Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken some time to respond to critiques of his slave reparations essay featured here last week:
I wanted to take moment to reply to Kevin Williamson’s Case Against Reparations. I wanted to do that, primarily, because his piece covers many of the most common objections to my piece, but also because I’ve always been an admirer of Williamson’s writing, if not his ideas. Among those ideas is a kind of historical creationism which holds that “race” is a fixed thing. The problems with this approach are many, and duly apparent from the outset
Politico Magazine on the origins of the religious right:
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize
How the novel made the modern world:
In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster famously requests us to imagine the English novelists not as floating down the stream of time, but “seated together in a room, a circular room,” all writing at once. In Schmidt, they get up and mingle. The book, at its heart, is a long conversation about craft. The terms of discourse aren’t the classroom shibboleths of plot, character, and theme, but language, form, and address. Here is where we feel the force of Schmidt’s experience as an editor and a publisher as well as a novelist. He knows how books get written, and not just in technical terms. He tells us that Fielding got £800 for Amelia, guides us through the office politics of literary London circa 1900, lets us in on who became a drunk, got divorced, had an outsider’s chip on his shoulder. The book is a biography in that sense, too: the lives of the novelists.
The Chronicle on the ‘never’s’ of being a teacher:
Never allow the Internet in the classroom. This commandment has far less to do with those students buying or selling stocks or trawling dating sites than with students who are fact-checking your remarks. Until the advent of the Internet, professors had long benefited from the sort of immunity and impunity that Catholic priests once enjoyed and totalitarian rulers still savor. The origins of the French Revolution? Look no further than Marie Antoinette, the Freemasons, or both. The genesis of the Dust Bowl? The name James Agee gave to the first gridiron meeting between Oklahoma and Texas (and immortalized in a series of photos by Walker Evans). It is, on the other hand, reassuring to know that our wild claims will eventually filter onto the very sites our students read.
At the Times, why play is better for you than exercise:
Just how, physiologically, our feelings about physical activity influence our food intake is not yet known, she said, and likely to be bogglingly complex, involving hormones, genetics, and the neurological circuitry of appetite and reward processing. But in the simplest terms, Dr. Werle said, this new data shows that most of us require recompense of some kind for working out. That reward can take the form of subjective enjoyment. If exercise is fun, no additional gratification is needed. If not, there’s chocolate pudding.
Related: how to save your hamstrings:
Enter the Nordic hamstring exercise. According to at least half a dozen recent studies, almost two-thirds of hamstring injuries might be prevented by practicing its simple steps: After warming up, kneel on the ground, with a spotter securing your ankles. Then, as slowly and smoothly as possible, lean forward so that your chest approaches the ground. Use your hamstrings to put the brakes on your forward momentum until you can no longer resist gravity. Put out your arms at that point to stop your fall. Allow your chest to touch the ground, then push yourself upright to repeat the exercise.
Not surprisingly, vintage chemistry sets were awesome:
Chemistry sets seem to have fallen out of favor in recent years, but there’s a movement to bring them back—or at least recapture some of the unstructured experimentation the old sets encouraged. In this gallery, we take a look at some vintage sets from the collection of the Chemical Heritage Foundation Museum in Philadelphia. They provide an interesting perspective on how public attitudes towards science shifted over the course of the 20th century, says Kristen Frederick-Frost, the museum’s curator of artifacts and collections manager.
The Wire shares directors’ cuts that ruined the movie:
Now, maybe the film was always going to lose its cult luster as its audience got older, and the director’s cut just accelerated that. But there was a definite sense that whatever spell Donnie Darko had cast over its audiences, the director’s cut helped undo real fast. With the advent of DVD releases, this has become an increasingly worrisome trend that doesn’t just apply to George Lucas’ incessant tinkering with his Star Wars films. Maybe directors didn’t like the rushed process of getting their films to theaters; maybe they want to write over whatever studio notes they were given. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to futz with things once the DVD is being prepped. Here are some of the worst offenders.
The funniest non-Onion headline of the week “Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them, study finds”:
Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities. (The study excluded Katrina and Audrey, outlier storms that would skew the model).
The Men in Blazers are having a lot of fun with their World Cup previews (more here):