Reviews and News:
Sign of the times: People in California are taking LSD again, not to get high but to be more productive.
Soccer’s culture of corruption: “At dawn on May 27, 2015, Swiss police raided Zurich’s five-star Baur au Lac hotel and arrested seven senior officials of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). According to the Guardian journalist David Conn, ‘Some of them were led out of back doors into waiting cars, and shielded from photographers by thoughtful hotel staff holding Baur au Lac bed sheets in front of them.’ The Swiss police were acting jointly with the FBI; then-FBI director James Comey described the defendants as having ‘fostered a culture of corruption and greed.’ As Conn recounts in The Fall of the House of FIFA, much of the investigation, which had begun by 2011, concerned FIFA’s choices of Russia to host the World Cup in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. Murky payments continue to surface.”
The beginning of the British Museum: “Sir Hans Sloane was one of the most remarkable figures produced by the British Enlightenment. His life spanned 10 decades and two hemispheres, he lived through six reigns and one revolution, and he witnessed the transformation of Britain from an agrarian economy to an imperial one. Trained as a doctor and natural scientist, enriched by a strategic marriage, Sloane became a collector of collections. Most of his possessions are now owned by the British Museum.”
Caravaggio the criminal: He was a great painter but also “a killer and a street gang menace (and a terrible tenant).”
In Case You Missed It:
Is the era of nation-states coming to a close? If so, will it mean a return of the city-state?
A history of Europe’s four winds: The “first and smallest wind, one I have never heard of before, blows across a northwestern corner of England. It is called Helm, and its headquarters, it seems, is a desolate plateau called Cross Fell in a particularly uninviting stretch of the Pennines. Helm is the only named wind blowing across Britain. It sounds perfectly awful and its reputation is frightful: it howled for fifteen days in 1843, it demolished a castle tower once, everybody complains about its psychological and temperamental effects and for centuries the countryside it rules was plagued by vendettas, pillagings, rapes, cattle-rustlings and murders.”
Mikhail Gorbachev brought democracy to Russia and was despised for it.
The costly grace in the fiction of D’J Pancake.
Interview: Seamus Perry and Mark Ford talk about the work of W. H. Auden
Classic Essay: Russell Kirk, “Edmund Burke and the Principle of Order”
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