Good morning. Lucara Diamond has operated the Karowe mine for seven years. During that time, Ed Caesar writes, it “has discovered an astonishing number of big stones, including three of the ten largest rough diamonds in history, and fifteen stones weighing more than three hundred carats. Since the discovery of the Cullinan, in 1905, Karowe is the only place where stones heavier than a thousand carats have been found. In 2015, Lucara recovered a near-pristine white diamond of eleven hundred and nine carats, which became known as the Lesedi La Rona—‘Our Light,’ in Setswana. The big black-covered diamond found by Otsogile Metseyabeng last April is now known as the Sewelô, which means ‘A Rare Find.’ The price of a diamond increases exponentially as its weight rises, because of the scarcity of big stones. Lucara’s streak has made the company profitable at a time when many producers have struggled. It has also reshaped the diamond industry.”

Dalí sculptures and etchings stolen from Stockholm gallery. “The Couleur gallery, in the Swedish capital’s upmarket Östermalm district, was holding an exhibition of work by Dalí containing about 10 pieces by the Spanish artist, the news agency TT said. ‘They were worth 200,000 to 500,000 crowns (£16,000 to £40,000) each. So it’s quite a lot of money. It’s terrible,’ the gallery owner, Peder Enstrom, told TT. The works by Dalí were on loan from Switzerland, he said.”

A short history of anthropology: “An anthropologist travelling in a remote part of the Philippines sought shelter in a shepherd’s cave. Far from seeming surprised at being greeted in a dialect of his own language by a white-skinned alien, the host merely asked if the visitor was from Oxford, to which the amazed anthropologist replied that he was. ‘Oh, we had one of you before,’ said the shepherd, and laughed at the reminiscence. ‘We had such fun. He was always asking very rude questions, so we kept performing made-up dances, and we thought up new gods and forbidden things.’ Apocryphal or not, the story epitomises the ineluctable difficulties of a subject which should never pretend to be an exact science.”

Ben Smith to leave Buzzfeed for The New York Times. He will write the “Media Equation” column.

Reddit is a nightmare, Addison Del Mastro writes: “Internet forums are today’s ‘How The Other Half Lives.’ The degeneration is worse than you think.”

Boyd Tonkin reviews Ismail Kadare’s The Doll: “Ismail Kadare is a lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern from the rockily intractable mysteries of his native Albania. Born, like his frenemy the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, amid the blank-faced mansions and feuding clans of the ‘stone city’ of Gjirokastër, the novelist has always framed the terror, secrecy and confusion of the Hoxha regime and its aftermath as a family affair.”

A new history of the Spanish Empire: “A dense and scholarly polemic, it has proved to be a controversial runaway bestseller with twenty-five editions and more than a hundred thousand copies sold, a huge figure in Spain. It is because of this book that one Spanish newspaper described Roca Barea as ‘the woman who has liberated thousands of ideological hostages from a national cancer, the Black Legend.’”

Essay of the Day:

In Harper’s, Christian Wiman writes about the inescapability of suffering:

“For Nietzsche, there can be no creativity without suffering, and there can be no life without creativity. Nor can one winnow out the highs and lows of life like wheat from tares. There is no (true) joy without suffering and there is no (meaningful) suffering without joy . . . Miroslav said if he weren’t a Christian he’d be a Nietzschean. I’m a Christian and may be a Nietzschean. Not the whole overwrought overman stuff, and not the conflation of pity and weakness. But I feel in my bones (literally, alas) the truth of Nietzsche’s insistence upon confronting reality as it is, the iron law of cause and effect that in some instances, as even the most faithful must admit, God either cannot or will not break. Nietzsche believed one could fit oneself to, and thereby conquer, necessity by saying, “Thus I willed it,” as if the only thing not subject to necessity were the will of the one who recognized it. This seems a step too far. But the burn of being I feel in my bones, which makes life seem so joyful, and the burn of unbeing that rages right alongside, which makes that joy so tragic, seem, ultimately, one thing. As does the need to align my will with it.

“Perhaps the question, with regard to suffering and what it will mean in your life, comes down to this: What will be the object of your faith, and what will your act of faith look like? Nietzsche placed great faith both in existence and in himself. For forty-four years and thirteen books this worked well enough (though the loneliness of his soul is obvious). Then, as legend goes, one morning he saw a horse being beaten and all his Übermensch armor disintegrated into madness. He became the thing he’d warned against: pitying, and thus pitiful.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Glenfinnan Viaduct

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