The story that follows is buried in the nautical volume Tales of Shipwrecks and Adventures at Sea, published in London in 1846. Despite its remarkable nature, I do not recall previously having read the tale in any other volume.
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A mole is an agent or provocateur secretly embedded within an organization, and whose purpose is to serve the interests of an outside entity. Because moles can be immensely destructive to the interests of their hosts, it is essential that they be identified and neutralized. We will discuss here some very basic techniques that can be used–and have been used–to search for and identify moles.
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We are all familiar with the fleeting and fickle nature of gratitude. When our services are found to be expedient, or agreeable, we are flattered and fêted; but when the immediate crisis has passed, and there is longer a looming emergency, we are forgotten as quickly as last Sunday’s supper. We are likely to forget that it has always been so. An interesting anecdote, found in Alexander Garden’s 1822 volume Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War in America, will serve to confirm this fact.
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In a recent conversation with a friend who works as an instructor at a major university, I was amused to learn a new term about which I was previously unaware. It is the portmanteau word mesearch. A fusion of the words me and research, the term is used to describe a feature of modern scholarship that has sadly proliferated in recent decades.
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Some time in the 1840s—the precise year is not certain—a British ship returning from the Mediterranean was obliged to delay its arrival in England for a few days, due to the persistence of stormy weather and thick fog in the Channel. One of the landsmen passengers found it difficult to sleep; and, to pass the time less fretfully, he took to conversing with an experienced old tar, a grizzled Cornishman, who proved to be a fascinating night-watch companion. He had mastered the lore and history of his native country. This mariner told our landsman many ancient tales of disasters, shipwrecks, escapes, and raw courage. One unsettling story, however, proved to be more memorable than all the others. And it is this one which we will now relate.
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The idea of divine retribution is a current that runs consistently through the pages of Herodotus. Evil deeds, wicked actions, or the manifestation of hubris, will eventually be repaid; and the payment is usually devastating.
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While the power and utility of forensic linguistics is taken for granted today, this was not always the case. The world of scholarship was slow to appreciate the degree to which written language betrays its authorship and pedigree. The “Phalaris Controversy” is a famous, and striking, example of the use of textual analysis in resolving an acrimonious intellectual brick-fight.
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The imminent release of Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey on July 17 has ignited a vigorous and necessary debate regarding the tension between artistic license and the importance of fidelity to a classic text. It is a question of old date. But while every generation has felt the compulsion to interpret anew the literary monuments of the past, they have often hesitated, out of respect for the antiquity of these monuments, to tamper unduly with the words and sentiments contained within them.
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The word climacteric is not one commonly encountered. The Oxford English Dictionary describes its variegated colors of meaning. A consultation with Volume II of the 1970 edition (covering the letter C) informs us that the word is an adjective “applied to that period of life (usually between the ages of 45 and 60) at which the vital forces begin to decline.”
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Dear Sir:
Some recent news reports have occasioned me to call attention to a principle of learning which, in our era of existential unease and fracture, often escapes notice. A professor at an institution of higher learning, we have been told, worries that he may not be able to “compete” (as he says) with the volumes of information made available to his students by the machines of artificial intelligence. In this I think his fears are misplaced, and that he need not heat his mind to such a state of fretful ebullition; and I will attempt, with a few disjointed thoughts and unconnected meanderings, to explain why I believe this to be so.
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