death: He jumped into a hot pool in an attempt to make the blood from his slit wrists flow faster, but instead he suffocated from the hot steam rising from the pool.

Noble deaths really are not that good an idea. Or else Seneca needed a better narrator than I.

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