Reviews and News:
Don’t drink a cocktail, unless it’s a Negroni: “The cocktail is designed to lie about its origins; no wonder it reached its apogee during Prohibition, which forced everyone with an unrepentant thirst to lie about their cravings. Even today, when only extreme youth, religious belief or personal inclination prevents a person from draining the bar dry, the cocktail continues its career of dishonesty. It hides ingredients or methods. It provides a front for poor-quality booze. And it often dissolves, within its inscrutable depths, mountains of sugar, enabling drinkers to pose as sophisticates while downing something that tastes like a soft drink – to get drunk without leaving the playpen. This is why I love the Negroni, which fools no one. It is easy to make and contains nothing but pure booze. Despite being a third sweet vermouth, it isn’t saccharine: the other two thirds, equal measures of gin and Campari, may have something to do with this. And it is the colour of danger, a red rag to anyone jaded by cocktail-world bull.”
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George Strait’s long ride: “For decades, he’s been country’s most consistent hitmaker. Can he keep holding on?”
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The drawings of the Old Masters: “Some art can be made in solitude, straight out of the artist’s head. But portraiture is a game for two. That’s the lesson of The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt, a marvellous little exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It is essentially a medley of Old Master works on papers from various British collections — which might sound a little on the quiet side. But that would be the wrong conclusion: on the contrary it poses intriguing questions and is full of visual pleasures.”
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Yuval Levin: “What if a naïve faith in voters’ rationality is not the source of our system’s difficulties? What if the problem is that the public wants to tell its leaders something they don’t want to hear? What if the literature of anti-democratic political science, like so much of our elite conversation about politics, is just a way to tell the public to shut up? What if, as a result, the leaders who secure a hearing for public frustrations manage to do so by working around or undermining our institutions, rather than by harnessing them? What if that willful elite ignorance is why our institutions face a crisis of legitimacy, leading to elections that force us to choose between bland technocrats and reckless brutes? In other words, what if our constitution-bound democratic republicanism is not the problem but the solution—not a romantic delusion but the epitome of realism?”
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In Case You Missed It:
The metaphysics of the hangover: “The hangover has a physical dimension, no doubt about that. You’ve gone and poisoned yourself. But it’s something else as well. The hangover is mourning for the feeling of wholeness that you had the night before. You look back at a time when you attained—or stole—the experience Jean-Paul Sartre calls being in itself.”
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How to read a Gutenberg Bible.
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David Williams’s When the English Fall imagines the post-Apocalyptic strength of the Amish.
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A new collection of letters between Tolstoy and his wife, Tolstaya, casts light on the couple’s difficult and complex relationship.
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Interview: Tyler Cowen talks with Atul Gawande about the problems with CRISPR, Michael Crichton’s cultural influence, Knausgård versus Ferrante, and more.
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Classic Essay: Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen
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