Amor Mundi Newsletter 7/21/13

07-22-2013

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

An Unwillingness to Produce the Body

In the lead up to the scheduled execution-postponed yet again on Thursday-of Warren Lee Hill, Lincoln Caplan writes a short history of the role of habeas corpus in death penalty cases. Starting with Justice William Brennan Jr.'s 1963 affirmation of the importance of habeas corpus and walking through the history of the limitation and near evisceration of habeas as a super writ for the prevention of injustice, Caplan writes that "the habeas story is about capital punishment. More to the point, it is about the radical cutback in habeas law as a reliable means of challenging unconstitutional death sentences," and ties its decline to resurgent questions about American federalism. The Great Writ of justice, as habeas is known, has indeed been radically curtailed. But the real reasons go beyond its connection to the death penalty. The problem is that habeas corpus long represented a claim of justice beyond the letter of the law, an idea of justice at odds with the Court's recent focus on legalism and bright lines. For a full history of the straight-jacketing of the great writ of habeas corpus, take a look at "Error-centricy: Habeas Corpus and the Rule of Law as the Law of Rulings."

Into the Wine Dark

Caroline Alexander investigates what Homer might have meant when he called the sea "wine dark," stumbling across questions of translation and the sea's importance to Greece along the way: "It is alluring, stirring, and indistinctly evocative. It is also, strictly speaking, incomprehensible, and for all the time the phrase has been relished, readers and scholars have debated what the term actually means. In what way did the sea remind Homer of dark wine? And of the myriad ways to evoke the sea, why compare it to wine at all? A translator's task is to render into English both the plain meaning and the sensibility-the felt meaning-of a Homeric phrase or word, and so it is a duty, albeit a perilous one, to plunge deeper into this celebrated sea phrase, and grope for clarity. Impertinent questions must be floated: what does it mean-and is there possibly a better rendering?"

The Good Books

Iranian scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo recently finished a memoir of his time spent in Teheran's Evin Prison. In Time Will Say Nothing he writes of the power of the written word for the incarcerated: "Books became my only companions. In the many desolate hours that I spent in my cell, most of my time was filled with reading Gandhi, Nehru, and Hegel; for long periods they all helped me to forget the grim present. Since childhood, I had always had an obsession and a fascination with books. For me, they had been more than an escape, as they are for many people. Jorge Luis Borges considered them an absolute necessity; they afforded him the highest pleasure. As he famously put it, he always imagined Paradise in the form of a library. This is because for good readers, under normal circumstances, books enrich life, injecting passion and enchantment into the mundane and the quotidian. Moreover, in a solitary jail cell, books simply help one to survive; one can never underestimate their power and importance in such a place."

The MOOC, Circa 1885

Scott Newstock defends in-person learning against the rise of the MOOC. "To state the obvious: there's a living, human element to education...." Close learning, he rightly sees, "exposes the stark deficiencies of mass distance learning such as MOOCs." What is new in Newstock's argument is his backwards glance. To burst the MOOC bubble, he quotes one prominent expert who argues that the average distance learner "knows more of the subject, and knows it better, than the student who has covered the same ground in the classroom." Indeed, "the day is coming when the work done [via distance learning] will be greater in amount than that done in the class-rooms of our colleges." What you might not expect is that this prediction was made in 1885. "The commentator quoted above was Yale classicist (and future University of Chicago President) William Rainey Harper, evaluating correspondence courses." Thus Newstock offers a fair warning to those who prophecy that MOOCs will empty the schools.

Tintyping Afghanistan

When soldier and photographer Ed Drew was deployed in Afghanistan earlier this year, he began taking tintype photographers of his colleagues and surroundings. The tintype process, last used in a theatre of battle during the Civil War, is archaic and difficult to do exactly right, and the resulting photographs speak of the end of a modern era in the language of the distant past.

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