It’s Monday, and maybe your week isn’t off to a great start, but imagine walking into the office to discover that the bestseller lists you’ve been publishing for over a year have all been wrong. “In February 2018, The Washington Post launched new lists of best-selling books. In an attempt to combine online and in-store sales, some of the new lists incorporated data from both NPD BookScan and Amazon. For the first three months, all the lists were published correctly. But in late May 2018, the software that merges the two data sets began to experience substantial, intermittent errors, rendering the lists inaccurate.”

Yuval Noah Harari admits to changing the text of his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in response to Russian censors: “Earlier this week, Newsweek reported that the Russian translation of 21 Lessons blunted Harari’s criticism of Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. In English, the book says that ‘we are constantly told that we are living in a new and frightening era of “post-truth”’, citing the annexation of the peninsula as an example. ‘The Russian government and President Putin personally denied several times that these were Russian troops and described them as spontaneous “self-defence units” who acquired a uniform similar to the Russian [one] in local stores,’ writes Harari. ‘When they made such rather ridiculous statements, Putin and his associates knew perfectly well that they were lying.’ But in the Russian edition, Harari uses Trump to make this point: ‘According to estimates of the Washington Post newspaper, President Trump made more than 6,000 false public statements in the time after his inauguration.’”

Never change, Hollywood: “To stay on Beijing’s good side, U.S. filmmakers are willing to kowtow to China’s authoritarian regime, and there seems no limit to their willingness to acquiesce. Take Top Gun: Maverick, a long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic action film that made Tom Cruise a superstar. After the sequel’s trailer was unveiled at San Diego’s ComicCon last week, alert fans noted that the iconic leather flight jacket worn by Cruise’s character in the original film had been altered. All of the patches from the original film were there except for flags representing Chinese adversaries Japan and the Republic of China (Taiwan). Those flags were missing. The culprits were soon pretty obvious. The Hollywood Reporter found that the Chinese company Tencent is co-financing the sequel. Co-producing the film along with Paramount Pictures is Skydance, which is partially owned by Tencent.”

Let’s get to some good news, shall we? An 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard discovered at the Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire two years ago has finally been identified: “It was sent to one of the leading experts in Roman glass, the late professor Jennifer Price, who in turn sought advice from other glass experts around the world. The distinctive profile of the glass indicated it came from a long bottle with an oval shape and a sharp taper at the end. Price eventually found it matched a restored fish-shaped bottle in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. In an indication of its rarity, the only other example of a Roman fish bottle comes from a 2AD burial at Chersonesus in Crimea.” (HT: Daniel McCarthy)

Andrew Thompson-Briggs reviews Dietrich von Hildebrand’s two-volume Aesthetics, which are now both available in English for the first time: “Taken together, the two volumes of Hildebrand’s Aesthetics are a treasury of art and nature criticism.”

Jim Antle reviews Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities: “He makes three important arguments that often get short shrift in treatments of this subject: immigration is driving the emergence of populist politics in the United States and much of Western Europe; the extent of diversity is less significant to these political upheavals than the speed of the demographic change; and there is considerable cost to the unintended consequences of multiculturalism and anti-racism morphing into a generic anti-whiteness.”

The lesson of Alcibiades: “The life of Alcibiades (452-404 BC) understandably fascinated his contemporaries. He appears, for example, in Plato’s dialogues Gorgias, Protagoras, and Symposium (there are also two other dialogues, First and Second Alcibiades, but Plato’s authorship is doubted); Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War; Xenophon’s Hellenica and Memorabilia; and Aristophanes’ The Acharnians, The Birds, The Frogs, and The Banqueters . . . We today can’t help also being fascinated either, as evidenced by Ariel Helfer’s 2017 book Alcibiades and Socrates . . . now comes David Stuttard with Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens.”

Essay of the Day:

From Shakespeare to Anthony Powell, writers have used attire to tell us something about the character of their characters. But do clothes always make the man? Peter Jeffrey surveys some of modern literature’s best dressed protagonists:

“In the 1960s, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, on his way to shop for clothes in Manhattan for a getaway to Vineyard Haven, also wondered, ‘Could he bear to see himself in the brilliant mirrors of a clothing store?’ In the end, ‘Dressed in Italian pants, furled at the bottom, and a blazer with slender lapels, red and white, he avoided full exposure in the triple, lighted mirror.’ He also bought bathing trunks and ‘an old- fashioned straw hat’ which ‘pleased him, floating on the hair which still grew thickly at the sides … The flat-topped hat, a crust of straw, had a red and white band, matching the coat. He removed the tissue paper from the sleeves and put it on, swelling out the stripes. Bare-legged he looked like a Hindu.’

“‘The apparel oft proclaims the man,’ says Polonius. Oft, not always. Yes, the Duke of Wellington’s, Douglas MacArthur’s and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s clothes proclaim dash and bravery, but Moses Herzog, primarily a melancholy character, is capable of only occasional gaudy impulses, Jay Gatsby, flashy and rather vulgar. Yes, Soapy Sponge is unremittingly sporty but also a bit of a spiv, and Priestley definitely not keen to portray himself as what he sees in a tailor’s mirror.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Porto 

Poem: Marjorie Maddox, “Arise”

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