Rationality and Terror
It is irrational. I associate this sort of argumentative contention with young men. Perhaps unfairly, or perhaps because they are particularly prone to combine predilections for rote factuality and...
View ArticleReversion To The Norm
Or, On Richard Hofstadter’s “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” Third Foray. Change a few examples, and the decades old essay could be republished today as a commentary on current politics. Almost. The...
View ArticleCourtiers
They are “servants to political power,” courtiers, in truth. By “defending the royal court and attacking anyone who challenges or dissents from it,” they do “what courtiers have always done.” Glenn...
View ArticleAll and Nothing
It is a popular charge. The Republican Party has “evolved” from “proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all.” In that respect,...
View ArticleEllipses
I understand the complaint. It is a lazy leveling to substitute ellipses for commas, periods, question marks, and any number of other punctuation marks. The practice transforms potentially well denoted...
View ArticleFact’s Future
A fact is a factum, a thing done. It is something accomplished: a deed performed, a happening occurred, an event enacted. Unlike truths which are untouched by time, facts are stamped with the character...
View ArticleA Union Divided
Most essays age quite badly. A few hardly age at all. The essay James Fallows wrote more than a decade and a half ago on American politics and the media belongs neither to those most nor to those few....
View ArticleThe Humanity of The Humanities
I collect articles lamenting the decline of the humanities. One day I may read them. It was perhaps a lapse of judgment that placed the latest entry in the genre before my eyes rather than upon the...
View ArticleDrought
Other misfortunes occur. The skies overflow, the earth fissures, the winds erupt. The great disaster is a great event, a cataclysm. With droughts nothing happens. All is quiet and still. Summer turns...
View ArticleTrump’s Pharmakon
It is a simple story. One faction so committed to old and emptied pieties that they have proven incapable of recognizing the “necessities” of the times, the other so disordered that they have mistaken...
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