The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

Gary Wolf of Quantified Self writes:

Princeton University Press has just reissued this classic essay ["The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge" by Abraham Flexner, 1939] by the founder of the Institute for Advanced Study, with a new companion essay by the physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf. I'm going to buy the book, but you don't have to do that to read the original essay, with its terribly relevant opening paragraph: "Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women – old and young – detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?"