Friday Evening Links

Here are some links that have caught my attention this week:

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• The Guardian reviews a new book on Nazi fashion.
  
• H. Aram Veeser has written a lengthy tribute to Edward Said, which--like a lot of Said's work--is an odd combination of intriguing and unconvincing.
  
• The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles Stephen Greenblatt and discusses his new book on Shakespeare.
  
• Other Chronicle articles discuss how an SAT-style exam is shaking up Russian higher education and ask about the role of height in shaping the public's view of its leaders.
  
• The New York Times discusses scientists and their attempt to understand humor.
  
• Common-Place looks at the contemporary resonance of captivity narratives from the Barbary pirates.
  
• Melvyn Bragg has written a neat little article about William Golding for The Independent.
  
• In The American Prospect, Michael Tomasky attacks the myth that America is still bitterly divided over the Vietnam War: every Gallup poll on the question taken since 1968 shows that a large majority of Americans feel that the war was a mistake.
  
• The Washington Post outlook section looks at the sorry state of democracy in Belarus.
  
• McSweeney's presents a list of really boring books for children.
  

I was glad to see that The Telegraph has now published its obituary of the historian Norman Cantor. Like a lot of Telegraph obituaries, it's charming and lively. Here's an excerpt:

In America he was praised for his "fluent, graceful, prose style". In Britain, he was sometimes criticised for his use of self-consciously "hip" language, his penchant for imposing rigid patterns on intractable material and his often cavalier way with evidence.

His book about the Black Death, In the Wake of the Plague (2001), dismissed Chaucer as a "wise guy poet"; it described Henry Plantagenet was a "19-year-old stud" and Edward III's daughter, Princess Joan, as a "top-drawer white girl

...

Asked by a journalist from The Sunday Telegraph whether he was embittered, Cantor displayed even less liking for British journalists than for British academics. "I'm never going to be out of a job," he stormed. "I am one of the highest paid professors in America. Here's a scoop for you: I earn $101,000 a year. Print that in your Sunday Telegraph."

A big theme of the article is the differences between American and British higher education, though I don't think the article's view on that subject is especially convincing. For that matter, I'm not sure if this obit gives a good sense of Cantor's career, but it's definitely a fun read.

Posted by Ed at October 1, 2004 08:00 PM