Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser]( We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. King of the Jungle: The Mayan Empire of Archaeologist Richard Hansen Charlotte Allen | The Weekly Standard On the trail with the man who discovered the preclassic Mayan civilization. --------------------------------------------------------------- Rupert, Idaho -- Richard D. Hansen is the director of what is probably the largest archaeological excavation in the world, the Mirador Basin Project, some 51 ancient Mayan cities connected by raised causeways along an 840-square-mile elevated trough in the middle of the dense and swampy rainforest of the northern Guatemalan lowlands. Hansen’s annual excavation budget for the project is in the range of $2.5 million, dwarfing the $200,000 to $500,000 a year that most archaeologists are able to scrape together from grants for their more modest digs. The ancient Mayan structures in the Mirador Basin, uncovered by Hansen’s team of archaeologists, conservators, soil scientists, students from 66 different research universities and institutions, and up to 400 local Guatemalan workmen, are startlingly massive in both height and volume. When the jungle vegetation was peeled back, the ruins of the El Mirador complex were revealed to be four times the size of the sculpture-studded complex at Tikal, a once-powerful Mayan city-state and a popular Guatemalan tourist destination that is the crown jewel of Mayan architecture. At 230 feet, the highest of Tikal’s soaring ziggurat-shaped temple-pyramids was once considered the tallest Mayan structure. But the temple-pyramid of La Danta unearthed by Hansen at El Mirador and similarly ornamented with intricate carvings is a shade higher, at 236 feet. [Read More]( Why Liberals Have Such A Hard Time With ‘Monstrous Men’ And Their Art Mark Hemingway | The Federalist While it's not a universal truism, more often than not, bad morals make for bad art, and the unwillingness to say so produces even worse criticism. --------------------------------------------------------------- Claire Dederer has written a much-discussed essay for The Paris Review, “What We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” It’s a good question, and Dederer, a former film critic and author, focuses much of the essay on the difficulty of evaluating Woody Allen’s work in light of the Great Sexual Harassment Panic of 2017. Specifically, there’s no getting around Allen’s celebrated film “Manhattan.” Allen’s character in the film dates a 17 year-old Mariel Hemingway, as if an older man having a sexual relationship with a teenager is a perfectly normal thing to do. It certainly doesn’t seem so normal when you consider that Allen later started dating, and eventually married, the adopted teenage daughter of his then-wife Mia Farrow. [Read More]( The Last Detail David Usborne | Esquire When Donald Trump won the presidency, many Americans hoped John McCain would live up to his maverick image and resist his agenda. But after the senator was diagnosed with brain cancer in July, his contrarian resolve revealed itself in unexpected ways that may shape his legacy—and our future. McCain spoke to David Usborne about his extraordinary year. --------------------------------------------------------------- On a blue-sky Sunday in September, John McCain sat down for brunch at Dirty Habit, a sleek hotel restaurant in Washington, D. C. Dressed in a charcoal suit with a blue shirt and gold tie, he launched into a funny story. Back in 2008, he said, when he was running for president the second time, he was at a meet-and-greet on primary day in Michigan. The race came at a crucial time: Though McCain had won New Hampshire, he’d lost Iowa and Wyoming and was far from a clear front-runner for the GOP nomination. The only man who had come to see him at the event was a Mike Huckabee supporter. Someone suggested McCain try his luck at one of the stately houses across the way. “So sure, yeah, I’d like to get in out of the cold,” McCain told me. “I walk across the street, walk up the steps, and walk inside. It was a fucking funeral home.” Worse, he had a bunch of journalists in tow. “They had a field day,” he said. “The headlines were ‘McCain Dying to Get In.’ ” [Read More]( The impossibility of intelligence explosion François Chollet | Medium In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI): "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control." Decades later, the concept of an “intelligence explosion” — leading to the sudden rise of “superintelligence” and the accidental end of the human race — has taken hold in the AI community. [Read More]( Surrounded by Books John Lukacs | Chronicles Surrounded by books has been a main circumstance of my long life. So it is now, near the end of my 94th year, when I am in my large library of perhaps 18,000 books in the western wing of my house in Chester County, Pennsylvania. So it was in the beginning: I was born in a sanatorium in Budapest, Hungary, wherefrom, after a day or two, I was translated home to my mother’s bedroom in an airy apartment that housed, among other things, many books. This I know and can see from photos in a family album, still in my possession. What a miracle that the writings and the words of great people had been preserved for thousands of years even before an age of books came into existence! The word book was there in many languages well before the 16th century a.d. The Book of God was the Bible, people thought and said. Even now, the word bible (Gk., β?βλος) refers to and defines the meanings of books (bibliophile, bibliography, etc.) After about 1500 a new age began; wrongly named the “Modern” Age, it may even be named the Age of Books. Before that, books were written on wooden tablets or parchments or cloths. Now books were printed and fastened and bound and stored together. Their numbers and their availability increased in much of the world. In 1517, exactly 500 years ago, Erasmus wrote that the Middle Ages (a term then yet-unknown) were passing and something of a newer and golden age was about to begin. Today, few people possess that kind of optimism or know that the “Modern” Age, the Age of Books, is now passing. [Read More]( The Tragedy of Liberalism Patrick J. Deneen | The Hedgehog Review America is a nation in deep agreement and common belief. The proof lies, somewhat paradoxically, in the often tempestuous and increasingly acrimonious debate between the two main US political parties. The widening divide represented by this debate has, for many of us, defined the scope of our political views and the resultant differences for at least the past one hundred years. But even as we do tense and bruising battle, a deeper form of philosophical agreement reigns. As described by Louis Hartz in his 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America, the nature of our debates themselves is defined within the framework of liberalism. That framework has seemingly expanded, but it is nonetheless bounded, in as much as the political debates of our time have pitted one variant of liberalism against another, which were given the labels “conservatism” and “liberalism” but which are better categorized as “classical liberalism” and “progressive liberalism.” While we have focused our attention on the growing differences between “classical” and “progressive,” we have been largely inattentive to the unifying nature of their shared liberalism. [Read More]( Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. Our mailing address is: The Federalist 8647 Richmond Highway Suite 618 Alexandria, VA 22309 [Add us to your address book]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( The Federalist · 8647 Richmond Highway · Suite 618 · Alexandria, VA 22309 · USA