Bertrand Russell to the old Fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

Provenance of the image unclear, but my guess is that it comes from the Russell archives at McMaster university. At any rate, the archive catalogue (snippet below) does list correspondence between Russell and Mosely.

Foreign Policy is a terrific journal, but sometimes even it runs out of ideas for thought-provoking copy.

Take, for example, this morning’s little feature headlined “7 things the North Koreans are really good at”.

BTW, in case you’re interested, they are:

1. Building tunnels

Apparently, the Hermit Kingdom has constructed a massive network of clandestine tunnels underneath the so-called demilitarised zone (DMZ). “Designed as a means to mount a massive military invasion from the north, the tunnels are ‘large enough to shuttle through an entire military division per hour,’ according to Popular Mechanics. GlobalSecurity.org estimates that Pyongyang has built up to 20 tunnels that snake through the Demilitarized Zone.”

2. Counterfeiting US dollars. Foreign Affairs maintains that Kim Jong-Un & Co make the best fake dollars in the world.

3. Hacking (Really? In a country with no real Internet access.)

4. Doing more with less (i.e. absence of choice. Eric Schmidt told me that during his extended visit to North Korea, no public building he entered — except for his hotel — had any form of heating. It seems improbably that a state that cannot heat its buildings would be good at sophisticated software. But then again, they’ve built rockets and nukes.)

5. Cheap labour. (No surprise there.)

6. Massive co-ordinated propaganda displays. (Synchronized swimming was made for North Koreans.)

7. Seafood (Eh??

I love this exchange in the Paris Review‘s interview of Nabokov:

INTERVIEWER

Did you learn from your students at Cornell? Was the experience purely a financial one? Did teaching teach you anything valuable?

NABOKOV

My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best, they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations. Every lecture I delivered had been carefully, lovingly handwritten and typed out, and I leisurely read it out in class, sometimes stopping to rewrite a sentence and sometimes repeating a paragraph—a mnemonic prod which, however, seldom provoked any change in the rhythm of wrists taking it down. I welcomed the few shorthand experts in my audience, hoping they would communicate the information they stored to their less fortunate comrades. Vainly I tried to replace my appearances at the lectern by taped records to be played over the college radio. On the other hand, I deeply enjoyed the chuckle of appreciation in this or that warm spot of the lecture hall at this or that point of my lecture. My best reward comes from those former students of mine who, ten or fifteen years later, write to me to say that they now understand what I wanted of them when I taught them to visualize Emma Bovary’s mistranslated hairdo or the arrangement of rooms in the Samsa household or the two homosexuals in Anna Karenina. I do not know if I learned anything from teaching, but I know I amassed an invaluable amount of exciting information in analyzing a dozen novels for my students. My salary as you happen to know was not exactly a princely one.

Those analyses of novels (collected in his Lectures on Literature) are among my most prized possessions.

Can you imagine how he would have figured in Rate my Professors!