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Reviews and News:

Helen Andrews on John Stuart Milla self-righteous adulterer who had a nave belief in the power of education to perfect humanity: "In his correspondence with true-believing socialists, Mill usually told them that he fully expected socialism to come to England one day but that at present mankind was unprepared for it. Mill had every hope that this unpreparedness would be temporary, for he had limitless faith in the power of education to shape humanity. If a single group of children could be raised to be socialists as deliberately as James Mill had raised him to be a Benthamite, then it would only take one generation to prove to the world that cooperative socialism was no utopia but an alternative within reach. Instructing this pioneer generation was one of the things he thought Harriet could have done for humanity, if she had lived. For a thinker whose entire philosophy depended on human perfectibility, Mill had remarkably little idea how to bring it about."

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"Anthony Horowitz has said he was warned off including a black character in his new book after being told by an editor it would be inappropriate. Horowitz, best known for his Alex Rider series of novels, said he found it 'disturbing' that he was being advised against a white writer creating a black character."

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Pax Romana revisited: "Rome kept the peace in Palestine as it did across a breathtakingly large empire: through a combination of laissez-faire government and military might. On the one hand, Roman governors were sensitive to local laws and customs. Goldsworthy quotes letters from the Emperor Trajan to his magistrate in Bithynia, Pliny the Younger, instructing him to rule in disputes according to Bithynian laws. Similarly, Rome left in place local religion, rulers, and even currency. On the other hand, if locals got uppityor worse, revolutionaryRoman force came down like a crushing hammer. The Jews learned this in 64 BC, and again in AD 70."

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Saul Bellow's politics: "Unlike his friend and colleague on The University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, Edward Shils, Bellow was shy about identifying himself overtly with the political right."

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The lost typefaces of W.A. Dwiggins.

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NASA's infographic for aliens.

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Essay of the Day:

In Slate, Daniel Engber revisits Daryl Bem's 2011 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that presented evidence of ESP:

"When the study went public...some of Bem's colleagues guessed it was a hoax. Other scholars, those who believed in ESPtheirs is a small but fervent field of studysaw his paper as validation of their work and a chance for mainstream credibility.

"But for most observers, at least the mainstream ones, the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directionsthat ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you'd be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you'd be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the fieldand thus, much of what we think we understand about the mindcould be total bunk."

Read the rest.

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Image: Lagoon Nebula

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Poem: Dana Gioia, "Prayer"

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Prufrock: JS Mill's Socialism, Saul Bellow's Politics, and the Science of ESP - The Weekly Standard