51吃瓜

For centuries, people in the Alps have attributed health issues, headaches in particular, to the mountain wind known as the Foehn. It is, alpine communities insist, a very special wind, with very special properties …. The issue was recently the subject of an hour-long programme on Swiss radio, during which listeners phoned in to swap symptoms. One woman described feeling low, and having a headache when the Foehn was building up, but then being full of energy when it finally started blowing. A man said he believed the wind was a challenge, in a positive way, because it “shakes us up a bit.”

The foehn has been blowing in the Alps recently, adding insult to a badly injured winter ski season. Snow arrived exceptionally late; in very low-lying resorts nothing fell in December after one of the warmest Novembers on record. Early ski racing fixtures had to be cancelled and, once again, the Alpine winter sports industry is peering out toward a distant horizon, wondering whether this winter is just rotten luck or the harbinger of warm winters to come and a ski industry teetering on the edge of the abyss.

Kah茅le patronized me extensively. I was introduced to camp after camp, and in rapid succession repeated the experiences of a traveler who has much to answer for in the way of colour, and the peculiar cut of his garments. I felt as though I was some natural curiosity, in charge of the robustious Kah茅le, who waxed more and more officious every hour of his engagement; and his tongue ran riot as he descanted upon my characteristics, to the joy of the curious audiences we attracted …. The boy sat near me, still descanting upon our late experiences, our possible future, and the thousand trivial occurrences that make the recollections of travel forever charming.

[T]his duty of doing one’s proper work well, and taking care that every product of one’s labour shall be genuinely what it pretends to be, is not only left out of morals in popular speech, it is very little insisted on by public teachers 鈥�. Some of them seem to be still hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequence from week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and improved hymn-books; others apparently trust to descanting on self-culture in general, or to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances; and meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of immorality.

One of the great paradoxes of modern science is that scientists can speak with more confidence about supernovas, neutron stars and the first moments of cosmic creation than they can about what is going on in their own skulls. Humanities scholars should not ignore science or reject it in kneejerk fashion, but neither should they kowtow to it.

If you lived anywhere near New York City, you knew Jimmy Breslin. What made Breslin stand out was his blue-collar point of view. He was dogged in chasing a story. He didn鈥檛 kowtow to the powerful, and he often thought about how class and privilege might influence a narrative.