You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Joseph Epstein assesses the question in a review of Darrin M. McMahon’s Divine Fury:
[G]eniuses tend to emerge in those areas of life dominant in specific cultures at specific times. For the Greeks, the main games were philosophy and art. For the Romans, it was military exploits and administration, and the only two Romans up for genius whom McMahon mentions prominently are Julius and Augustus Caesar. During the Middle Ages, devotion and piety, with an emphasis on asceticism and personal sacrifice, won the genius laurels, and the genius that occupied the souls of men and women was thought to be imbued by angels. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas were both made saints. (“Genius,” wrote the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, “is another kind of sainthood.”) For the Renaissance, it was art, chiefly visual art, painting and sculpture and architecture, that rang the gong. For the modern age, beginning with the 18th century, scientific geniuses predominate.
For our own age, the main game, once thought to be invention—Thomas Edison and Henry Ford held genius status for a while—has yet to be determined, especially with so much science now being done not individually but in teams. Hence the paucity of agreed-upon geniuses in our day. Those master marketeers of the digital age, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, need not apply.
A model wearing a Kebo Geni costume attends the Banyuwangi Ethno Carnival 2013 in Banyuwangi, Indonesia on September 7, 2013. The central theme to the carnival is the Legend of Kebo-keboan Blambangan and consists of three main parades which are Kebo Geni, Kebo Tirto Bayu, Kebo Bumi, comprising more than 250 performers. By Robertus Pudyanto/Getty Images.
Malcolm Gladwell examines the use of performance-enhancing drugs, quoting from cyclist Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race:
“Dope is not really a magical boost as much as it is a way to control against declines,” Hamilton writes. Doping meant that cyclists finally could train as hard as they wanted. It was the means by which pudgy underdogs could compete with natural wonders. “People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work,” Hamilton writes. For many riders, the opposite was true:
EPO [erythropoietin, a hormone that boosts production of red blood cells] granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you’d ever imagined, in both training and racing. It rewarded precisely what I was good at: having a great work ethic, pushing myself to the limit and past it. I felt almost giddy: this was a new landscape. I began to see races differently. They weren’t rolls of the genetic dice, or who happened to be on form that day. They didn’t depend on who you were. They depended on what you did—how hard you worked, how attentive and professional you were in your preparation.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674) is one of the most noteworthy figures of early 17th-century British poetry and primarily known for his slew of poems chosen by anthologists W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson for Poets of the English Language, a superb five-volume set published by the Viking Press in 1950. Posting poems by Herrick over the next few days also allows us to champion the Poetry Foundation’s excellent website, where readers can find a fascinating bio on Herrick, the courtier poet to King Charles I who “died a poor country parson, whom no fellow poet seems to have commemorated with a verse-epitaph, much less an elegy.” The first poem we’re featuring is “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”:
Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a flying:
And this same flower that smiles to day,
To morrow will be dying.The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
The higher he’s a getting;
The sooner will his Race be run,
And nearer he’s to Setting.That Age is best, which is the first,
When Youth and Blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times, still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time;
And while ye may, goe marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
(Painting: Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May by John William Waterhouse, 1909, via Wikimedia Commons)
Charles Kenny examines it:
Of the world’s population, about 7 out of 10 live in a country where pretty much every child completes primary school. The proportion of secondary-school-aged kids who are in classes has climbed from about half to two-thirds over the past 15 years. The trouble is, a lot of those enrolled appear to be learning very little. In India only a little more than a quarter of the children who complete primary school can read a simple passage, perform division, tell time, and handle money—all skills that should be mastered by the end of second grade. And while eighth-grade enrollment increased to 87 percent from 82 percent of school-aged children in the country from 2006 to 2011, the fraction of enrolled children who could do long division fell to 57 percent from 70 percent—suggesting that despite more of them going to school, fewer kids actually learned basic math over that time.
According to Adam Gopnik, both the new book and film on J.D. Salinger miss the point:
The subject of the book and documentary is not Salinger the writer but Salinger the star: exactly the identity he spent the last fifty years of his life trying to shed. Cast entirely in terms of celebrity culture and its discontents, every act of Salinger’s is weighed as though its primary purpose was to push or somehow extend his “reputation”—careerism is simply assumed as the only motive a writer might have. If he withdraws from the world, well, what could be more of a come on? If it turns out that he hasn’t entirely withdrawn from the world but has actually participated in it happily enough on his own terms: well, didn’t we tell you the whole recluse thing was an act?
This kind of scrutiny might possibly say something about a writer like Mailer, whose loudest energies (if not his best ones) were spent playing in the public square, not to mention Macy’s windows. But it couldn’t be worse suited to a writer like Salinger, the spell of whose work is cast, after all, entirely by the micro-structure of each sentence—on choosing to italicize this word, rather than that; on describing a widower’s left rather than right hand; on the ear for dialogue and the feeling for detail; above all, on the jokes.
Dana Stevens is also underwhelmed by the film:
The mystery of J.D. Salinger—why he wrote, why he stopped publishing, who he was—has survived half a century of attempts at desecration, from the importuning, wisdom-seeking fans who for decades staked out his house in Cornish, N.H., to the sickening second life of The Catcher in the Rye as a manual for high-profile murderers. That mystery is certainly hardy enough to withstand the voyeuristic onslaught of this self-aggrandizing, lurid documentary, which leaves the viewer feeling that we’ve been given a tour of Salinger’s septic tank in hip waders without ever getting to knock on his door and say hello.
But Tom Shone finds a redeeming quality:
[J]ust as you’re about to pelt the screen with peanuts for sheer phoniness, we get the real thing: the only known film footage of the actual Salinger, shot during the war, when he was at his most tall, dark and Clive Owenish, doffing his hat to Parisian women offering him flowers. He takes a single flower and tucks it into his hat brim — a piece of gallantry he nonetheless performs with ineffable and beguiling shyness.
Derek Mead dissects the myriad problems with California’s push to make revenge porn illegal:
Proving intent will already be difficult at a criminal trial, as the law essentially sets up a he said, she said situation (or whichever pronouns you prefer) in every single case, which are difficult to prosecute. … It’s also more disgusting than a contract dispute over plumbing services or something more mundane, which adds an extra barrier for victims to overcome when thinking about a civil suit. That’s not to mention the extreme cost: Spending thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars in the hope of winning a judgment against an ex is a course of action few people can justify.
That, combined with the fact that photos online will never go away, is a good reason to try to deter revenge porn by criminalizing it. With lawmakers already making hamfisted laws to ban or restrict photography in the name of privacy as well as protect copyright as aggressively as possible, it’s easy to wonder why legislators have been reserved in this case. But adding more broad laws that improperly regulate the internet isn’t the answer.
Recently, law professor Mary Anne Franks criticized a Florida bill attempting the same thing:
[S]he says the law is ultimately “both too broad and too narrow.” For example, the bill applies to “any photograph or video of an individual which depicts nudity,” but doesn’t define nudity. It’s “an extremely broad formulation that could potentially include a photograph of someone standing next to a picture of Botticelli’s Venus,” says Franks. At the same time, it’s “a narrow definition, in that it would presumably not apply to depictions of graphic sexual activity unless certain parts of the body are visible,” she says. Franks tells me of an actual case in which a man ejaculated on his sleeping girlfriend’s face and then uploaded pictures to the Internet — that would not violate Florida’s law.
National Review continues to support war with Syria. Jim Manzi dissents:
[F]orcing Assad from power represents a far larger and more uncertain undertaking than has been publicly discussed.
This is the course of action advocated by the editors: “a broader, longer-term plan to topple Assad and defeat his allies.” Those are smooth words for a rough job. How would we accomplish this? How many people would we kill, and how much public money would we spend? Why do we believe that the rebels would form a government that would not be worse for us? How would Iran attempt to counter such an intervention, since they have an extremely strong interest in the outcome? And so on. The litany of costs and dangers ought to be familiar to anybody after Iraq and Afghanistan. Would you voluntarily take on one-tenth the cost in deaths and money of either of those wars to replace Assad with whatever is likely to follow him? Wandering into that kind of a commitment based on what has been presented to the American people so far would be extremely rash.
(Photo: A protester holds up her hand, which is covered in red paint, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry testifies during a hearing on “Syria: Weighing the Obama Administration’s Response” before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on September 4, 2013. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)
And other fascinating facts about snogging:
