How much luck is involved in winning at Scrabble? According to a recent study, more than you might think.
Daniel Johnson steps down as editor of Standpoint.
Kyle Smith reviews Clint Eastwood’s The Mule: It is “an oddly endearing, kind of wonderful little picture in which Clint plays an isotope of his cranky old bastard Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino, and once again he’s getting mixed up with gang members. This time, though, he’s working for them.”
Paul Cantor on Frankenstein at 200.
The Nobel Prize gets a “bland-new” logo: “When will organizations stop spending millions on rebranding campaigns that swap images for bland, all-text fonts?
Roger Scruton on the “fury” of modern architecture: “The modernists belonged, on the whole, to the revolutionary wing of contemporary socialism, with Hannes Meyer, as director of the Bauhaus, explicitly pledging allegiance to the Leninist vision, while others, like the endearing Karel Teige in Prague, advocating a romantic and poetic communism designed to liberate the common people without controlling them. Le Corbusier attempted to join this revolutionary movement at a certain stage but, finding a more congenial sponsor in the Vichy Government of war-time France, he moved right-wards, without, however, losing the totalitarian mentality that united him to Gropius and Meyer. This totalitarian mentality should be seen in its historical context.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Harper’s, French novelist Michel Houellebecq writes in praise of Donald Trump:
“President Trump tears up treaties and trade agreements when he thinks it was wrong to sign them. He’s right about that; leaders must know how to use the cooling-off period and withdraw from bad deals.
“Unlike free-market liberals (who are, in their way, as fanatical as communists), President Trump doesn’t consider global free trade the be-all and end-all of human progress. When free trade favors American interests, President Trump is in favor of free trade; in the contrary case, he finds old-fashioned protectionist measures entirely appropriate.
“President Trump was elected to safeguard the interests of American workers; he’s safeguarding the interests of American workers. During the past fifty years in France, one would have wished to come upon this sort of attitude more often.
“President Trump doesn’t like the European Union; he thinks we don’t have a lot in common, especially not ‘values’; and I call this fortunate, because, what values? ‘Human rights’? Seriously? He’d rather negotiate directly with individual countries, and I believe this would actually be preferable; I don’t think that strength necessarily proceeds from union. It’s my belief that we in Europe have neither a common language, nor common values, nor common interests, that, in a word, Europe doesn’t exist, and that it will never constitute a people or support a possible democracy (see the etymology of the term), simply because it doesn’t want to constitute a people. In short, Europe is just a dumb idea that has gradually turned into a bad dream, from which we shall eventually wake up. And in his hopes for a ‘United States of Europe,’ an obvious reference to the United States, Victor Hugo only gave further proof of his grandiloquence and his stupidity; it always does me a bit of good to criticize Victor Hugo.
“Logically enough, President Trump was pleased about Brexit. Logically enough, so was I; my sole regret was that the British had once again shown themselves to be more courageous than us in the face of empire. The British get on my nerves, but their courage cannot be denied.
“President Trump doesn’t consider Vladimir Putin an unworthy negotiating partner; neither do I. I don’t believe Russia has been assigned the role of humankind’s universal guide—my admiration for Dostoevsky doesn’t extend that far—but I admire the persistence of orthodoxy in its own lands, I think Roman Catholicism would do well to take inspiration from it, and I believe that the ‘ecumenical dialogue’ could be usefully limited to a dialogue with the Orthodox Church (Christianity is not only a ‘religion of the Book,’ as is too quickly said; it’s also, and perhaps above all, a religion of the Incarnation). I’m painfully aware that the Great Schism of 1054 was, for Christian Europe, the beginning of the end; but on the other hand, I believe that the end is never certain until it arrives.
“It seems that President Trump has even managed to tame the North Korean madman; I found this feat positively classy.
“It seems that President Trump recently declared, ‘You know what I am? I’m a nationalist!’ Me too, precisely so. Nationalists can talk to one another; with internationalists, oddly enough, talking doesn’t work so well.
“France should leave NATO, but maybe such a step will become pointless if lack of operational funding causes NATO to disappear on its own. That would be one less thing to worry about, and a new reason to sing the praises of President Trump.
“In summary, President Trump seems to me to be one of the best American presidents I’ve ever seen.”
Photos: Volcanic activity in 2018
Poem: Mary-Patrice Woehling, “Melchior’s Wife”
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