Reviews and News:

Isaac Bashevis Singers religion: Fiction was where Singers Yiddishkeytwhich he translates as Jewishness and which I would suggest can be understood as Jewish lifefound its fullest expression. It was his way of being Jewish with others.

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Surfing religiously: Though Calvinist missionaries outlawed surfing when they first came to Hawaii in the 1820sthey viewed it as frivolous and wantonthe last 50 years have seen single-fin riding rabbis, short boarding priests, and bodysurfing Buddhist monks. Surf-related yoga and meditation retreats are common, too, led by the likes of the Pipeline master Gerry Lopez. Bethany Hamilton, the professional who lost an arm to a tiger shark when she was 13, looks to her faith in God to compete on the same level as pros with two arms (which she does mind-bendingly well). The big-wave champ Greg Long sits in lotus to prepare for confronting apartment building-sized walls of ocean.

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Push notifications are ruining your life. Turn them all off.

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The spiritualist convictions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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Nearly everyone agrees: Dunkirk is the best film of the summer.

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Revisiting the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic: There had been pandemics before, notably the Russian flu of the 1890s, which killed a million people, but nothing on this extraordinary scale. Bloated corpses clogged rivers; bells never ceased tolling for the dead; and smoke blocked out the sunlight for days as the unburied were cremated in huge funeral pyres. When the flu subsided in 1919, nearly 50 million people had died.

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Salvador Dals mustache intact 28 years after the painters death: The mustache kept its classic 10-past-10 position, Llus Peuelas, the secretary general of the foundation that oversees Dals estate, told reporters on Friday, referring to the artists waxed and gravity-defying bristles, which Dal kept pointed upward, like the hands of a clock. Narcs Bardalet, who had embalmed Dals body in 1989, told the Catalan radio station RAC1 that finding the mustache intact was a miracle.

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Can poetry and pop change your life?

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Essay of the Day:

In Aeon, Sam Haselby writes about the 19th-century interest in the beauty of the soul and what it can teach us today:

In a global culture that appears increasingly obsessed with radical individualism, narcissistic presentations of self, and incendiary political rhetoric, it is hard to imagine that society once cared about the beauty of the soul. But, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Germany and across Europe, the pursuit of a beautiful soul became a cornerstone of philosophical thought and popular discourse, advanced by some of the most important intellectuals of the time, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt. To these thinkers, the pursuit of inner perfectibility responded to the horrors of the French Revolutions irrational mass action culminating in The Terror of the 1790s. Nascent notions of democracy, they believed, could be developed only if each individual achieved liberation from what Immanuel Kant described as the self-incurred tutelage of intellectual immaturity by developing cognitive and emotional faculties through aesthetic experiences.

At the core of the beautiful soul is the idea that the individual possesses an innate cognitive potential. Subject to the right environmental and educational conditions, this latent potential can be developed to reach a more perfect state of intellect, morality, character and conduct. The beautiful soul is an aesthetic concept focused on developing human capacities and advancing knowledge and culture. It entails the pursuit of personal cultivation to create a convergence of the individual aesthetic impulse with a collective ethical ideal. The beautiful soul is a virtuous soul, one that possesses a sense of justice, pursues wisdom, and practises benevolence through an aestheticised proclivity for the good.

Read the rest.

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Photo: Jaguar catches a fish

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Poem: Horace, II.10. Translated by Ryan Wilson

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Prufrock: Surfing and Spirituality, Isaac Bashevis Singer's Religion, and Revisiting the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic - The Weekly Standard