Reviews and News:
In Commentary, Andrew Ferguson takes stock of the Washington movie: “From Mr. Smith to Legally Blonde 2, the point of the Washington movie is clear: Left to its own devices, without an outside agent to penetrate it and cleanse it of its sins, self-government sinks into corruption and despotism.”
Arnaud Nourry, the chief executive of Hachette Livre says that ebooks are “a stupid product” and that the industry has had “one or two successes among a hundred failures.”
A chaser to the shot of reality in Ryan T. Anderson’s new book on transgenderism that I recommended yesterday, here’s Jennifer Bilek on the wealthy white men who are funding transgender activism: “Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in transgender medical infrastructure across the United States and world to “treat” transgender people. In addition to gender clinics proliferating across the United States, hospital wings are being built for specialized surgeries, and many medical institutions are clamoring to get on board with the new developments. Doctors are being trained in cadaver symposiums across the world in all manner of surgeries related to transgender individuals, including phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, facial feminization surgery, urethral procedures, and more. More and more American corporations are covering transgender surgeries, drugs, and other expenses. Endocrinologists seeking the fountain of youth in hormones for more than a generation, and the subsequent earnings for marketing those hormones, are still on a quest for gold.” And at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher dings The New York Times for its “advocacy journalism”: “Does the Science section now have to subject its stories to the PC commissar?”
The Southern Poverty Law Center strikes (out) again. They regularly put conservative and Christian organizations on their list of hate groups simply because they disagree with them. Now they have taken aim at a small, progressive town on the shores of Lake Michigan for being the home of a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The problem? No one in the town has ever heard of the chapter or seen any Klan activity: “In eight years on the Lake County board, Lawlor could not remember any signs of KKK activity in Gurnee—no crosses burned, no graffiti, and certainly no official Klan demonstrations, rallies, speeches or protests. Not so much as a nasty flier. In fact, in February, Lawlor had helped put together a county-wide summit promoting unity and tolerance. It was an attempt to tamp down the uptick of hate speech and intimidation against the local Latino and Muslim population in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. The health department had put up signs in English and Spanish welcoming people of all races, religions and sexual orientations. And Lawlor himself had given a speech in which he revealed that he is gay. ‘One of my primary focuses as a board chair and an openly gay county official, is that we are not only seen as an open place, but that we are an open place,’ he says. ‘We’ve tried to build the narrative that when you are Latino, black, Muslim, whatever…you are welcome here.’ Now, however, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the self-styled national watchdog for hate groups, had bestowed upon Gurnee the kind of label that makes a small-town official like Lawlor wake up in a cold sweat.”
OK. Enough politics. Here are some 19th-century Japanese prints of whaling.
Also: In 1848, Joseph Gueusquin built a cabaret outside Paris inspired by the treehouse in The Swiss Family Robinson. A few planks can still be seen in the tall trees.
Essay of the Day:
Mario Vargas Llosa is the writer we need today, argues Marcela Valdes in The New York Times Magazine. Here’s a snippet:
In March, Vargas Llosa will turn 82. He once looked like a dark-eyed John Travolta: full lips, strong chin, thick black hair. The hair is now white, but the serene manners and the prodigious self-discipline remain. He has written almost every morning of his life, publishing 59 books in 55 years, among them some of the greatest novels of the past half century: The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Feast of the Goat. ‘If I didn’t write,’ he told The Paris Review in 1990, ‘I would blow my brains out, without a shadow of a doubt.’ This week Vargas Llosa has three books coming out — English translations of a novel (The Neighborhood) and of a collection of political essays (Sabers and Utopias), as well as a new volume in Spain, The Call of the Tribe, which is not yet available in English. It’s a condensed history of three centuries of classical liberal thought, from Adam Smith to Jean-François Revel, that doubles as a kind of intellectual autobiography.”
Photos: Mount Sinabung eruption
Poem: J. Allyn Rosser, “Self of Steam”
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