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Laughing Matters or In Praise of Folly John P. Clark Britannica.com
Only laughter can save the world, says the author of the article, a philosophy teacher from New Orleans. And not a shy bourgeois giggle, but a thunderous Rabelaisian laugh. It is the comic (always underlying true philosophy) that can help us in the eternal balancing between the Scylla of order and the Charybdis of chaos. Reflecting on the congeniality of the text to the subject of description, the author scolds philosophers who dare to write books about the philosophy of humor for lacking a sense of humor and misunderstanding the nature of the funny. In this sense, according to Clark, Woody Allen turns out to be more adequate. However, from the article one can understand that among scientists there is still one exception - Bakhtin.
Quote: Ironically, in our search for philosophical insights into the nature of the funny, we must set aside philosophical works.
Order a full translation of an article?The Germans David Lawday The New Statesman
There are no more Germans. Or rather, without noticing it themselves, they changed beyond recognition. Accepting more and more immigrants into their land, the guilt-ridden German people gradually disappeared into the flow of Turks, Jews, Balkan refugees and their very distant relatives from the Volga region. As a result, along with the famous idea about the Deutsche Volk, it seems that the notorious Auschwiz Komplex began to disappear: from the evil genius of the nation, Hitler turned into a comic book hero.
Quote: If the influx of immigrants does not constantly and significantly increase, then by 2030 the population of Germany will decrease to 75 million people (today it is 82 million), and by the middle of the century it may even reach 60 million. To stop the process population decline and have at its disposal sufficient labor resources to finance pensions and maintain a high standard of living, the country must accept at least 1 million immigrants annually, i.e. about double what it is now.
Order a full translation of an article?Lucky numbers Jim Holt Linguafranca
Consider that you have a million dollars in your pocket. To get it, you need very little - to find a proof of Goldbach’s postulate, which is that any even number can be written as the sum of two prime numbers (remember that a prime is a number that is not divisible by anything other than itself). A rare opportunity to earn such a large sum on such abstract matter presented itself thanks to two publishing houses - the British Faber and Faber and the American Bloomsbury , who decided to advertise the book they were publishing by the Greek film and theater director Apostolos Doxiadis entitled "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Postulate" (the solution to the mentioned problem occupied the main character of the book). It must be said that the author of the article himself proposed a “meta-proof” of Goldbach’s assertion, which, however, has not yet convinced the publishers.
Quote: The winner, if one is announced, of course, should be given two checks as a reward: one for $499,943, and the other for $500,057 - two prime numbers, which, as it should be according to Goldbach, add up to an even number - $1,000,000.
Order a full translation of an article?The Strange Case of Susan Sontag Judith Shulevitz Slate
Writer Susan Sontag was accused of plagiarism. She denied it, claiming that this was not plagiarism, but ordinary postmodernism. We are talking about the historical and biographical novel “In America,” which tells the story of the fate of the Polish actress Elena Modrzejewska (Sontag renamed her Marina Zalezowska). The book contains almost unchanged excerpts from Modrzejewska’s memoirs, as well as from a biography of the actress published in the 60s, and even a small fragment from someone else’s novel. It would seem that all the materials used are quite accessible to the general public and there is no crime here. Meanwhile, the author of the article, who closely studied the novel, insists that not everything is as pure as it seems.
Quote: The above passage [borrowed from an original letter from the actress]... plays a decisive role in the book, since it gives the image a special credibility... Readers who, after reading this passage from the novel, began to appreciate Sontag's gift as a writer, may be disappointed, learning that she is not its author.
PS The very fact of such proceedings makes us wary. If the novel were truly miraculously good, it would hardly have occurred to anyone to accuse the writer of plagiarism. The winners are not judged.
Order a full translation of an article?Death of an Altruist James Schwartz Linguafranca
George Price was a man from before. He was a Renaissance man. After receiving a doctorate in chemistry, he began working on the Manhattan Project, then became a journalist, became involved in politics, and then went to work at IBM, where he took part in the development of the first “mainframe” computers and in research on mathematical market modeling. But Price gained his greatest fame in the field of biology. Having improved the theory of “family altruism” developed by William Hamilton, he actually became the discoverer of the “unselfish gene.” The story about the non-trivial fate of an evolutionary scientist, which also ended in a non-trivial way, is read in one breath.
Quotes: Hamilton was convinced that true altruism almost never occurs. Among representatives of the human race, he himself could name only two examples - Mother Teresa and his friend, the brilliant American scientist George Price.
In 1957, in a letter to Senator Hubert Humphrey... Price proposed, for example, to buy two pairs of good shoes for each resident of the USSR (totaling approximately $2 billion) in exchange for the liberation of Hungary from the Soviet yoke.
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