Reviews and News:
Philip Hamburger’s dangerous book: “A small study of law, The Administrative Threat obviously lacks the raw emotional appeal of a novel, and it claims for itself no high historical place. But someone needs to warn the other segments of American political life that Philip Hamburger has provided the populist right with something that had been missing: a theoretical rationale for the national irritation with the current regime of administrative law. Where before there was only a kind of wordless rage, there exists now an actual articulation: a serious and convincing constitutional explanation of what’s wrong with the way the nation is being run.”
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A simplistic recreation of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance: “Taichman developed Indecent over several years with the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Vogel (in a highly unusual set of credits, Vogel is billed as the writer, Taichman the director, and the two of them as co-creators). It is in every theatrical respect a better show. Indecent uses fluid movement, including music and dance, rather than the more static contrast of a two-story stage set, and uses projected words in Yiddish and English to allow for rapid shifts through space and time. And when we are finally shown the “rain scene” at the play’s climatic moment, rain pours down on the two actresses in a genuinely imaginative theatrical coup. But unlike Taichman’s 2000 production, Indecent has no real interest in either Asch’s play or the obscenity trial except to use them to provide fuel to make lesbianism once again seem daring and revolutionary. Peretz’s 1906 advice that Asch burn the play is portrayed as Act of Repression Number One rather than an austere piece of literary guidance. America is shown as a cruel society, far crueler than the European countries that we see hosting the play’s troupe. And there are plenty of hints at the parallels between America of the 1920s and President Trump’s travel ban, attempts to ‘close the borders’ and attempts to censor ‘transgressive’ art.”
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From guitar manufacturer to “musical lifestyle company”? In recent years, Gibson Guitars morphed into Gibson Brands, the parent company of an ever-growing array of instrument makers, recording equipment, playback hardware, studio software and other consumer electronics products. The company now also has an acoustic-guitar division in Bozeman, Mont., another electric-guitar plant in Memphis, Tenn., and a digital technology R&D facility in Cupertino, Calif. Juszkiewicz also snapped up the former Tower Records site in West Hollywood with the intention of developing it into a high-profile flagship new-products showroom. Gibson’s biggest acquisition yet was the 2014 purchase of the Philips audio and home entertainment division of 126-year old Netherlands-based Royal Philips, the consumer electronics firm that, along with Sony, was instrumental in the development of the audiocassette, the compact disc, the DVD and Blu-ray home video formats.”
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How do you conserve art made of bologna, or bubble gum, or soap?
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In Case You Missed It:
Julius Caesar in Gaul: “Some of the most colourful passages of Greek and Latin literature describe the people of Gaul. There are haughty, bellicose Gauls, drunk Gauls, Gauls who sleep on straw like animals, Gauls who make severed heads into necklaces for horses or store them in cedar oil to bring out on special days. And then, ‘living beyond the deep sea and quite cut off from the world’, are the huge and ‘terrifying’ Britons. All in all, a horrible bunch. One of the effects of the Gallic War, which Julius Caesar waged between 58 and 51 BC, was to draw what Bijan Omrani calls ‘an impenetrable veil over centuries of indigenous Gallic culture’. The campaign, which Caesar initially undertook to pay off his debts and outshine his political rivals, helped the Romans to rewrite Gallic history. Conquered tribes left little trace of their former ways of life. Caesar, meanwhile, left his extensive Commentaries on the Gallic War. The text is Omrani’s guide as he travels across France, Belgium and Switzerland in search of the conflict it describes – and the history it doesn’t.”
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The first free-solo climb of the 3,000-foot El Capitan.
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In The New Yorker, Stephen Phelan writes about the deadliest motorcycle race in the world—the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy
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Remembering the Falklands War: “For Thatcher, the Falklands represented a two-front war — a battle within her own cabinet to determine the British response, and a contest with Britain’s closest ally, the United States, whose interests in the region clashed with those of Great Britain. A loss on either front would have toppled her government. How Thatcher confronted and overcame these challenges offers a rebuke to defeatism and a model of statesmanship in an age of debased and dysfunctional leadership.”
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Interview: Damian Thompson talks to pianist Evgeny Kissin about the West’s self-betrayal.
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Classic Essay: Louis Markos, “Wise Passiveness: Pieper and Wordsworth on the Liberal Arts”
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