Latest links…

1. Watch someone become competently acquainted with a pleasure, in the Millian sense — composer David Bruce spends a week trying to find out if he can like the music of Ludovico Einaudi
2. “It is straightforwardly good for a typical plant to have access to sunlight, water and soil nutrients” — such an anodyne claim may pose problems for Peter Singer’s “equal consideration of interests” argument about non-human animals, says Joseph Moore (Oxford)
3. “A revival of this genre is overdue” — Martin Lenz (Groningen) on the value of the commentary—and some tips on how to write one
4. “We remain convinced that Israelis and Palestinians are infinitely better than their leaders” — Anna C. Zielinska (Lorraine) and Alain Policar (Sciences Po) on supporting peace and those working towards it
5. “Every day there’s a new story about some outlandish, bizarre, or embarrassing thing individual college students somewhere have said” — but “things that individual college students say—no matter how outlandish—are almost never newsworthy,” writes Erik Angner (Stockholm)
6. “Dead people are people too. New technologies are probably going to make the way we process this fact increasingly weird” — Justin Smith-Ruiu on the influence of the administrative and technological on the moral
7. “Aristotle just popped up, and what made it more suspicious was that he seems to have an all-encompassing body of knowledge, ranging from optics and ethics to economics and politics” — a nationalist Chinese political scientist says Aristotle couldn’t have been real

Discussion welcome.