Sundry items making no coherent whole

I've added content to the following old posts:

• America's Critical-Thinking Movement in the 1930s & '40s
• Some quotations on facts
• John Albert Chadwick, WWI vet who left Cambridge logic for an Ashram

These old lines by Mike Royko seem timely:

I always believed that being a Cubs fan built strong character. It taught a person that if you try hard enough and long enough, you'll still lose. And that's the story of life. .... [a year later] Being a Cub Fan prepares you for life because everyone in life winds up a loser. Just check the cemetery. (Royko, 'A Farewell to Cubs' April 20, 1980, and 'When Ya Gotta Go' April 9, 1981, rpt. in For the Love of Mike: More of the Best by Mike Royko [University of Chicago Press, 2001], p. 35 & p. 40)

Leonard Nimoy explains the Spock pinch (the link is to the video for a 1969 CBC interview).

The BBC's list of 10 'lost' books worth our time.

The Guardian's 'top 10 philosopher's fictions'.

Pardon my crooked scanning of this image:

New Words in 1919 (from The New Republic, Oct. 1, 1919)

Hermann Broch (c. 1939-1948): 'When living in a twilight haze, one cannot distinguish between the conditions of nature and those of culture. One's attitude towards culture, then, resembles that of animals towards nature.'* (Hermann Broch Massenwahntheorie: Beitrage zu einer Psychologie der Politik, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979], p. 69; trans. of 1st sentence: Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed, trans. author & Peter Jansen [University of Chicago Press, 2008], n. 456)

Roland Barthes (1984): 'Myth consists in turning culture into nature, or at least turning the social, the cultural, the historical into "the natural".' (Barthes, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, [NY: Hill & Wang, 1986; 1st published in French in 1984], p. 65)

C. D. Broad (1954):

[Aunt Julia's] cat for a great many years was a large tom, whom even I (who am inclined to be weak about cats) must admit to have been ugly, greedy, lecherous, and lacking in affection. She lavished good food on him .... She had named him Urijah .... Urijah survived his mistress for several years. He was treated with the same marked generosity by my cousin Ernest, who surely cannot have approved of his character, and died in extreme and unlovely old age. (Broad, 'Autobiography', The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp [NY: Tudor Publishing Company, 1959], p. 20)

James Lees-Milne (1942): '... Ronnie Norman, the eternal handsome schoolboy, noisily loquacious until he finds the conclusion to an argument, when he stops like an unwound clock.' (James Lees-Milne, Diaries, 1942-1954, ed. Michael Bloch, entry for Jan 12, 1942)

The 'Indiscreet charm of Beryl Bainbridge' by Philip Hensher.

Beryl Bainbridge in Coronation Street:



* Broch's above-quoted remarks in German: 'Wenn der Mensch sich im Dämmerzustand befindet, kann er nicht zwischen den Gegebenheiten von Natur und Kultur unterscheiden. Seine Einstellung gegenuber der Kultur ahnelt dann der des Tieres gegenuber der Natur.'