Reviews and News:

How the Pope's 16th-century chef revolutionized cooking: "At the time, medieval tastes still dominated elite dinner tables. In the Ancient world, the cuisine of the Mediterranean, based on bread, oil, and wine, was held up as a marker of its innate superiority over the Germanic peoples, with their supposedly barbaric fare of meat, milk, and beer. After the fall of Rome, the two traditions slowly merged until, in the late Middle Ages, the food served on the tables of the mighty across Europe was broadly similar: heavily spiced sweet-and-sour combinations, given layers of earthy complexity with great heaps of garden herbs. Many of the dishes Scappi chose to record in his magnum opus retain that sensibility, such as his recipe for an omelette made with pig's blood goat cheese, spring onion, cinnamon, clover, nutmeg, marjoram, and mintthe kind of concoction that would nowadays be considered inedible just about anywhere on earth. Yet, among these forbidding relics of the medieval world, the Opera abounds with innovation that put cookingperhaps for the first timeon a plinth next to the other creative arts."

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What can Walker Percy teach us about depression and suicide? "You have a right to be depressed, he says: We are born into this world as alienated from ourselves, and our division has been exacerbated by our philosophic inheritance, and the strangeness of how modern life is lived. The world itself is mad, as witnessed to by its ever-novel modes of world destruction; in such a world, to be mad is to be sane. As for anyone who is not depressed by all this, one may well be suspicious of their sanity"

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Ideology and the corruption of language: "Everyone talks about 'dialogue,' but very few of us have the patience or are willing to do the hard work to engage in it."

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Why are we tempted to abandon society? "Hermits appeal to us because of the allure of simplicity. The hermit's life is de-cluttered entirely from human connection or communionliving in a world without dentist appointments or small talk, distractions or annoyances. Living outside of our community, the hermit finds a necessary perspective: A God's-eye view on the hustle and bustle of the world that consumes and distracts us. Hermitage has almost always been associated with religious or spiritual enlightenmentthe purpose is never just to get away into nature but to learn from it. It's a curiously goal-oriented project, even as its practitioners often reject such thinking."

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In Case You Missed It:

Is populism a threat to democracy?

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What was Machiavelli really like, and what did he actually think of power?

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"The Praetorian Guard, a modern term, was founded, or rather formalized, around 27 BC by Augustus for the protection of the emperor and his family." Its members were a dangerous, greedy bunch.

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Revenge of the copy editors

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Interview: Sam Leith talks to Joanna Bourke about the history of pain and the rise of painkillers. "What was life like before anaesthesia?"

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Classic Essay: G. K. Chesterton, "Pseudo-Scientific Books"

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Prufrock: How the Pope's Cook Changed European Cuisine and ... - The Weekly Standard