December 21, 2017

From Harper's:

People tend to believe they will be vindicated by history.

From The New Yorker:

The Patent Office estimates that intellectual property currently represents more than a third of all value created in the U.S., and its value is growing far more quickly than the economy over all. Every year, patents and trademarks will collectively be worth trillions more than the year before.

From The TLS (Terry Eagleton on Books of the Year 2017):

After a distinguished career as a literary theorist and philosopher of science, the polymathic Christopher Norris has now launched out on another life as the author of what he calls “philosophical verse-essays” (though he admits the title sounds a mite pretentious). What he has done in The Winnowing Fan (Bloomsbury) is to reinvent the poetry of ideas, in a post-Romantic, post-Symbolist culture for which the poetic and the conceptual are generally viewed as antagonists. Poetry is supposed to deal with sensuous particulars, not with general speculations, a distinction that no doubt would have come as a mighty surprise to Pope, Johnson, or Wordsworth. Dismissing this prejudice, Norris has some elegant, superbly crafted verses here on Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin, Mallarmé, Roland Barthes and a host of other theoretical luminaries.

It all seems a far cry from Philip Larkin. No doubt many readers will expect these pieces to be ponderous and obscure. In fact, however, the volume is full of wit, playfulness and intellectual agility. A number of the poems are written in that most exacting of forms, terza rima, and Norris has to bend and twist his language to meet its imperious demands, yet there’s hardly a clunky rhyme in the whole book. It’s a hugely ambitious, arrestingly original work, which turns criticism into poetry and poetry into critique.

From The Economist:

The Paris agreement assumes, in effect, that the world will find ways to suck CO2 out of the air. That is because, in any realistic scenario, emissions cannot be cut fast enough to keep the total stock of greenhouse gases sufficiently small to limit the rise in temperature successfully. But there is barely any public discussion of how to bring about the extra “negative emissions” needed to reduce the stock of CO2 (and even less about the more radical idea of lowering the temperature by blocking out sunlight). Unless that changes, the promise of limiting the harm of climate change is almost certain to be broken.

From The Economist:

Fully 101 of the 116 models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to chart what lies ahead assume that carbon will be taken out of the air in order for the world to have a good chance of meeting the 2°C target.