Calvin was a product of Renaissance humanism, a student of the Greek and Roman classics who reread Cicero every year, a writer of exceptional grace and lucidity in both Latin and French, a man of prodigious learning, who did not dwell on damnation but rather exulted in a sovereign but not at all distant God, a God whose glory was manifest in the goodness of the world and the potential of humanity.
…Calvin’s legacy has been traced in everything from modern marriage and modern science to modern liberal government and of course modern capitalism. By many accounts, he is a major source of modernity’s very understanding of the self.
…Max Weber’s famous 1905 thesis “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” has been dealt so many body blows that the wonder is that it staggers on. Weber may not have got the historical details or the psychological dynamism right, yet when he proposed religious, especially Calvinist, roots of the calculating rationality, incessant striving and this-worldly asceticism fueling early capitalism, he was on to something.

Man of Contradictions, Shaper of Modernity. Age? 500 Next Week. - NYTimes.com

Posted on July 6, 2009

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Assessing the stylistic personality of Palin’s resignation speech:

“The style is closer to a high schooler’s angry diary entry than to an official speech. I’ve read a lot of speech transcripts. They tend to have fewer words in all capital letters. And fewer things in quotation marks that aren’t actually, you know, quotes. And I’ve never seen an official speech transcript, written by an actual speechwriter, that contains this:

*((Gotta put First Things First))*”

Ezra Klein - Sarah Palin Resigns

Posted on July 6, 2009

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QUOTE: …for the bulk of human history, the much-derided Thomas Malthus was right: Population growth consistently overwhelmed technological growth. As you can see from the clustering of purple boxes there, technology did not traditionally solve our problems. It merely kept us afloat. And sometimes, it barely did that. “We only think Malthus got it wrong because the two centuries he was wrong about were the two centuries that followed the publication of his work,” writes Krugman. But his theory did a pretty good job explaining the first 58 centuries of human civilization.

Ezra Klein - Malthus’s Revenge

Posted on July 6, 2009

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Not everyone realizes,” Weber told students, “that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar. This is particularly true when we recollect that it has to be written on the spot, to order, and that it must create an immediate effect, even though it is produced under completely different conditions from that of scholarly research. It is generally overlooked that a journalist’s actual responsibility is far greater than the scholar’s.

A Journalist’s ‘Actual Responsibility’ - NYTimes.com

Posted on July 6, 2009

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“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. “There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”

Incandescent Bulbs Return to the Cutting Edge - NYTimes.com

Posted on July 6, 2009

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