From Axis Mundi to Mappa Mundi: Great Temples and Sacred Bundles in Aztec Society: the 2014 Divinity School Alumnus of the Year lecture, by Davíd Carrasco

Via the University of Chicago alumni newsletter:

From Axis Mundi to Mappa Mundi: Great Temples and Sacred Bundles in Aztec Society: the 2014 Divinity School Alumnus of the Year lecture, by Davíd Carrasco.

Davíd Carrasco (ThM 1970, MA 1974, PhD in the History of Religions area, 1977) as the Divinity School's Alumnus of the Year for 2014. Carrasco is the Neil Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard Divinity School. A famed scholar, lecturer, writer, filmmaker, and expert on Mexican and Mesoamerican art and culture, he is a historian of religions with a particular interest in religious dimensions in human experience

Recorded in Swift Hall on April 24, 2014.

Watch here.

Mexico City Miscellanea: Links Apropos of an Ongoing Conversation

A most fascinating conversation this morning in Mexico City, apropos of which, this batch of links (some for me, some for my friend, and all for you):

Agustín Cadena "Por qué leo"
Brief, brilliant. I wish people who didn't read books would at least read this one page (ish) essay. Then they'd read books. And then they'd be happier. (It's in Spanish. I'm almost finished translating it into English.)

Those marvelous marbled papers from etsy:
My Marbled Papers
Marbled Goods

Steve Jobs' TED video of his Stanford University Commencement Speech

From the University of Chicago President's Office webpage biography of Robert Maynard Hutchins:

"Hutchins was a strong advocate of academic freedom, and as always refused to compromise his principles. Faced with charges in 1935 by drugstore magnate Charles Walgreen that his niece had been indoctrinated with communist ideas at the University, Hutchins stood behind his faculty and their right to teach and believe as they wished, insisting that communism could not withstand the scrutiny of public analysis and debate. He later became friends with Walgreen and convinced him to fund a series of lectures on democracy."

According to Hutchins in The University of Utopia, "The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens".

Quantifying an Aesthetic Form Preference in a Utility Function

Quantifying Happiness

Quantifying Rotation-Induced Illness in Squirrel Monkeys

Misery, Thy Name is Rumsfeld's Vacation Home

The Campaign for the IMF
People, get a clue.

Robert Darnton's new The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future

And last but not least, the podcast of my book presentation in Mexico City last week is now on-line. With Javier García Diego, Carlos González Manterola, Carlos Pascual, and Eduardo Turrent (En español.)