Howard Scott Warshaw was once the “most highly coveted game developer” in the world—until he created E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The game flopped. Why? He had only been given five weeks to make it: “‘The reason a game takes 6 months is there’s a lot of tuning and tweaking; you work on the game until you have a good one and the variable is time,’ said Warshaw. ‘In this case, it was an inversion of that: Instead of starting with the goal of making a good game, it’s, “OK I have 5 weeks — let’s see how good of a game I can make.”’ Warshaw’s only option was to create a small, simple, replayable game — something with few moving parts that he could implement quickly. Less than 2 days later, he was standing in a conference room in Burbank, pitching his design to Spielberg: The player would guide E.T. through a landscape filled with pits, and collect pieces of a phone while evading FBI agents. ‘He just looked at me and said, “Can’t you just do something like Pac-Man?”’ recalls Warshaw. ‘But eventually, he approved it.’”

Is this the first photo of Stonehenge?

Andrew Roberts reviews a new history of the French Revolution: “The French Revolution has been a curiously unexamined subject of late, at least if one takes the entire decade from the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 to Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of November 1799. There have been only two major histories since Simon Schama’s Citizens was published 15 years ago. Now Jeremy D. Popkin, a history professor at the University of Kentucky, has triumphantly filled the gap with A New World Begins, a well-written, profoundly researched work that has the reader eagerly turning the pages despite knowing pretty well how the main characters’ stories are likely to end (i.e., with decapitation).

The genius of Reynolds Stone: “You may not know the name of Reynolds Stone, but it is almost impossible that you haven’t come across his designs. If you’re familiar with the masthead of the Economist or remember the clock on the top of the front page of the Times; if you’ve seen the colophon on a book published by the Folio Society or Hamish Hamilton or owned a Penguin edition of Shakespeare; if you’ve borrowed something from the London Library; if you had a £5 note in your wallet in the 1960s; if you’ve walked over the memorial to Winston Churchill on the floor of Westminster Abbey or if you own a passport with the royal coat of arms on the front, then you’ve been in close contact with the work of this wood engraver, typographer, letter-cutter and watercolourist.”

Sudip Bose reviews Jonathan Rosenberg’s Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War: “This historical period, Rosenberg argues, exposed a cultural divide in the nation: between those who believed that art transcended politics and those who countered that art was an instrument of nationalism. The pitting of the musical universalists against the musical nationalists, central to so much 20th-century American cultural history, is the leitmotif of Rosenberg’s book, though the terms of the debate were not always as black and white as they were during the First World War.”

Essay of the Day:

Who was the real Buddha? Alexander Wynne sifts fact from the fiction in Aeon:

“The legendary version of the Buddha’s life states that the Siddhattha Gotama was born as a prince of the Sakya tribe, and raised in the town of Kapilavatthu, several centuries before the Christian era. Living in luxurious seclusion, Siddhattha remained unaware of the difficulties of life, until a visit beyond the palace walls revealed four shocking sights: a sick man, an old man, a dead man and a holy man. The existential crisis this sparked led Siddhattha to renounce the world, in order to seek a spiritual solution to life. After six years of trying out various practices, including extreme asceticism, at the age of 35 Siddhattha attained spiritual realisation. Henceforth known as the ‘Buddha’ – which simply means ‘awakened’ – Siddhattha spent the rest of his life travelling around northern India and establishing a new religious order. He died at the age of 80.

“Only the bare details of this account stand up to historical scrutiny. According to contemporary academic opinion, the Buddha lived in the 5th century BCE (c480-400 BCE). But the failure to identify Kapilavatthu implies that he was not a prince who lived in a grand palace. The most likely sites are the Nepalese site of Tilaurakot, an old market town about 10 km north of the Indian border, and the Indian district of Piprahwa, to the south of Tilaurakot and just over the Indian border. But the brick remains at both places are a few centuries later than the Buddha, which at least agrees with the oldest literary sources: according to the Pali canon – the only complete collection of Buddhist literature from ancient India ­– the Buddha’s world generally lacked bricks, and Kapilavatthu’s only building of note was a tribal ‘meeting hall’ (santhāgāra), an open-sided, thatched hut (sālā).

“Since Siddhattha lived in a wooden house, he would not have spent his youth sequestered in a palace, unable to experience the painful facts of life. Indeed, in the Pali Mahāpadāna Sutta, one of the most important sources for early Buddhist myth, the story of the Buddha’s youth is attributed to the entirely mythical figure of the former Buddha Vipassī, said to have lived 91 aeons ago (an inconceivably long time). This text is not a reliable source for the life of Siddhattha Gotama; to build up a more reliable picture, we must consider older parts of the Pali canon. In none of these is the Buddha ever called Siddhattha. Indeed, since this word means ‘one who has fulfilled [siddha] his purpose [attha]’, it looks very much like a mythic title, and in fact is used in only late mythic texts such as the Pali Apadāna.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Flooded Venice

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.