EthicalDative

Onboarding HNWI’s in Hacked States

Posted on January 24, 2020 by JMN

www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/jeff-bezos-phone-hack.html

… Christopher Pierson… founded BlackCloak, a cybersecurity company for high-net-worth and high-profile individuals — executives, celebrities and billionaires. According to Mr. Pierson, few people take their digital lives as seriously as they should.

“The majority of clients we onboard come on in some kind of hacked state,” he told me. “Their computers are compromised or their login credentials are available on dark web. Their home camera systems are accessible to people on internet or their entire home and appliances are vulnerable and viewable by persons remotely.”

(Charlie Warzel, “Jeff Bezos’s Phone Hack Should Terrify Everyone,” NYTimes, 1-24-20)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged cybersecurity, language | 4 Comments

Saloon Spittoon

Posted on January 21, 2020 by JMN

writing plume

The bucal effluvia belched

from limousine and lectern

drums the ear like the per-

cussive splot of a hocked

louie slapping a saliva slick

in a saloon spittoon.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged doggerel | Leave a comment

You Can Pick Your Battles, Not Your Wars

Posted on January 21, 2020 by JMN

www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/21/crushed-by-brexit-how-labour-lost-the-election

My title is what I extrapolate from the tersely cogent remark attributed to an anonymous Labour Party strategist:

“In the end, you can’t just fight a battle and ignore your opponent. You can’t just say: ‘We’re fighting at sea’, if your opponent is mounting a land invasion.”

(Heather Stewart, “‘Crushed by Brexit’: how Labour lost the election,” theguardian.com, 1-21-20)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged Brexit, language, rhetoric | Leave a comment

Getting Itself Done

Posted on January 20, 2020 by JMN

www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/uk-election-labour.html

… The mines of County Durham, the pottery workshops of Staffordshire and the textile factories of Lancashire… Onetime Labour strongholds stretching from West Bromwich on the outskirts of Birmingham to Blyth Valley near the Scottish border… Bolsover in the North Midlands and Bishop Auckland in the North East… At the end of the 2010s, they simply fell off a cliff.

All seats lost by Labour in the northern and Midlands districts voted for Brexit in 2016, according to Alex Niven.

(Alex Niven, “The Labour Party’s Spectacular Defeat Had Been Coming for Decades,” NYTimes, 12-20-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged Brexit | Leave a comment

Spilt Pith

Posted on January 20, 2020 by JMN

www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/opinion/walt-whitman-nytimes-2020.html

Such was [Walt] Whitman’s description of [President] Lincoln in a March 1863 letter to two New York friends. The president, wrote Whitman, had a face “like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.”

(Ed Simon, “Why We Will Need Walt Whitman in 2020,” NYTimes, 12-30-10)

“Ruth stood firmly on his sturdy legs, like the Colossus of Rhodes, and, taking a mighty swing at the second ball pitched to him, catapulted the pill for a new altitude and distance record.” [The Times description of Babe Ruth’s record-breaking “epochal clout” against the Yankees, his 28th home run.]

(Jane Leavy, “Why on Earth Did Boston Sell Babe Ruth to the Yankees?” NYTimes, 12-30-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language | Leave a comment

Art Wins, Artists Lose

Posted on January 18, 2020 by JMN

Among the biggest losers in the current system are artists themselves. With art now considered an asset class to equities and commodities, collectors are forever on the lookout for rising stars whose work can be bought at bargain prices and then resold for many multiples as their reputation soars. When the market moves on, careers are often shattered (except in the case of a few ever-in-demand stars).

And even those artists who do remain popular usually benefit only from the initial sale of their work; as its value appreciates, the profits go mainly to collectors and auction houses.

(Michael Massing, “How the Superrich Took Over the Museum World,” NYTimes, 12-14-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art | 1 Comment

“Pretty Ugly”

Posted on January 16, 2020 by JMN

Harold Bloom’s home library, photographed in June. Credit Tanya Marcuse.

This tweet contrasts so starkly with the seriousness of the actual situation with Iran,” said Ben Rhodes, a former top national security aide to Mr. Obama. “We are in the midst of a roiling crisis with Iran that is largely of Trump’s own making, and yet he continues to view that largely through the prism of pretty ugly domestic politics.”
(Annie Karni, “A Narrative Collapses as Trump Tweets: ‘It Doesn’t Really Matter’,” NYT)

This quote triggers a reflection on the interesting use in English of “pretty” as what I would call an adverbial qualifier. The word is emptied of its adjectival sense of “comely” or “attractive” and becomes instead the equivalent of “fairly” or “to a great extent.” It seems to fall somewhere between the poles of “not much” and “extremely.” It’s especially fun when it happens to land alongside its opposite adjective “ugly.”

Would a non-native speaker be confused by “pretty ugly,” wondering, “Which is it?” As a linguist I enjoy mulling how such expressions might be translated.

In Spanish I would resort to “bastante,” which basically means “enough”; however, “bastante fea” becomes what I would call “pretty ugly.”

In French also I would choose “assez,” or “enough”; “assez laide” is “pretty ugly” too.

(I’ve used the feminine adjectives “fea” and “laide” in both translations because “politics” is feminine in both languages: “la politica” and “la politique.”)

From a style standpoint, waffling adverbs can render statements flaccid, tepid, noncommittal, evasive, or deniable. See, for example, a statement by Stephanie Grisham, presidential press secretary, in defense of a photoshopped image retweeted by her boss:

In an interview with Fox News, Ms. Grisham said the president was “making clear” that Democrats were “parroting Iranian talking points, almost [my emphasis] taking the side of terrorists.”

Correction: Making “almost” clear.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, rhetoric, style, translation | 5 Comments

Intellectual Disarmament

Posted on January 15, 2020 by JMN

diversity

Ross Douthat writes that when he was an undergraduate at Harvard University “our so-called ‘core’ curriculum promised to teach us ‘approaches to knowledge’ rather than the thing itself.”

It was, and remains, an insane view for humanists to take, a unilateral disarmament in the contest for student hearts and minds; no other discipline promises to teach only a style of thinking and not some essential substance.
(Ross Douthat, “The Academic Apocalypse,” NYTimes, 1-11-19)

As a failed teacher I’ve found that some of the best pointers on teaching issue from the armchairs of non-teachers. It’s tempting to invert the sardonic old dig to: “Those who can’t teach it do it.”

I once taught Spanish in a humanities division. Our medley of disciplines — foreign languages, art, English, music, history, theater — competed to fulfill the humanities component of students’ degree plans.

I finally dropped out of academia, before being thrown out, and went into advertising. My own insufficiency and creeping disengagement had defeated me. I could not give undergraduates a good reason to meet my Spanish class twice a week.

I had made one belated grasp for “substance” in an effort to make Spanish look relevant to elective shoppers: Translation! My overture to slant teaching in that direction was batted away by the senior ranks.

As it happened, I had a profitable side-hustle as a translator for off-shoring industries. My obsession with George Steiner’s “After Babel” did not keep my bid to align my classroom and research activities from looking non-cynical to my tenured colleagues. They didn’t buy it, or me.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged academia | Leave a comment

Vija Celmins

Posted on January 13, 2020 by JMN

New York Times.

Vija Celmins (pronounced VEE-ja SELL-mins) was born in 1938 in Riga, capital of Latvia. Fleeing the Soviet invasion of 1944, her family immigrated to the United States in 1948. She earned an undergraduate art degree in Indiana and an M.F.A from UCLA in 1965.

A recent painting by Vija Celmins, “Vase,” offers a close-up of the side of a Chinese porcelain vase, with its finely rendered craquelure glaze. Credit…Vija Celmins and Matthew Marks Gallery.

Within a decade, she was becoming known for precise, painstakingly wrought illusions of reality: expanses of ocean waves, star-studded night skies, clouds or the moon’s surface, rendered in graphite, charcoal or muted tones of oil paint.

From a time when she was “looking at simple objects and painting them straight”: From left, “Heater,” 1964, and “Lamp #1,” 1964. Credit…Haruka Sakaguchi for The New York Times.

[In the period 1963-1968]… Ms. Celmins first committed to “looking at simple objects and painting them straight.” She depicts her studio companions — an electric heater, its red-hot coil at full blast; a two-headed lamp; and an electric fan — in varieties of gray. “I’m from a gray land, Latvia,” she has said. They also testify to her attraction to the lush backgrounds of Velázquez.

From 1968, “Letter,” collage and graphite on paper. Ms. Celmins made the envelope’s five stamps separately; three tiny drawings offer aerial views of the Pearl Harbor attack. Credit…Vija Celmins and Matthew Marks Gallery.

In a smaller gallery of tiny graphite drawings there is a depiction of a letter addressed to the artist in her mother’s cursive handwriting. Ms. Celmins made the envelope’s five stamps separately; each is a tiny drawing with crenelated edges, three offer aerial views of the Pearl Harbor attack.

(Roberta Smith, “Deep Looking, With Vija Celmins,” NYTimes, 9-26-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, drawing, painting | 1 Comment

Therianthropes

Posted on January 12, 2020 by JMN

A humanoid with a bird-like head was among the eight therianthrope figures depicted in a cave painting on the island of Sulawesi. Credit…Ratno Sardi.

In December 2017, an Indonesian archaeologist discovered a cave painting on the island of Sulawesi that dates back at least 43,900 years — “the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.”

In the story told in the scene, eight figures approach wild pigs and anoas (dwarf buffaloes native to Sulawesi). For whoever painted these figures, they represented much more than ordinary human hunters. One appears to have a large beak while another has an appendage resembling a tail. In the language of archaeology, these are therianthropes, or characters that embody a mix of human and animal characteristics.

The author of this article writes: “… The original inspiration for the painting, as well as its significance to the humans who created it, is likely to remain a mystery.”

… These humans were storytellers whose abstract [?] paintings shed light into the origins of human cognition and spirituality… “While we can’t know if this was the case… we can point to these enigmatic images of therianthropes as the world’s earliest known evidence for our ability to conceive of the existence of supernatural beings.” … A linguist [at MIT] suggested that the painting could have implications for understanding humanity’s “unique capacity to communicate using intricate language… It also hints at high order cognitive processes such as language and elaborate artwork emerging fairly recently in evolution,” [he said].

(Becky Ferreira, “Mythical Beings May Be Earliest Imaginative Cave Art by Humans,” NYTimes, 12-11-19)

Besides introducing me to the term “therianthrope” (werewolves are therianthropes!), the article suggests how archaeology itself is a science that treats mystery with projective storytelling and disciplined leaps of imagination.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged archaeology, art, language | Leave a comment