title: Adaa Khan

text: Post modelling and advertisements, Khan decided to start her acting career in television. In 2009, she debuted into Hindi television industry playing the role of Vigya in Sony Entertainment Television's show "Palampur Express".


title: Adaa Khan

text: In 2010, she bagged Star Plus's show "Behenein". It centers around the story of four rich and beautiful sisters. She was cast as the parallel lead Aakashi Shastri.


title: Adaa Khan

text: In 2012, Khan got her first leading role in Director's Kut Productions drama "Amrit Manthan" as the heroic Princess Amrit Kaur Sodhi, co-starring Ankita Sharma, Dimple Jhangiani and Wasim Mushtaq.


title: Adaa Khan

text: She did episodic roles in shows like "Yeh Hai Aashiqui", "Crime Patrol", "Code Red" and "Savdhaan India @ 11". She was also a contestant on the reality show "Welcome – Baazi Mehmaan Nawazi Ki".


title: Adaa Khan

text: In 2015, Khan got the role of Shesha, a shape-shifting serpent in "Naagin". Her fierce looks and dialogue delivery made her character very popular among the audiences. In 2016, she reprised her role of Shesha in "Naagin 2". In 2018, she played the lead role of Sitara in the supernatural series "".


title: Adaa Khan

text: In 2019, she appeared as a guest in the last few episodes of "Naagin 3", reprising her role of Shesha.


title: Adaa Khan

text: The same year, she appeared as Shesha again in a guest role in "Naagin 5". In 2022, she was seen as Shesha in "Naagin: Basant Panchami Special".


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as "The Power Elite", "", and "The Sociological Imagination". Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era." It was Mills who popularized the term "New Left" in the US in a 1960 open letter, "Letter to the New Left".


title: C. Wright Mills

text: C. Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas, on August 28, 1916. His father, Charles Grover Mills, worked as an insurance broker; his mother, Frances, was a homemaker. His parents were pious and middle class, with an Irish-English background. Mills was a choirboy in the Catholic Church of Waco, and he developed a lifelong aversion to Christianity. Mills attended Dallas Technical High School, with an interest in engineering, and his parents were preparing him for a practical career in a rapidly industrializing world of Texas. His focuses of study besides engineering were algebra, physics, and mechanical drawing.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In 1934, Mills graduated from Dallas Technical High School and his father pressed him to attend Texas A&M University, but he found the atmosphere "suffocating" and left after his first year. He transferred to the University of Texas at Austin where he studied anthropology, social psychology, sociology, and philosophy. At this time, the university was developing a strong department of graduate instruction for both the social and physical sciences. Mills' benefited from this unique development, and he impressed professors with his powerful intellect. In 1939, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology, as well as a master's in philosophy. By the time he graduated, he had already been published in the two leading sociology journals, the "American Sociological Review" and The "American Journal of Sociology".


title: C. Wright Mills

text: While studying at Texas, Mills met his first wife, Dorothy Helen Smith, a fellow student seeking a master's degree in Sociology. She had previously attended Oklahoma College for Women, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: After their marriage, in 1937, Dorothy Helen, or "Freya", worked as a staff member of the director of the Women's Residence Hall at the University of Texas. She supported the couple while Mills completed his graduate work; she also typed, copied and edited much of his work, including his Ph.D. dissertation. There, he met Hans Gerth, a German political refugee and a professor in the Department of Sociology. Although Mills did not take any courses with him, Gerth became a mentor and close friend. Together, Mills and Gerth translated and edited a few of Max Weber's works. They also collaborated on "Character and Social Structure," a social psychology text. This work combined Mills's understanding of socialization from his work in American Pragmatisim and Gerth's understanding of past and present societies.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In August 1940, Freya divorced Mills, but after only a year they were remarried. Shortly after, their daughter, Pamela, was born on January 15, 1943.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1942. His dissertation was entitled "A Sociological Account of Pragmatism: An Essay on the Sociology of Knowledge". Mills refused to revise his dissertation while it was reviewed by his committee. It was later accepted without approval from the review committee. Mills left Wisconsin in early 1942, after he had been appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills was able to further his career and avoid the draft by using his high blood pressure as a deferment. During his work as an Associate Professor of Sociology from 1941 until 1945 at the University of Maryland, College Park, Mills's awareness and involvement in American politics grew. During World War II, Mills befriended the historians Richard Hofstadter, Frank Freidel, and Ken Stampp. The four academics collaborated on many topics, and each wrote about contemporary issues of the war and how it affected American society.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: While still at the University of Maryland, Mills began contributing "journalistic sociology" and opinion pieces to intellectual journals such as "The New Republic", "The New Leader", as well as "Politics", a journal established by his friend Dwight Macdonald in 1944.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: During his time at the University of Maryland, William Form befriended Mills and quickly recognized that "work overwhelmingly dominated" Mills's life. Mills was continuing his work with Gerth while trying to publish Weber's "Class, Status, and Parties". Form explains that Mills was determined to improve his writing after receiving criticism on one of his works; "Setting his portable Corona on the large coffee table in the living room, he would type triple-spaced on coarse yellow paper, revising the manuscript by writing between the lines with a sharp pencil. Unscrambling the additions and changes could present a formidable challenge. Each day before leaving for campus, he left a manuscript for Freya (his wife) to retype."


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In 1945, Mills moved to New York after earning a research associate position at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research. He separated from Freya with this move and the couple divorced in 1947.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills was appointed assistant professor in the university's sociology department in 1946. Mills received a grant of $2,500 from the Guggenheim Foundation in April 1945 to fund his research in 1946. During that time, he wrote "White Collar", which was finally published in 1951.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In 1946, Mills published "From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology", a translation of Weber's essays co-authored with Hans Gerth. In 1953, the two published a second work, "Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions".


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In 1947, Mills divorced his wife Freya and married his second wife, Ruth Harper, a statistician at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. She worked with Mills on "New Men of Power" (1948), "" (1951), and "The Power Elite" (1956). In 1949, Mills and Harper moved to Chicago so Mills could serve as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Mills returned to teaching at Columbia University after a semester at the University of Chicago, and was promoted to Associate Professor of Sociology on July 1, 1950. In only six years, Mills was promoted to Professor of Sociology at Columbia on July 1, 1956.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In 1955, Harper gave birth to their daughter Kathryn. From 1956 to 1957, the family moved to Copenhagen, where Mills acted as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. Mills and Harper separated in December 1957 and officially divorced in 1959.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills married his third wife, Yaroslava Surmach, an American artist of Ukrainian descent, and settled in Rockland County, New York, in 1959. Their son, Nikolas Charles, was born on June 19, 1960.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In August 1960, Mills spent time in Cuba, where he worked on developing his text "Listen, Yankee". He spent 16 days there, interviewing Cuban government officials and Cuban civilians. Mills asked them questions about whether the guerrilla organization, the one that made the revolution, was the same as a political party. Additionally, Mills interviewed President Fidel Castro, who claimed to have read and studied Mills's "The Power Elite". Although Mills only spent a short amount of his time in Cuba with Castro, they got along well and Castro sends flowers when Mills passes a few years later.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills was described as a man in a hurry. Aside from his hurried nature, he was largely known for his combativeness. Both his private life – four marriages to three women, a child from each, and several affairs – and his professional life, which involved challenging and criticizing many of his professors and coworkers, have been characterized as "tumultuous". He wrote a fairly obvious, though slightly veiled, essay in which he criticized the former chairman of the Wisconsin department, and called the senior theorist there, Howard P. Becker, a "real fool".


title: C. Wright Mills

text: During a visit to the Soviet Union, Mills was honored as a major critic of American society. While there he criticized censorship in the Soviet Union through his toast to an early Soviet leader who was "purged and murdered by the Stalinist." He said, "To the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published in the Soviet Union!"


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In a biography of Mills by Irving Louis Horowitz, the author writes about Mills's acute awareness of his heart condition. He speculates that it affected the way he lived his adult life. Mills was described as someone who worked fast, yet efficiently. That is argued to be a result of his knowing that he would not live long due to his heart health. Horowitz describes Mills as "a man in search of his destiny". In 1962 Mills suffered his fourth and final heart attack and died on March 20 in West Nyack, New York. His service was held at Columbia University, where Hans Gerth and Daniel Bell both travelled to speak on his behalf. A service for friends and family was held at the interfaith pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills was an intense student of philosophy before he became a sociologist. His vision of radical, egalitarian democracy was a direct result of the influence of ideas from Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and Mead. During his time at the University of Wisconsin, Mills was deeply influenced by Hans Gerth, a sociology professor from Germany. Mills gained an insight into European learning and sociological theory from Gerth.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills and Gerth began their 13 year collaboration in 1940. Almost immediately, Gerth expressed his doubts about working collectively with Mills. He ended up being right, as they had critical tensions in their collaboration in relation to intellectual ethics. They both recruited advocates to support their sides, and they used ethical positions as a weapon. They still worked together though, and each had their own jobs within the collaboration. Mills worked out a division of labor and edited, organized and rewrote Gerth's drafts, while Gerth interpreted and translated the German material. Their first publication together was "A Marx for the Managers", which was a critique of "The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World" by James Burnham. Mills and Gerth took most of their position from German sources. They had their disagreements, but Mills and Gerth grew a partnership and became great collaborators who worked together for a long time to create new and useful work for the field of sociology.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: C. Wright Mills was strongly influenced by pragmatism, specifically the works of George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James. Although it is commonly recognized that Mills was influenced by Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen, the social structure aspects of Mills's works are shaped largely by Max Weber and the writing of Karl Mannheim, who followed Weber's work closely. Max Weber's works contributed greatly to Mills's view of the world overall. Being one of Weber's students, Mills's work focuses a great deal on rationalism. Mills also acknowledged a general influence of Marxism; he noted that Marxism had become an essential tool for sociologists, and therefore all must naturally be educated on the subject; any Marxist influence was then a result of sufficient education. Neo-Freudianism also helped shape Mills's work.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "I do not believe that social science will 'save the world', although I see nothing at all wrong with 'trying to save the world' ... If there "are" any ways out of the crises of our period by means of intellect, is it not up to the social scientist to state them? ... It is on the level of human awareness that virtually all solutions to great problems must now lie" – Mills 1959:193There has long been debate over Mills's intellectual outlook. Mills is often seen as a "closet Marxist" because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress, as well as his attempt to keep Marxist traditions alive in social theory. Just as often, however, others argue Mills more closely identified with the work of Max Weber, whom many sociologists interpret as an exemplar of sophisticated (and intellectually adequate) anti-Marxism and modern liberalism. However, Mills clearly gives precedence to social structure described by the political, economic and military institutions, and not culture, which is presented in its massified form as means to ends sought by the power elite. Therefore placing him firmly in the Marxist and not Weberian camp, so much that in his collection of classical essays, Weber's Protestant Ethic is not included. Although Mills embraced Weber's idea of bureaucracy as internalized social control, as was the historicity of his method, he was far from liberalism (being its critic). Mills was a radical who was culturally forced to distance himself from Marx while being "near" him.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: While Mills never embraced the "Marxist" label, he told his closest associates that he felt much closer to what he saw as the best currents of a flexible humanist Marxism than to alternatives. He considered himself a "plain Marxist", working in the spirit of young Marx as he claims in his collected essays: "Power, Politics and People" (Oxford University Press, 1963). In a November 1956 letter to his friends Bette and Harvey Swados, Mills declared "[i]n the meantime, let's not forget that there's more [that's] still useful in even the Sweezy kind of Marxism than in all the routineers of J. S. Mill put together."


title: C. Wright Mills

text: There is an important quotation from "Letters to Tovarich" (an autobiographical essay) dated Fall 1957 titled "On Who I Might Be and How I Got That Way":


title: C. Wright Mills

text: These two quotations are the ones chosen by Kathryn Mills for the better acknowledgement of his nuanced thinking.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: It appears that Mills understood his position as being much closer to Marx than to Weber but influenced by both, as Stanley Aronowitz argued in "A Mills Revival?".


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills argues that micro and macro levels of analysis can be linked together by the sociological imagination, which enables its possessor to understand the large historical sense in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. Individuals can only understand their own experiences fully if they locate themselves within their period of history. The key factor is the combination of private problems with public issues: the combination of troubles that occur within the individual's immediate milieu and relations with other people with matters that have to do with institutions of an historical society as a whole.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills shares with Marxist sociology and other "conflict theorists" the view that American society is sharply divided and systematically shaped by the relationship between the powerful and powerless. He also shares their concerns for alienation, the effects of social structure on the personality, and the manipulation of people by elites and the mass media. Mills combined such conventional Marxian concerns with careful attention to the dynamics of personal meaning and small-group motivations, topics for which Weberian scholars are more noted.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Mills had a very combative outlook regarding and towards many parts of his life, the people in it, and his works. In that way, he was a self-proclaimed outsider: "I am an outlander, not only regionally, but deep down and for good."


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Above all, Mills understood sociology, when properly approached, as an inherently political endeavor and a servant of the democratic process. In "The Sociological Imagination", Mills wrote:


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Contemporary American scholar Cornel West argued in his text "American Evasion of Philosophy" that Mills follows the tradition of pragmatism. Mills shared Dewey's goal of a "creative democracy" and emphasis on the importance of political practice but criticized Dewey for his inattention to the rigidity of power structure in the US. Mills's dissertation was titled "Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America", and West categorized him along with pragmatists in his time Sidney Hook and Reinhold Niebuhr as thinkers during pragmatism's "mid-century crisis."


title: C. Wright Mills

text: Seeing as though he was a sociologist himself, some may be surprised to learn that Mills was quite critical of the sociological approach during his time. In fact, scholars saw "The Sociological Imagination" as "Mills' final break with academic sociology." In this work, Mills was critical of specific people, such as Parsons and Paul Lazarsfeld, a member of his department at Columbia. While Mills did have frustrations with Parsons's theories and the Columbia department, his arguments in "The Sociological Imagination" are based in more than retaliatory remarks. While "The Sociological Imagination" was and is still sometimes read as "an attack on empirical research" when it is really "a critique of a certain research style." Mills was worried about sociology falling into the traps of normative thinking and ceasing to be a critic of social life. Throughout his academic career, Mills fought with mainstream sociology about different conflicting sociological styles. Mills was primarily worried about social sciences being susceptible to the "power and prestige of normative culture" and veering away from its original objective. It is difficult to say whether or not sociology moved in the direction that Mills feared. However, scholars do know that until his death, Mills fought to maintain what he thought was the integrity of sociology.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology" (1946) was edited and translated in collaboration with Gerth. Mills and Gerth had begun collaborating in 1940, selected a few of Weber's original German text, and translated them into English. The preface of the book begins by explaining the disputable difference of meaning that English words give to German writing. The authors attempt to explain their devotion to being as accurate as possible in translating Weber's writing.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders" (1948) studies the "Labor Metaphysic" and the dynamic of labor leaders cooperating with business officials. The book concludes that the labor movement had effectively renounced its traditional oppositional role and become reconciled to life within a capitalist system.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "The Puerto Rican Journey" (1950) was written in collaboration with Clarence Senior and Rose Kohn Goldsen. It documents a methodological study and does not address a theoretical sociological framework.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "" (1951) offers a rich historical account of the middle classes in the United States and contends that bureaucracies have overwhelmed middle-class workers, robbing them of all independent thought and turning them into near-automatons, oppressed but cheerful. Mills states there are three types of power within the workplace: coercion or physical force; authority; and manipulation. Through this piece, the thoughts of Mills and Weber seem to coincide in their belief that Western Society is trapped within the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality, which would lead society to focus more on rationality and less on reason. Mills's fear was that the middle class was becoming "politically emasculated and culturally stultified," which would allow a shift in power from the middle class to the strong social elite. Middle-class workers receive an adequate salary but have become alienated from the world because of their inability to affect or change it. Frank W. Elwell describes this work as "an elaboration and update on Weber's bureaucratization process, detailing the effects of the increasing division of labor on the tone and character of American social life."


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "Character and Social Structure" (1953) was co-authored with Gerth. This was considered his most theoretically sophisticated work. Mills later came into conflict with Gerth, though Gerth positively referred to him as, "an excellent operator, a whippersnapper, promising young man on the make, and Texas cowboy à la ride and shoot." Generally speaking, "Character and Social Structure" combines the social behaviorism and personality structure of pragmatism with the social structure of Weberian sociology. It is centered on roles, how they are interpersonal, and how they are related to institutions.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "The Power Elite" (1956) describes the relationships among the political, military, and economic elites, noting that they share a common world view; that power rests in the centralization of authority within the elites of American society. The centralization of authority is made up of the following components: a "military metaphysic", in other words a military definition of reality; "class identity", recognizing themselves as separate from and superior to the rest of society; "interchangeability" (they move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking positions of power therein); cooperation/socialization, in other words, socialization of prospective new members is done based on how well they "clone" themselves socially after already established elites. Mills's view on the power elite is that they represent their own interest, which include maintaining a "permanent war economy" to control the ebbs and flow of American Capitalism and the masking of "a manipulative social and political order through the mass media." Additionally, this work can be described as "an exploration of rational-legal bureaucratic authority and its effects on the wielders and subjects of this power." President Dwight D. Eisenhower referenced Mills and this book in his farewell address of 1961. He warned about the dangers of a "military-industrial complex" as he had slowed the push for increased military defense in his time as president for two terms. This idea of a "military-industrial complex" is a reference to Mills' writing in "The Power Elite," showing what influence this book had on certain powerful figures.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "The Causes of World War Three" (1958) and "Listen, Yankee" (1960) were important works that followed. In both, Mills attempts to create a moral voice for society and make the power elite responsible to the "public". Although "Listen, Yankee" was considered highly controversial, it was an exploration of the Cuban Revolution written from the viewpoint of a Cuban revolutionary and was a very innovative style of writing for that period in American history. In his paper on Mills's work, Elwell describes "The Causes of World War Three" as a jermiad on Weber's ideas. More specifically on his view of "crackpot realism" (" the disjunction between institutional rationality and human reason").


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "The Sociological Imagination" (1959), which is considered Mills's most influential book, describes a mindset for studying sociology, the sociological imagination, that stresses being able to connect individual experiences and societal relationships. Three components form the sociological imagination are history, biography, and social structure. Mills asserts that a critical task for social scientists is to "translate personal troubles into public issues". The distinction between troubles and issues is that troubles relate to how a single person feels about something while issues refer to how a society affects groups of people. For instance, a man who cannot find employment is experiencing a trouble, while a city with a massive unemployment rate makes it not just a personal trouble but a public issue. This book helped the "penetration of a field by a new generation of social scientists dedicated to problems of social change rather than system maintenance". Mills bridged the gap between truth and purpose in sociology. Another important part of this book is the interpersonal relations Mills talks about, specifically marriage and divorce. Mills rejects all external class attempts at change because he sees them as a contradiction to the sociological imagination. Mills had a lot of sociologists talk about his book, and the feedback was varied. Mills' writing can be seen as a critique of some of his colleagues, which resulted in the boom generating a large debate. His critique of the sociological profession is one that was monumental in the field of sociology and that got lots of attention as his most famous work. One can interpret Mills's claim in "The Sociological Imagination" as the difficulty humans have in balancing biography and history, personal challenges and societal issues. Sociologists, then, rightly connect their autobiographical, personal challenges to social institutions. Social scientists should then connect those institutions to social structures and locate them within a historical narrative.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: The version of "Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking" (1960) worked on by C. Wright Mills is simply an edited copy with the addition of an introduction written himself. Through this work, Mills explains that he believes the use of models is "the" characteristic of classical sociologists, and that these models are the reason classical sociologists maintain relevance.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: "The Marxists" (1962) takes Mills's explanation of sociological models from "Images of Man" and uses it to criticize modern liberalism and Marxism. He believes that the liberalist model does not work and cannot create an overarching view of society, but rather it is more of an ideology for the entrepreneurial middle class. Marxism, however, may be incorrect in its overall view, but it has a working model for societal structure, the mechanics of the history of society, and the roles of individuals. One of Mills's problems with the Marxist model is that it uses units that are small and autonomous, which he finds too simple to explain capitalism. Mills then provides discussion on Marx as a determinist.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: According to Stephen Scanlan and Liz Grauerholz, writing in 2009, Mills's thinking on the intersection of biography and history continued to influence scholars and their work, and also impacted the way they interacted with and taught their students. The "International Sociological Association recognized "The Sociological Imagination" as second on its list of the 'Books of the Century'".


title: C. Wright Mills

text: At his memorial service, Hans Gerth (Mills's coauthor and coeditor) referred to Mills as his "alter ego", despite the many disagreements they had. Interestingly, many of Mills's close friends "reminisced about their earlier friendship and later estrangement when Mills mocked them for supporting the status quo and their conservative universities." In addition to the impact Mills left on those in his life, his legacy can also be seen through the prominence of his work after his passing. William Form describes a 2005 survey of the eleven best selling texts and in these Mills was referenced 69 times, far more than any other prominent author. Frank W. Elwell, in his paper "The Sociology of C. Wright Mills" further explains the legacy Mills left as he "writes about issues and problems that matter to people, not just to other sociologists, and he writes about them in a way to further our understanding." His work is not just useful to students of sociology, but the general population as well. Mills tackled relevant topics such as the growth of white collar jobs, the role of bureaucratic power, as well as the Cold War and the spread of communism.


title: C. Wright Mills

text: In 1964, the Society for the Study of Social Problems established the C. Wright Mills Award for the book that "best exemplifies outstanding social science research and a great mutual understanding of the individual and society in the tradition of the distinguished sociologist, C. Wright Mills."


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: Vadim Nikolaevich Krasnoselsky (; ; born 14 April 1970) is a Transnistrian politician who is the 3rd and current President of Transnistria. Previously, he served as a member of the Supreme Council of Transnistria from the 7th district, as 6th Speaker of the Supreme Council (2015–2016) and the 7th Minister of the Interior.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: On April 14, 1970, Vadim Krasnoselsky was born to parents Nikolai Vasilyevich Krasnoselsky (1939-2016) and Antonina Grigorievna Krasnoselskaya (born 1945) in the village of Dauriya, in the Borzinsky district (now the Zabaykalsky District) of the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union. This area is located in the Russian Far East.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: Krasnoselsky came from a military family. In 1978 his father was transferred to a military base in Bender in the Moldavian SSR. He attended High School No. 102 (now Gymnasium No. 1) in Bender, and is said to have sat at the same desk of his future wife Svetlana. As a child, Krasnoselsky is reported to have attended a music school, and took part in rowing and other sporting competitions, fulfilling the standards for the title of “Candidate for Master of Sports of the USSR”.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: After leaving school in 1987 Krasnoselsky started studying in Odessa, but left during his first year to join a Military Aviation Engineer Higher School in Kharkiv, from which he graduated in 1993. However, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to an independent Ukraine. He subsequently joined the Transnistrian security forces, later becoming a high-ranking official in the Ministry of the Interior.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: From 1998 to 2000, Krasnoselsky was the Deputy Head of the anti-corruption department of the Bendery police force, and from 2000 to 2003, he was Deputy Head of the anti-corruption department in the central office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the PMR.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: Vadim Krasnoselsky took his degree in law at the Pridnestrovian State University, graduating from the Faculty of Law in 2002. He worked for the Bender police for several years, rising through the ranks before becoming the chief of police in that city.From September 10, 2003, he was the head of the Bendery GOVD (later the Bendery Department of Internal Affairs).


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: In 2007, Krasnoselsky became Minister of the Interior, serving until 2012 when he started working in business, as an adviser to the Board of Directors of SZAO Interdnestrcom, where he worked for 3 years until 2015. He was elected to the Supreme Council in the 2015 elections, and was appointed as the body's Speaker.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: Supported by the Sheriff conglomerate, he defeated incumbent President Yevgeny Shevchuk in the 2016 presidential elections, receiving 62% of the vote. He was inaugurated on 27 December at the Nadezhda Aronetskaya State Drama Theatre. On 4 January 2017, he received newly elected Moldovan President Igor Dodon in Bender, who was the second Moldovan leader to visit the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR) in several years. In September 2018, his first major state visit outside of the PMR was to Sukhumi for Abkhazia's Independence Day celebration. In January 2019, he attended the opening of the PMR representative offices in Moscow, replacing the Cooperation Center "Pridnestrovie". On 29 May, he announced the creation of an international lawsuit against Moldova in which the PMR asks for compensation for "the aggression against the people of Transnistria". In August, he attended a ceremony at the base of the Operational Group of Russian Forces with Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu dedicated the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of Moldova in the Second Jassy–Kishinev Offensive. In late October, he met with President Dodon at his presidential residence in Holercani ahead of the Bavaria Conference, scheduled for 4–5 November.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: During his presidency, he revived the traditional New Year balls, in which he takes part with his spouse. In September 2017, he ordered the creation of the Tiraspol Suvorov Military School, the youth cadet school of the Armed Forces of Transnistria.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: Krasnoselsky has proposed raising statues of notable Imperial Russian leaders such as Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov and Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: He has stated that he is a constitutional monarchist, going as far as to say the following during a presidential campaign:


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: As Transnistria's Minister of the Interior in 2007, Krasnoselsky was involved in a controversial decision to remove headstones and other memorials to Romanian soldiers in a military cemetery and rededicate the cemetery solely to Soviet soldiers, although remains were not exhumed. The incident sparked controversy within Romania and Germany. Krasnoselsky also made several controversial statements regarding the Romanian soldiers.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: In March 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Moldova gave 1,810 vaccines which were donated by Romania to Transnistria. Krasnoselsky incorrectly stated they came from the World Health Organization (WHO). He later corrected himself and thanked Romania.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: He was reelected in the 2021 Transnistrian presidential election. Only Russian observers from the State Duma, were allowed to monitor the vote, posing questions about its legitimacy.


title: Vadim Krasnoselsky

text: His wife, Svetlana Krasnoselskaya, is a philologist and Russian language teacher. He has one son, Ivan, and two daughters, Genevieve and Sofia.


title: Kim Tok-hun

text: Kim Tok-hun (, born 1961) is a North Korean politician serving as the Premier of North Korea since August 2020. He is also a full member on the Presidium of the Politburo of the Workers' Party of Korea and served as the chief of the parliamentary budget committee. He was formerly the delegate for North-South cooperation before being appointed a Vice Premier by the Supreme People's Assembly.


title: Kim Tok-hun

text: Kim Tok-hun has been a member of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea since the 7th Congress in May 2016. He later joined the party Politburo on 11 April 2019 as an alternate member, then he was promoted to full member on 31 December, and concurrently as a party vice-chairman, with a portfolio that included heading the Cadre Affairs Department. He possibly earned Kim Jong-un's approval uncovering a corruption scandal involving cadre training facilities in February of the next year. In April 2020 he was also elected chairman of the Budget Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly.


title: Kim Tok-hun

text: On 13 August 2020, in the wake of COVID-19 spillover in North Korea and floods hitting the southern part of the country, he was appointed premier of the cabinet by Kim Jong-un, and elevated to the top-level Politburo Presidium. He has recently been the second-highest ranking official in North Korea after Kim Jong-un.


title: The House of Mirth

text: The House of Mirth is a 1905 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City's high society around the end of the 19th century. Wharton creates a portrait of a stunning beauty who, though raised and educated to marry well both socially and economically, is reaching her 29th year, an age when her youthful blush is drawing to a close and her marital prospects are becoming ever more limited. "The House of Mirth" traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a tragically lonely existence on the margins of society. In the words of one scholar, Wharton uses Lily as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class."


title: The House of Mirth

text: Before publication as a book on October 14, 1905, "The House of Mirth" was serialized in "Scribner's Magazine" beginning in January 1905. It attracted a readership among women and men alike. Charles Scribner wrote Wharton in November 1905 that the novel was showing "the most rapid sale of any book ever published by Scribner." By the end of December, sales had reached 140,000 copies. Wharton's royalties were valued at more than half a million dollars in today's currency. The commercial and critical success of "The House of Mirth" solidified Wharton's reputation as a major novelist.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Because of the novel's commercial success, some critics classified it as a genre novel. However, Wharton's pastor, then rector of Trinity Church in Manhattan, wrote to tell her that her novel was "a terrible but just arraignment of the social misconduct which begins in folly and ends in moral and spiritual death." This moral purpose was not lost on the literary reviewers and critics of the time, who tended to categorize it as both social satire and a novel of manners. When describing it in her introduction to "Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: A Case Book", Carol Singley states that the novel "is a unique blend of romance, realism, and naturalism, [and thus] transcends the narrow classification of a novel of manners."


title: The House of Mirth

text: "The House of Mirth" was Wharton's second published novel, preceded by two novellas, "The Touchstone" (1900) and "Sanctuary" (1903), and a novel, "The Valley of Decision" (1902).


title: The House of Mirth

text: "A Moment's Ornament" appears in the first stanza of William Wordsworth's (1770–1850) poem, "She was a Phantom of Delight" (1804) that describes an ideal of feminine beauty:


title: The House of Mirth

text: "A moment's ornament" represents the way Wharton describes Lily's relationship to her reference group as a beautiful and well-bred socialite. Her value lasts only as long as her beauty and good-standing with the group is maintained. By centering the story around a portrait of Lily, Wharton was able to address directly the social limitations imposed upon her. These included the mores of the upper crust social class to which Lily belonged by birth, education, and breeding.


title: The House of Mirth

text: The final title Wharton chose for the novel was "The House of Mirth" (1905), taken from the Old Testament:


title: The House of Mirth

text: "The House of Mirth" spotlights social context as equally important to the development of the story's purpose, as the heroine. "Mirth" contrasted with "mourning" also bespeaks a moral purpose as it underscores the frivolity of a social set that not only worships money, but also uses it ostentatiously solely for its own amusement and aggrandizement. At the time the novel takes place, Old New York high society was peopled by the extraordinarily wealthy who were conditioned by the economic and social changes the Gilded Age (1870–1900) wrought. Wharton's birth around the time of the Civil War predates that period by a little less than a decade. As a member of the privileged Old New York society, she was eminently qualified to describe it authentically. She also had license to criticize the ways New York high society of the 1890s had changed without being vulnerable to accusations of envy motivated by coming from a lower social caste. She accused her peers of having lost the sense of "noblesse oblige" of their forebears.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Wharton revealed in her introduction to the 1936 reprint of "The House of Mirth" her choice of subject and her major theme:


title: The House of Mirth

text: Wharton figured that no one had written about New York society because it offered nothing worth writing about. But that did not deter her as she thought something of value could be mined there. If only the writer could dig deeply enough below the surface, some "'stuff o' the conscience'" could be found. She went on to declare unabashedly that:


title: The House of Mirth

text: The central theme of "The House of Mirth" is essentially the struggle between who we are and what society tells us we should be. Thus, it is considered by many to be as relevant today as it was in 1905. If its sole subject had been the excesses and lives of the rich and famous, by themselves, it is doubtful it would have remained popular for as long as it has. "The House of Mirth" continues to attract readers over a century after its first publication, possibly due to its timeless theme. That the life and death of Lily Bart matters to modern readers suggests that Wharton succeeded in her purpose: to critique "a society so relentlessly materialistic and self-serving that it casually destroys what is most beautiful and blameless within it."


title: The House of Mirth

text: Lily Bart, a beautiful but impoverished socialite, is on her way to a house party at Bellomont, the country home of her best friend, Judy Trenor. Her pressing task is to find a husband with the requisite wealth and status to maintain her place in New York society. Additional challenges to her success are her advancing age—at twenty-nine, she has been on the "marriage market" for more than ten years—her penchant for gambling at bridge that has left her with debts beyond her means to pay, and her efforts as part of upper-crust society to keep up appearances with her wealthy friends. Lily's choices are further complicated by her innermost desire to marry for love as well as money and status, and her longing to be free of the claustrophobic constrictions and routines of upper-crust society.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Judy has arranged for her to spend more time in the company of Percy Gryce, a potential suitor who is wealthy but whom Lily finds boring. Lily grew up surrounded by elegance and luxury—an atmosphere she believes she cannot live without, as she has learned to abhor "dinginess." The loss of her father's wealth and the death of her parents left her an orphan at twenty. Lacking an inheritance or a caring protector, she adapts to life as a ward of her strait-laced aunt Julia Peniston from whom she receives an erratic allowance, a fashionable address, and good food, but little direction or parenting. Lily is not fond of her aunt Julia and avoids her whenever possible while simultaneously relying on her for both necessities and luxuries.


title: The House of Mirth

text: In the opening sentence of the "House of Mirth" Edith Wharton places Lily in "Grand Central Station" where Lawrence Selden, a friend and possible love interest, is taken by surprise to see her. Threats to Lily's reputation exist because of her tendency to push the limits of polite and acceptable behavior. On the way to visit Bellomont, she impulsively accompanies Selden during her two-hour wait for the change of trains to his Manhattan flat in the Benedick Building. On leaving the building, she encounters Mr. Rosedale, a Jewish businessman known to her set and the owner of the building. Attempting to cover the appearance of an indiscretion, she worsens the situation by telling Rosedale she had been consulting her dress-maker. This obvious lie is the first of a series of faux pas Lily gets caught up in. As


title: The House of Mirth

text: she makes an effort to explain away the social chances she takes, she becomes easy prey for her enemies to misrepresent her intention and behavior.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Near the week's end, the tall, handsome and engaging Selden unexpectedly shows up at Bellomont. Having already failed to meet Percy for morning church services, and fully aware that Lawrence has just ended an illicit relationship with the married but vindictive Bertha Dorset, Lily chooses to go for a long walk with Lawrence and to spend the afternoon with him instead of with Percy or the rest of the party. Even though Lily has already made it clear to Selden during their "tête-à-tête" in his flat that she looked at him as that friend who won't be afraid to say disagreeable things to her, she becomes drawn to him romantically. Succumbing to her agreeable femininity, Selden is in love with Lily. He feels foolish in nurturing an emotional attachment to her because she clearly states that she cannot and will not marry a man of his modest means. Fresh out of his four-year affair with Bertha Dorset, Lawrence begins to slide into another emotional attachment with the equally unavailable Lily.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Lily's week at Bellomont ends up in a series of failures beginning with losing a large sum at bridge. She fails to become engaged to Percy Gryce despite his initial interest in her. Although she has presented herself as a conservative, innocent person so as to snare a conservative husband, her actions with Selden reveal her pretense. She exaggerates the extent of her relationship with Percy until everyone at Bellomont thinks an engagement between them is imminent. Bertha still has feelings for Lawrence notwithstanding her recent breakup with him. As she notices Selden's fondness for Lily, she decides to sabotage Lily's budding romance with Percy by filling him in on the most salacious and scandalous rumors about Lily's card-playing and past romantic life. This effectively frightens Percy away. Lily manages to cast the blame on Judy for having been the one to set the match up.


title: The House of Mirth

text: On her last day at Bellomont, Lily creates threats to her social standing. Gus Trenor, a very skilled stockbroker, is married to Lily's best friend Judy. Judy is not particularly jealous of Gus's occasional conversations or flirtations with other women, unless he becomes so emotionally attached to them as to spend money on them or to give them money, which Judy rightly recognizes as a sign that the relationship has become a threat to their marriage. Lily is fully aware of Judy's jealousy on the money issue, and she is aware that Judy does not approve when other women, such as the financially embarrassed Carry Fisher, persuade Gus to speculate on their behalf in the stock market. Yet Lily persuades Gus to do just that. Lacking the financial knowledge to understand the difference between a legitimate loan or speculation, Lily flirts with Gus and allows him to hold her hand and lean against her. She convinces herself that Gus is making investments on her behalf and accepts several large checks from him. On several occasions, however, Gus makes it clear that he expects romantic attention from Lily in exchange for his financial expertise. Instead of discussing the issue openly, Lily begins to play cat and mouse with him. To avoid being with him in private, she appears in public with him at the opera and for late afternoon walks in Central Park with him. This attracts other people's attention.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Gradually, Lily begins to suffer the consequences of her indiscreet behavior. Percy, having been scared away by Lily's behavior and Bertha Dorset's malicious gossip, proposes to a young woman named Evie Van Osburgh, who is much better suited to him than Lily and who was introduced to him by Bertha Dorset herself. Mrs. Dorset's public pride in her match-making victory results in social ridicule for Lily from the people whom she directly and indirectly misled into thinking she and Percy were all but engaged. Finally, in retribution for a social snub, Lily's cousin Grace Stepney informs their aunt Julia about rumors that Lily has gambling debts which she may be trying to cover through an inappropriate relationship with Gus Trenor. This sows seeds of doubt and discomfort in Aunt Julia who, though shocked, does not discuss the situation with her niece so as to avoid a scene. Furthermore, Lily has destroyed her relationship with Gus and Judy Trenor. Judy's attitude toward Lily has cooled, partly due to Lily's financial relationship with Gus and partly because Lily now avoids Bellomont because she does not wish to hold up her end on what everybody else believes to be a pay-for-play relationship.


title: The House of Mirth

text: To avoid having to spend time alone with her aunt, the Trenors, Simon Rosedale, or anyone else she considers a possible source of embarrassment or boredom, Lily begins to accept invitations from people with whom she would not ordinarily socialize. These include the Wellington Brys, who are newcomers to the New York social scene, and whose social rise is being engineered by Carry Fisher. Carry, who earns money by acting as a social secretary to usher newly wealthy people into fashionable society, invites Lily to social events hosted by Louisa Bry. Lily also attends the opera with Carry, Simon Rosedale, and Gus Trenor. In the eyes of high society, Lily cheapens herself by voluntarily associating with her social inferiors. She returns briefly to Bellomont only to find that she is now being teased by her social peers for socializing with the upstart Brys and with Simon Rosedale.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Lily is not entirely without resources for social rehabilitation or at least blackmail. One of her aunt's temporary servants, who is also the charwoman at Selden's apartment, sells Lily a package of torn love letters. These were written by Bertha Dorset, and they represent an opportunity for Lily to blackmail her enemy. But instead of blackmailing Bertha into a positive relationship, Lily tries to neutralize the gossip by making herself useful to Bertha. Bertha, who has a new love interest in the form of a young man named Ned Silverton, relies on Lily to distract her husband George Dorset.


title: The House of Mirth

text: The extent to which Lily's reputation is damaged becomes obvious when Lily publicly appears in a way that comes across as advertising her availability for an illicit relationship. Following Mrs. Fisher's advice, the Wellington Brys throw a large "general entertainment" featuring a series of "tableaux vivants" portrayed by a dozen fashionable women in their set, including Miss Bart.


title: The House of Mirth

text: The "pièce de résistance" of this highly successful event turned out to be the portrayal of Mrs. Lloyd in Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous 18th-century painting (1775–1776). The portrait shows an attractive woman suggestively clad. As the curtain opens on this last scene, the gasp of approval heard from the audience was not so much for Reynolds’ brilliant interpretation of Mrs. Lloyd as it was for the loveliness of Lily Bart herself—marking the pinnacle of her social success but also the annihilation of whatever reputation is left to her. For better or for worse, she has transitioned from a marriageable "girl" to a not-quite-reputable woman similar to Carry Fisher. Yet she does not do as Carry Fisher does, and accept the loss of her respectability as the price she must pay to maintain a position in society.


title: The House of Mirth

text: As Selden observes her in this elegantly simple "tableau", he sees the real Lily Bart as if for the first time and feels the desire to be with her. He finds her alone in the ballroom toward the end of the musical interlude, as the collective praise from her admirers is subsiding. He leads her to a garden where he tells her he loves her and they kiss. Lily sighs, " 'Ah, love me, love me—but don't tell me so!' " and takes her leave. As Selden gathers his coat to leave, he is disturbed by Ned Van Alstyne's remarks, ". . . .Gad, what a show of good-looking women; but not one of 'em could touch that little cousin of mine. . . . I never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has."


title: The House of Mirth

text: The next day, Lily receives two notes—one from Judy Trenor inviting her to dine that evening at her town house and the other from Selden—asking to meet with her the following day. Though she had a dinner engagement, she agreed to a visit with Judy at ten o'clock. However, her late-evening encounter turns out to be with Gus alone. Gus vehemently demands the kind of attention he thought he had paid for. Pleading "naïveté" about business matters and appealing to their friendship, she promises to pay back the almost $10,000 she owes him. With heightened anger and resentment, he accuses Lily of playing with him while entertaining other men. Lily gets him to back off and flees, getting into a hansom cab. Shaken and feeling very much alone, she is unaware that she has been seen by both Ned Van Alstyne and Lawrence Selden, both of whom were aware that Judy was out of town and that the Trenor house in New York is occupied by Gus alone. The unspoken conclusion, shared between the two men, is that the rumors of Lily's romantic involvement with Gus Trenor have a solid basis in fact. Ned, as a relative of the family, asks Lawrence to not tell anybody what they saw. But the damage is done. Lily calls on her friend Gerty Farish for succor and shelter for the rest of the night, and returns to her aunt in the morning.


title: The House of Mirth

text: The following day Lily pleads with her aunt to help her with her debts and confesses that she has lost money gambling at bridge even on Sundays. Aunt Julia refuses to help her, except to cover the $1,000 to $2,000 bill for clothes and accessories. Feeling trapped and disgraced, she turns to thoughts of Selden as her savior and has a change of heart towards him as she looks forward to his visit at four o'clock.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Instead, her visitor turns out to be Simon Rosedale who, so smitten by her appearance in the "tableau vivant," proposes a marriage that would be mutually beneficial. Considering what Rosedale knows about her, she skillfully pleads for time to consider his offer Selden does not appear for his 4:00 appointment nor does he send word in explanation. Instead he has departed for Havana and then on to Europe on business. This comes as a shock to Lily.


title: The House of Mirth

text: To escape the rumors arising from the gossip caused by her financial dealings with Gus Trenor, and also disappointed by what she interprets as Selden's emotional withdrawal, Lily accepts Bertha Dorset's spur-of-the- moment invitation to join her and George on a Mediterranean cruise aboard their yacht, the "Sabrina." Bertha intends for Lily to keep George distracted while Bertha carries on an affair with young Ned Silverton. Lily's decision to join the Dorsets on this cruise proves to be her social undoing.


title: The House of Mirth

text: In order to divert the attention and suspicion of their social circle away from her, Bertha insinuates that Lily is carrying on a romantic and sexual liaison with George by commanding that she not return to the yacht in front of their friends at the close of a dinner the Brys held for the Duchess in Monte Carlo. Selden helps by arranging a night's lodging with her cousin Jack Stepney, under the promise that she leave promptly in the morning. The ensuing social scandal ruins Lily's reputation and almost immediately causes her friends to abandon her and Aunt Julia to disinherit her.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Undeterred by such misfortunes, Lily fights to regain her place in high society by befriending Mr. and Mrs. Gormer and becoming their social secretary, so as to introduce the Gormers to high society and groom them to take a better social position. However, her enemy, the malicious Bertha Dorset, gradually communicates to them the "scandalous" personal background of Lily Bart, and thus undermines the friendship which Lily had hoped would socially rehabilitate her. Only two friends remain for Lily: Gerty Farish (a cousin of Lawrence Selden) and Carry Fisher, who help her cope with the social ignominy of a degraded social status while continually advising Lily to marry as soon as reasonably possible.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Despite the efforts and advice of Gerty and Carry to help her overcome notoriety, Lily descends through the social strata of New York City's high society. She obtains a job as personal secretary of Mrs. Hatch, a disreputable woman who very nearly succeeds in marrying a wealthy young man in Lily's former social circle. It is during this occupation she is introduced to the use of chloral hydrate, sold in drugstores, as a remedy for malaise. She resigns her position after Lawrence Selden returns to warn her of the danger, but not in time to avoid being blamed for the crisis. Lily then finds a job in a milliner's shop; yet, unaccustomed to the rigors of working class manual labor, her rate of production is low and the quality of her workmanship is poor, exacerbated by her increased use of the drug. She is fired at the end of the New York social season, when the demand for fashionable hats has diminished.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Meanwhile, Simon Rosedale, the Jewish suitor who previously had proposed marriage to Lily when she was higher on the social scale, reappears in her life and tries to rescue her, but Lily is unwilling to meet his terms. Simon wants Lily to use the love letters that she bought from Selden's servant to expose the love affair between Lawrence Selden and Bertha Dorset. For the sake of Selden's reputation, Lily does not act upon Rosedale's request and secretly burns the love letters when she visits Selden one last time.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Lily is stopped on the street by Nettie Struther, who Lily once helped get to a hospital. Nettie is now married and has a baby girl, and she invites Lily to her apartment to meet and feed the baby with her. Lily goes to Nettie's and they play with the baby.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Eventually, Lily Bart receives a ten-thousand-dollar inheritance from her Aunt Peniston, which she arranges to use to repay Gus Trenor. Distraught by her misfortunes, Lily has by this time begun regularly using a sleeping draught of chloral hydrate to escape the pain of poverty and social ostracism. Once she has repaid all her debts, Lily takes an overdose of the sleeping draught and dies; perhaps it is suicide, perhaps an accident. As she is dying, she hallucinates cradling Nettie's baby in her arms. That very morning, Lawrence Selden arrives to her quarters, to finally propose marriage, but finds Lily Bart dead. Among her belongings are receipts for her payments toward the debt she owed to Gus Trenor, proving that her financial dealings with Trenor were honorable and not evidence of an improper relationship. His realization allows him to feel sympathy and closeness for her, and he is clearly distraught at her death.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Lily Bart—Wharton paints Lily, the heroine of her novel, as a complex personality with the purity that her Christian name implies, the defiance that her surname implies, and the foolishness that the title of the novel implies. The combination of the social pressures and conventions of her reference group and her refusal to "settle" numerous times to save herself portend a fateful destiny where she becomes complicit in her own destruction. Wharton depicts Lily as having an aesthetic purpose in life—a fine specimen to be looked at and admired. Her extraordinary beauty should have served her well to find a wealthy husband with the requisite social status that would have secured her place in upper-class New York society. However, her inner longing to become free of her society's social conventions, her sense of what is right, and her desire for love as well as money and status have thwarted her success in spite of a number of eligible admirers over the ten years she has been on the marriage market. Challenges to her success are her advancing age—she is 29 as the novel begins—the loss of her father's wealth, and the death of her parents which has left her orphaned without a caring protector, her constant efforts to "keep up with the Joneses"(4), the very modest but erratic "allowance" from her strait-laced Aunt Julia, and her gambling debts which make her the subject of vile gossip. To protect Lawrence Selden's reputation, she refuses to use damning evidence against her nemesis, Bertha Dorset, which would have recouped her ruined social standing. This leads to a tragic yet heroic ending.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Lawrence Selden—A young lawyer who, although not wealthy himself, is able to move easily within and without Old New York's elite social circles through kinship with old-line New York families. He has known Lily since her "coming out" eleven years earlier. For all this time he has been in the background of her life. He views the comings and goings of New York's high society with the detachment and the objectivity of an outsider —a characteristic that Lily not only admires but also that allows her to view those people in her surroundings in an objective, critical and a not-so-flattering way. She becomes fascinated and envies his independence from the "tribe" and the freedom that has given him. Her encounters with Selden underscore the conflict between her inner voice —her self-hood at its core— and the outer voices of her reference group. It is from Selden's description, assessment and admiration of Lily's outward characteristics that we glean those attributes that contribute to New York high society's perception and misperceptions of who she is. He can be brutally honest about Lily's superficiality and artificiality and simultaneously appreciate the sparks of freedom and spontaneity that temper these negatives. These mutual admirable qualities give way to their romantic regard for one another. He is not, however, free from the social pressure of rumor. Though he has shown Lily consistent friendship, he abandons her when she becomes the victim of appearances that put her virtue, as an unmarried woman, in question.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Simon Rosedale—A successful and socially astute Jewish businessman—the quintessential "parvenu"—who has the money but not the social standing to be accepted into the circle of New York's leisure class. Building his fortune in real estate, Rosedale makes his first appearance in the story when he observes Lily leaving his apartment building after what appears to be a tryst with one of his tenants. Rosedale is interested in Lily because not only is she beautiful, but what is more important, she is also a social asset in gaining him a place in high society. She reflects that she has put herself in his power by her clumsy dress-maker fib and her refusal to allow him to take her to the station which would have given him the prestige of being seen by members of the society with whom he was aspiring to gain acceptance. As his social ascendency continues, he offers Lily marriage which would provide her a way out of her financial dilemma and her precarious social standing; she puts him off. His cleverness and business acumen serve him well to achieve a higher and higher rung on the social ladder. Lily, however, is on her way down to the point that Rosedale is no longer interested in marrying her. Despite the differences in their social standing , Rosedale by the end of the story shows compassion for Lily. He offers her a loan when he runs into her after she has lost her hat-making job—an offer she refuses.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Percy Gryce—A conservative, rich, but shy and unimaginative young eligible bachelor on whom Lily, with the support of her friend Judy Trenor, sets her sights. Percy's less than titillating personality notwithstanding, Lily works out a strategy to catch him at week-long festivities at Bellomont. Her fortuitous and successful encounter with Percy on the train to Bellomont further encourages her in pursuit of her goal. Her strategy gets interrupted, however, when Selden at week's end also appears on the scene unexpectedly. Lily then decides, on the spur of the moment, to set aside her well-thought-out tactics to pursue Percy in favor of spending some time with Selden. When, at a more rational moment, she returns to pursuing Percy, his mother-in law-to-be tells Lily at Jack Stepny's and Gwen Van Osburgh's wedding about his engagement to Evie Van Osburgh.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Bertha Dorset (Mrs. George Dorset)—A petite and pretty high-society matron whose husband George is extremely wealthy. She is first introduced catching the train to Bellomont where she boards with great fanfare and commotion. She demands that the porter find her a seat with her friends, Lily and Percy. Once at Bellomont Judy Trenor intimates to Lilly that Bertha is manipulative and also unscrupulous such that it is better to have her as a friend rather than an enemy. It is well known that Bertha is bored with her husband and seeks attention and love outside the confines of marriage. At Bellomont Bertha continues to pursue Selden in an attempt to rekindle the flame of an adulterous affair they have been carrying on but with which he has become disenamored. As Book I ends, she invites Lily to accompany her on a Mediterranean cruise to distract her husband so she can carry on an affair with Ned Silverton. Bertha understands, as a married woman, she must keep up appearances and ruthlessly impugns Lily's reputation to mask her own adultery. She spreads false rumors that besmirch Lily's virtue among their friends. Lily, as an unmarried woman without a protector, has little she can do in her own defense.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Mrs. Peniston (Julia)—Lily's wealthy, widowed Aunt –sister to Lily's father. Mrs. Peniston embodies "old school" morality and has a family pedigree that goes back to the industrious and successful Dutch families of early New York. Although she maintains an opulent residence on fashionable Fifth Avenue, she does not follow fashion or renovate constantly to maintain a chic appearance. In Lily's eyes, the Peniston home is therefore dingy. Mrs. Peniston's "Old New York" lifestyle requires keeping her drawing room neat, eating well and dressing expensively. She harbors a passive attitude and does not actively engage in life. Although she spends time in the country during the first part of the book, by the last half of the book she is a shut-in with significant heart problems. When Lily arrived in New York in financial distress after the death of her mother, Mrs. Peniston took pleasure in the public display of her generosity by agreeing to take Lily on for a year after her mother died—much to the relief of the extended family. She found, to her surprise, that she liked the volatile Lily. She therefore continued to support Lily for over a decade during Lily's fruitless search for a wealthy, socially connected husband. She indulges and passively enables Lily's habit of gallivanting with her fashionable friends, and ignores the way Lily avoids and abandons her. Although Lily is clearly Julia's favorite, displacing her previous favorite Grace Stepney, Julia never makes any verbal or written promise to provide for Lily in the long term. Although Lily and her friends believe that is "understood" that she will inherit most if not all of Julia's fortune, Julia herself never made such a statement. Indeed, her forbearance is stretched to the limit when rumors reach her that Lily gambles for money and is encouraging attention from married men who compensate her for it. As upset as Julia is by evidence of Lily's immoral behavior, she does not immediately ask Lily for details because it is easier to discredit the messenger. When Lily comes to Julia asking for money to pay various debts, including what Lily passes off as gambling debts, Julia refuses. The relationship is permanently damaged, and when Lily sails away with the Dorsets instead of cleaning up the social and financial mess she has made, Julia does not write to Lily or attempt to repair the relationship. When word reaches her that Lily has been publicly accused of having an affair with George Dorset, and when Lily continues to gallivant in Europe instead of returning home, Julia disinherits Lily in favor of the more loyal Grace Stepney. By the time Lily returns to New York, Julia has died, and nobody knows about the disinheritance until her will is read.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Judy Trenor (Mrs. Gus Trenor)—Lily's best friend and confidante— is the stereotypical high-society matron, married to Gus Trenor, a successful business man. She frequently hosts large parties and social events at their country home, Bellomont. By engaging in gossip Mrs. Trenor keeps up on the social scene. She acts as matchmaker between Lily and Percy Gryce. She uses Lily as her surrogate private secretary and spends much of her day making sure that every detail of her events is done to perfection. This includes poring over lists to decide which guests are the most desirable to invite, which have been "stolen" by another conflicting event, and which unmarried men and women should be set up together. She invites Selden to Bellomont on anonymous advice to keep Mrs. George Dorset entertained. Judy suffers from frequent headaches and avoids noisy environments such as the opera. She must sometimes cancel minor engagements on short notice, and prefers to stay at Bellomont when her head hurts.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Gus Trenor—Judy Trenor's husband—a massive man with a heavy carnivorous head and a very red complexion. He is a successful stock market speculator and an advocate of Simon Rosedale's acceptance in high society circles although he considers him a bounder. He is also a notorious flirt and looks for attention in relationships with women outside of his marriage. Gus becomes enamored with Lily, a frequent guest at his wife's weekend social events. He uses his financial investment skills and a large sum of his own money in a risky investment for Lily which she agrees to. The proceeds from this speculation will help her pay her gambling debts and other expenses necessary to keep up appearances. The investment pays off for Lily financially, as Gus intends that it should, but the friendship turns sour when Lily is unwilling to exchange romantic attention for money the way Gus believes she tacitly agrees to do.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Carry Fisher (Mrs. Fisher)—A small, fiery and dramatic divorcée. She is perceived as carrying "a general air of embodying a 'spicy paragraph';"(70) and according to Mrs. Trenor, ". . .most of her alimony is paid by other people's husbands." (91) She sponges money from Gus Trenor to cover her bills much to his wife's chagrin. Although Gus accepts romantic favors from Mrs. Fisher in exchange for paying her bills and investing her money in the stock market, he considers her a "battered wire-puller"(94) in comparison to the fresh and unsullied Miss Bart. Carry is also known for bringing newcomers into high society such as Rosedale and the Wellington Brys, who had managed the miracle of making money in a falling market. After Lily has been expelled from the upper class by Bertha, Carry is one of the few people who still show compassion toward her, offering Lily support and job opportunities. Carry is an example of a woman who finds ways to earn money and to succeed in society despite being divorced and somewhat disreputable. Her presence in the story refutes the notion that Lily has no choice except to self-destruct.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Ned Silverton—A young man, whose first intention was to live on proofreading and write an epic, but ended up living off his friends. Ned's romantic relationship at the Bellomont house party is with Carry Fisher. Six months later, Ned accompanies Lily and the Dorsets on their Mediterranean cruise. He has an affair with Mrs Dorset, who manages to keep it concealed from most of society. Ned's increasing gambling addiction consumes not only his resources but that of his sisters, who live in poverty while he travels with Bertha Dorset. After the fling with Bertha ends, Ned participates in a scheme to help a purportedly wealthy but disreputable woman to marry the younger brother of Gwen and Evie Van Osburgh. This conspiracy, in which Lily is implicated, helps ensure Lily's downfall.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Evie Van Osburgh—A young, innocent, dull, and conservative, stay-at-home kind of a girl, heiress to a substantial fortune. Judy Trenor paired her sister, Gwen, with Percy Gryce at the Sunday-night supper at Bellomont. Evie ends up getting engaged within six weeks of their stay at Bellomont to Percy Gryce due to Bertha Dorset's match-making skills.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Gerty Farish—Selden's cousin. She is a kind, generous woman who occupies herself with charity work, but Lily despises her because of her less than glamorous appearance. In Book Two, Gerty becomes one of Lily's only friends, giving her a place to stay and taking care of her when everyone else abandons her. Lily does not wish to continue living with Gerty or combining resources because she is unwilling to lower herself to the standard of living Gerty can afford.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Jack Stepney and Gwen (Van Osburgh) Stepney—A very wealthy couple—guests at Bellomont just before celebrating their wedding at the Van Osburgh's estate six weeks later. They belong to Old New York's high society, although their money comes from Gwen's side. Prior to his marriage, the nearly bankrupt Jack has business dealings with Simon Rosedale and has tried to afford him entrée into New York's high society. After marrying Gwen, Jack becomes plump, conservative, and complacent. Jack is Lily's cousin so he agrees to shelter her for the night after Bertha kicks her off her yacht for ostensibly carrying on romantically with Bertha's husband.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Grace Stepney—Lily's middle-aged cousin lives in a boarding house and has spent most of her life waiting on Julia Peniston. Until Lily arrived, Grace was Julia's favorite: she shares Julia's conservatism and sense of propriety, and she is willing to help out during the fall cleaning. Grace attracts and remembers all manner of gossip related to high society in general and to Lily in particular, but does not generally gossip herself. Lily treats Grace very poorly, regarding her as insignificant. When Lily prevails on her aunt Julia to exclude Grace from a family dinner party, Grace retaliates. She relays to Aunt Julia the talk about Lily's attention to Gus Trenor in exchange for money that Lily used to pay gambling debts, and stops protecting Lily from the otherwise predictable consequences of Lily's actions. When Lily comes to Grace after the reading of the will, Grace does not have the money to give Lily the loan she is asking for because the assets Grace inherited from Julia are still tied up in probate. When Lily asks Grace to borrow money against Aunt Julia's estate and lend or give it to Lily, Grace refuses.


title: The House of Mirth

text: In the contemporary book review "New York Society Held up to Scorn in three New Books" (15 October 1905) "The New York Times" critic said that "The House of Mirth" is "a novel of remarkable power" and that "its varied elements are harmoniously blended, and [that] the discriminating reader who has completed the whole story in a protracted sitting, or two, must rise from it with the conviction that there are no parts of it which do not properly and essentially belong to the whole. Its descriptive passages have verity and charm, it has the saving grace of humor, its multitude of personages, as we have said, all have the semblance of life."


title: The House of Mirth

text: The publication of the novel prompted letters to the editor of the "New York Times Saturday Review of Books" which argued the merits of the story, saying that the novel was a faithful and true portrait of the New York City gentry, while detractors said that it impugned the character of the city's social élite as a heartless and materialist leisure class.


title: The House of Mirth

text: Susie Yang's well-received 2020 novel "White Ivy" was described by some book reviewers as similar to "The House of Mirth".


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Around 1920, he foreshadowed the discovery and mechanism of nuclear fusion processes in stars, in his paper "The Internal Constitution of the Stars". At that time, the source of stellar energy was a complete mystery; Eddington was the first to correctly speculate that the source was fusion of hydrogen into helium.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington wrote a number of articles that announced and explained Einstein's theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world. World War I had severed many lines of scientific communication, and new developments in German science were not well known in England. He also conducted an expedition to observe the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 that provided one of the earliest confirmations of general relativity, and he became known for his popular expositions and interpretations of the theory.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington was born 28 December 1882 in Kendal, Westmorland (now Cumbria), England, the son of Quaker parents, Arthur Henry Eddington, headmaster of the Quaker School, and Sarah Ann Shout.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: His father taught at a Quaker training college in Lancashire before moving to Kendal to become headmaster of Stramongate School. He died in the typhoid epidemic which swept England in 1884. His mother was left to bring up her two children with relatively little income. The family moved to Weston-super-Mare where at first Stanley (as his mother and sister always called Eddington) was educated at home before spending three years at a preparatory school. The family lived at a house called Varzin, 42 Walliscote Road, Weston-super-Mare. There is a commemorative plaque on the building explaining Sir Arthur's contribution to science.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: In 1893 Eddington entered Brynmelyn School. He proved to be a most capable scholar, particularly in mathematics and English literature. His performance earned him a scholarship to Owens College, Manchester (what was later to become the University of Manchester) in 1898, which he was able to attend, having turned 16 that year. He spent the first year in a general course, but turned to physics for the next three years. Eddington was greatly influenced by his physics and mathematics teachers, Arthur Schuster and Horace Lamb. At Manchester, Eddington lived at Dalton Hall, where he came under the lasting influence of the Quaker mathematician J. W. Graham. His progress was rapid, winning him several scholarships and he graduated with a BSc in physics with First Class Honours in 1902.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Based on his performance at Owens College, he was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1902. His tutor at Cambridge was Robert Alfred Herman and in 1904 Eddington became the first ever second-year student to be placed as Senior Wrangler. After receiving his M.A. in 1905, he began research on thermionic emission in the Cavendish Laboratory. This did not go well, and meanwhile he spent time teaching mathematics to first year engineering students. This hiatus was brief. Through a recommendation by E. T. Whittaker, his senior colleague at Trinity College, he secured a position at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich where he was to embark on his career in astronomy, a career whose seeds had been sown even as a young child when he would often "try to count the stars".


title: Arthur Eddington

text: In January 1906, Eddington was nominated to the post of chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. He left Cambridge for Greenwich the following month. He was put to work on a detailed analysis of the parallax of 433 Eros on photographic plates that had started in 1900. He developed a new statistical method based on the apparent drift of two background stars, winning him the Smith's Prize in 1907. The prize won him a fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge. In December 1912 George Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, died suddenly and Eddington was promoted to his chair as the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in early 1913. Later that year, Robert Ball, holder of the theoretical Lowndean chair also died, and Eddington was named the director of the entire Cambridge Observatory the next year. In May 1914 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society: he was awarded the Royal Medal in 1928 and delivered the Bakerian Lecture in 1926.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington also investigated the interior of stars through theory, and developed the first true understanding of stellar processes. He began this in 1916 with investigations of possible physical explanations for Cepheid variable stars. He began by extending Karl Schwarzschild's earlier work on radiation pressure in Emden polytropic models. These models treated a star as a sphere of gas held up against gravity by internal thermal pressure, and one of Eddington's chief additions was to show that radiation pressure was necessary to prevent collapse of the sphere. He developed his model despite knowingly lacking firm foundations for understanding opacity and energy generation in the stellar interior. However, his results allowed for calculation of temperature, density and pressure at all points inside a star (thermodynamic anisotropy), and Eddington argued that his theory was so useful for further astrophysical investigation that it should be retained despite not being based on completely accepted physics. James Jeans contributed the important suggestion that stellar matter would certainly be ionized, but that was the end of any collaboration between the pair, who became famous for their lively debates.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington defended his method by pointing to the utility of his results, particularly his important mass–luminosity relation. This had the unexpected result of showing that virtually all stars, including giants and dwarfs, behaved as ideal gases. In the process of developing his stellar models, he sought to overturn current thinking about the sources of stellar energy. Jeans and others defended the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism, which was based on classical mechanics, while Eddington speculated broadly about the qualitative and quantitative consequences of possible proton–electron annihilation and nuclear fusion processes.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Around 1920, he anticipated the discovery and mechanism of nuclear fusion processes in stars, in his paper "The Internal Constitution of the Stars". At that time, the source of stellar energy was a complete mystery; Eddington correctly speculated that the source was fusion of hydrogen into helium, liberating enormous energy according to Einstein's equation . This was a particularly remarkable development since at that time fusion and thermonuclear energy, and even the fact that stars are largely composed of hydrogen (see metallicity), had not yet been discovered. Eddington's paper, based on knowledge at the time, reasoned that:


title: Arthur Eddington

text: With these assumptions, he demonstrated that the interior temperature of stars must be millions of degrees. In 1924, he discovered the mass–luminosity relation for stars (see Lecchini in ""). Despite some disagreement, Eddington's models were eventually accepted as a powerful tool for further investigation, particularly in issues of stellar evolution. The confirmation of his estimated stellar diameters by Michelson in 1920 proved crucial in convincing astronomers unused to Eddington's intuitive, exploratory style. Eddington's theory appeared in mature form in 1926 as "The Internal Constitution of the Stars", which became an important text for training an entire generation of astrophysicists.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington's work in astrophysics in the late 1920s and the 1930s continued his work in stellar structure, and precipitated further clashes with Jeans and Edward Arthur Milne. An important topic was the extension of his models to take advantage of developments in quantum physics, including the use of degeneracy physics in describing dwarf stars.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: The topic of extension of his models precipitated his dispute with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was then a student at Cambridge. Chandrasekhar's work presaged the discovery of black holes, which at the time seemed so absurdly non-physical that Eddington refused to believe that Chandrasekhar's purely mathematical derivation had consequences for the real world. Eddington was wrong and his motivation is controversial. Chandrasekhar's narrative of this incident, in which his work is harshly rejected, portrays Eddington as rather cruel and dogmatic. Chandra benefited from his friendship with Eddington. It was Eddington and Milne who put up Chandra's name for the fellowship for the Royal Society which Chandra obtained. An FRS meant he was at the Cambridge high-table with all the luminaries and a very comfortable endowment for research. Eddington's criticism seems to have been based partly on a suspicion that a purely mathematical derivation from relativity theory was not enough to explain the seemingly daunting physical paradoxes that were inherent to degenerate stars, but to have "raised irrelevant objections" in addition, as Thanu Padmanabhan puts it.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: During World War I, Eddington was secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, which meant he was the first to receive a series of letters and papers from Willem de Sitter regarding Einstein's theory of general relativity. Eddington was fortunate in being not only one of the few astronomers with the mathematical skills to understand general relativity, but owing to his internationalist and pacifist views inspired by his Quaker religious beliefs, one of the few at the time who was still interested in pursuing a theory developed by a German physicist. He quickly became the chief supporter and expositor of relativity in Britain. He and Astronomer Royal Frank Watson Dyson organized two expeditions to observe a solar eclipse in 1919 to make the first empirical test of Einstein's theory: the measurement of the deflection of light by the sun's gravitational field. In fact, Dyson's argument for the indispensability of Eddington's expertise in this test was what prevented Eddington from eventually having to enter military service.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: When conscription was introduced in Britain on 2 March 1916, Eddington intended to apply for an exemption as a conscientious objector. Cambridge University authorities instead requested and were granted an exemption on the ground of Eddington's work being of national interest. In 1918, this was appealed against by the Ministry of National Service. Before the appeal tribunal in June, Eddington claimed conscientious objector status, which was not recognized and would have ended his exemption in August 1918. A further two hearings took place in June and July, respectively. Eddington's personal statement at the June hearing about his objection to war based on religious grounds is on record. The Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, supported Eddington at the July hearing with a written statement, emphasising Eddington's essential role in the solar eclipse expedition to Príncipe in May 1919. Eddington made clear his willingness to serve in the Friends' Ambulance Unit, under the jurisdiction of the British Red Cross, or as a harvest labourer. However, the tribunal's decision to grant a further twelve months' exemption from military service was on condition of Eddington continuing his astronomy work, in particular in preparation for the Príncipe expedition. The war ended before the end of his exemption.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: After the war, Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off the west coast of Africa to watch the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. During the eclipse, he took pictures of the stars (several stars in the Hyades cluster include Kappa Tauri of the constellation Taurus) in the region around the Sun. According to the theory of general relativity, stars with light rays that passed near the Sun would appear to have been slightly shifted because their light had been curved by its gravitational field. This effect is noticeable only during eclipses, since otherwise the Sun's brightness obscures the affected stars. Eddington showed that Newtonian gravitation could be interpreted to predict half the shift predicted by Einstein.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington's observations published the next year allegedly confirmed Einstein's theory, and were hailed at the time as evidence of general relativity over the Newtonian model. The news was reported in newspapers all over the world as a major story. Afterward, Eddington embarked on a campaign to popularize relativity and the expedition as landmarks both in scientific development and international scientific relations.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: It has been claimed that Eddington's observations were of poor quality, and he had unjustly discounted simultaneous observations at Sobral, Brazil, which appeared closer to the Newtonian model, but a 1979 re-analysis with modern measuring equipment and contemporary software validated Eddington's results and conclusions. The quality of the 1919 results was indeed poor compared to later observations, but was sufficient to persuade contemporary astronomers. The rejection of the results from the Brazil expedition was due to a defect in the telescopes used which, again, was completely accepted and well understood by contemporary astronomers.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Throughout this period, Eddington lectured on relativity, and was particularly well known for his ability to explain the concepts in lay terms as well as scientific. He collected many of these into the "Mathematical Theory of Relativity" in 1923, which Albert Einstein suggested was "the finest presentation of the subject in any language." He was an early advocate of Einstein's general relativity, and an interesting anecdote well illustrates his humour and personal intellectual investment: Ludwik Silberstein, a physicist who thought of himself as an expert on relativity, approached Eddington at the Royal Society's (6 November) 1919 meeting where he had defended Einstein's relativity with his Brazil-Príncipe solar eclipse calculations with some degree of scepticism, and ruefully charged Arthur as one who claimed to be one of three men who actually understood the theory (Silberstein, of course, was including himself and Einstein as the other). When Eddington refrained from replying, he insisted Arthur not be "so shy", whereupon Eddington replied, "Oh, no! I was wondering who the third one might be!"


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington was also heavily involved with the development of the first generation of general relativistic cosmological models. He had been investigating the instability of the Einstein universe when he learned of both Lemaître's 1927 paper postulating an expanding or contracting universe and Hubble's work on the recession of the spiral nebulae. He felt the cosmological constant must have played the crucial role in the universe's evolution from an Einsteinian steady state to its current expanding state, and most of his cosmological investigations focused on the constant's significance and characteristics. In "The Mathematical Theory of Relativity," Eddington interpreted the cosmological constant to mean that the universe is "self-gauging".


title: Arthur Eddington

text: During the 1920s until his death, Eddington increasingly concentrated on what he called "fundamental theory" which was intended to be a unification of quantum theory, relativity, cosmology, and gravitation. At first he progressed along "traditional" lines, but turned increasingly to an almost numerological analysis of the dimensionless ratios of fundamental constants.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: His basic approach was to combine several fundamental constants in order to produce a dimensionless number. In many cases these would result in numbers close to 10, its square, or its square root. He was convinced that the mass of the proton and the charge of the electron were a "natural and complete specification for constructing a Universe" and that their values were not accidental. One of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, Paul Dirac, also pursued this line of investigation, which has become known as the Dirac large numbers hypothesis.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: A somewhat damaging statement in his defence of these concepts involved the fine-structure constant, "α". At the time it was measured to be very close to 1/136, and he argued that the value should in fact be exactly 1/136 for epistemological reasons. Later measurements placed the value much closer to 1/137, at which point he switched his line of reasoning to argue that one more should be added to the degrees of freedom, so that the value should in fact be exactly 1/137, the Eddington number. Wags at the time started calling him "Arthur Adding-one". This change of stance detracted from Eddington's credibility in the physics community. The current CODATA value is 1/


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington believed he had identified an algebraic basis for fundamental physics, which he termed "E-numbers" (representing a certain group – a Clifford algebra). These in effect incorporated spacetime into a higher-dimensional structure. While his theory has long been neglected by the general physics community, similar algebraic notions underlie many modern attempts at a grand unified theory. Moreover, Eddington's emphasis on the values of the fundamental constants, and specifically upon dimensionless numbers derived from them, is nowadays a central concern of physics. In particular, he predicted a number of hydrogen atoms in the Universe 136 × 2 ≈ 1.57 10, or equivalently the half of the total number of particles protons + electrons. He did not complete this line of research before his death in 1944; his book "Fundamental Theory" was published posthumously in 1948.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington is credited with devising a measure of a cyclist's long-distance riding achievements. The Eddington number in the context of cycling is defined as the maximum number E such that the cyclist has cycled at least E miles on at least E days.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: For example, an Eddington number of 70 would imply that the cyclist has cycled at least 70 miles in a day on at least 70 occasions. Achieving a high Eddington number is difficult since moving from, say, 70 to 75 will (probably) require more than five new long distance rides, since any rides shorter than 75 miles will no longer be included in the reckoning. Eddington's own life-time E-number was 84.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: The Eddington number for cycling is analogous to the "h"-index that quantifies both the actual scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington wrote in his book "The Nature of the Physical World" that "The stuff of the world is mind-stuff."


title: Arthur Eddington

text: The first derives directly from current physical theory. Briefly, mechanical theories of the ether and of the behaviour of fundamental particles have been discarded in both relativity and quantum physics. From this, Eddington inferred that a materialistic metaphysics was outmoded and that, in consequence, since the disjunction of materialism or idealism are assumed to be exhaustive, an idealistic metaphysics is required. The second, and more interesting argument, was based on Eddington's epistemology, and may be regarded as consisting of two parts. First, all we know of the objective world is its structure, and the structure of the objective world is precisely mirrored in our own consciousness. We therefore have no reason to doubt that the objective world too is "mind-stuff". Dualistic metaphysics, then, cannot be evidentially supported.