"Hard to See and No Less Difficult to Imagine"

"The countless victims and occasional beneficiaries of Tambora's fury were oblivious to the volcanic roots of their circumstances, Dr. Wood noted, making the challenge of writing about it formidable and 'occasionally mind-bending.'

"More generally, he said, the revelation of global volcanic ruin—a portrait 200 years in the making—offers a kind of meditation on the difficulty of uncovering the subtle effects of climate change, whether its origins lie in nature's fury or the invisible byproducts of human civilization."

William J. Broad in The New York Times discusses the worldwide impact of the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora, "the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history."

Stupendous Man

"Having made the basic analogy between Puritan New England and ancient Israel, some extended the comparison even further, to speculate about the perhaps decisive place of the American colonies in sacred history. In Calvinist interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, Israel was usually portrayed as a nation chosen by God to preserve his law until His Son arrived to purify and promulgate it throughout the world. Israel was thus a divine crucible and a providential conduit for the gospels. And so, it seemed, was America--a nation chosen by God to proclaim the repristinized Christianity of the Protestant Reformation to all peoples."

On the eve of John Calvin's five hundredth birthday, Damon Linker in The New Republic traces the theologian's impact on American ideology.

"An Architecture of Permanence"

Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times reports that Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has won the 2009 Pritzker Prize.

A Tracking Shot Is a Moral Act

Christopher Bray and Anne Billson review Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard in The Telegraph.

All the World Is Football Shaped

Jody Rosen in Slate recommends websites and books for those following the Euro 2008 soccer tournament.

Free Games for May...

...See Emily Play with the Teletubbies (via YouTube).

And in related news, Craig S. Smith writes an obituary in The New York Times for Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD.