Word: newtons
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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From U.S. writers, there were few outstanding literary biographies, little notable poetry and even less first-rate literary criticism. Newton Arvin's Herman Melville was the best critical study of the year, brief, intelligent and splendidly informed; Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials was a good, stimulating collection of minor pieces by the best of U.S. working critics. Poet Robert Frost was much honored, but no poetry was published that promised a likely successor to him. Carl Sandburg's Complete Poems contained 72 newly collected ones that showed the same minstrel's virtues and poetic limitations...
Other officers named to the new executive board were Edward Joseph Coughlin, Jr. '52 of Newton and Dunster House as Sports Editor; Frank Brandeis Gilbert '52 of New York City and Eliot House as Associate Managing Editor; and Robert Leroy Wiley, Jr. '52 of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Lowell House as Advertising Manager...
...skepticism, we think, is a healthy thing. It is that curious process of mind which makes a man blink at his environment, scratch his head, and try to figure out what is going on. There is considerable historical evidence that such a process may be a valuable one. Newton, for example, was raised in an environment which taught him that all objects had a proper place, and that if given a chance they would find that place. Newton watched a falling apple, skeptically refused to believe it was heading for its only true and rightful place, and developed a theory...
There are other examples, based on far less apocryphal stories, of the process doing some good. Einstein's skeptical attitude towards Newton's is one; the geometricians' distrust of Euclid is another. Bentham refused to accept the "natural laws, natural rights," theories of previous economists; Susan B. Anthony skeptically disagreed with the idea that only men could vote. None of these people claimed to be right or wrong in the absolutist sense of Father Feeney; they simply questioned the status quo. And in every case their questioning has helped mankind along. As long as man keeps on scratching his head...
...November 1934, he wrote to Newton D. Baker, a rival for the Democratic nomination two years before: "One of my principal tasks is to prevent bankers and businessmen from committing suicide!" Somewhat earlier he had written a friend: "There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolutions...