Reviews and News:
Chaos at Newsweek: “After a handful of top reporters and editors were fired in a purge of the Newsweek masthead on Monday, about 40 of the magazine’s staffers ignored management’s invitation to go home and busted out wine and bourbon for what one employee described as ‘half funeral, half party.’”
It’s not LGBT, you bigot, it’s LGBTQQICAPF2K+. Katherine Timpf writes that adding the K for “kink” is “one of the dumbest things of all time.” It’s not just the K that’s absurd, Ms. Timpf.
Before the Communist revolution, Havana was home to a thriving international literary scene. It’s now long gone: “Before the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, the Calle Obispo in the centre of old Havana was a thriving street, with many bookshops that stocked works not only from Cuba but the rest of Latin America along with imports from the United States and France among other countries. Nowadays, the striking 1930s art deco building that houses the Moderna Poesía bookshop is more interesting architecturally than for any of the works it displays. ‘Lots of space, few books’, as a local writer says. And those few tomes are nearly always the printed speeches of Castro, books by the nineteenth-century Cuban independence hero José Martí, or the works of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.”
A crayfish that can clone itself is spreading around the world: “No one knows exactly when the clones first appeared, but humans only became aware of them in the early 2000s.”
Is Louis C. K. doomed to become the next Woody Allen? No, says Noah Millman.
In 1934, a young Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun were assigned to teach a class together at Columbia. They were an odd pair. Even odder: they became friends. “Barzun was born in France in 1907; Trilling in New York, in 1905. Barzun, whose parents were patrons of the arts, grew up in Paris and Grenoble among the European avant-garde. Trilling’s father was a tailor from Bialystok, Poland, who had immigrated to Queens. Barzun’s father was a diplomat who settled for a time in New Rochelle. Barzun was a nonpracticing Catholic; Trilling a secular but self-affirming Jew (becoming in 1939 the first Jewish professor granted tenure by the English and comparative-literature department). As students and instructors at Columbia they had only a nodding acquaintance. Barzun, tall, fair-haired, Gaelically handsome, was self-assured and interested in history, theater, music, and detective stories. Trilling. shy, intense, on the short side, was keen on Freud, Marx, and American fiction. To a budding and brooding intellectual like Trilling, the young Barzun seemed too comfortable in his own skin; there was no angst, no alienation. ‘Such awareness as we first had of each other,’ Trilling recalled, ‘was across a barrier which had about it something of a barricade.’ Meanwhile, in Barzun’s eyes, Trilling seemed ‘content to do well, with little exertion, in what he liked and to stumble through the rest.’ Upon learning they would be paired up, neither one jumped at the prospect. But their anxiety about teaching together soon disappeared. Their differences complemented rather than distanced them.”
Essay of the Day:
What saves people from tyranny? Religion, not autonomy, argues Richard Reinsch in Modern Age:
“Progressives have carpet-bombed our politics with the proposition that personal identities are the source and summit of our citizenship. And these identities are, most prominently, caught up with sexuality and race, such that American citizens are not particular individuals participating in republican self-government. They are rather the products of autonomously willed assertions (call me Caitlyn), or else members of a race that provides a set of ready-made beliefs, attitudes, and opinions to adopt.
“With regard to gender, the argument made by the LGBTQ coalition could only emerge in a social order that has been radically shaped by a democratic leveling ethos, one that leads individuals to nod at the assertion that I can remake myself at will. Tocqueville would have understood this in terms of an individualism that refuses to recognize any standards of virtue that might direct the democratic will. This volitional understanding of freedom pulsates among the Americans who, Tocqueville says, everywhere emulate Descartes’s philosophy without having actually read his words. Members of a democratic society find in the very exercise of their will proof of its veracity, merely because it’s their own.
“Identity and dignity are both at stake in the claims made on behalf of gender and its unlimited manifestations. But does liberty rest in what amounts to Cartesianism on crack, a liberty unable to make sense of the body save for its instrumental uses to the inner, autonomous, willing agent? Give me dignity or give me death, progressives say; but I’ll settle for the embodied human person who knows that he or she is an acting composite of soul and body that discloses purposes and goods to pursue.
“Similarly, this notion of dignity has contributed to the weaponization of race that we now see on campuses, where, for example, white students at Scripps College were denied use of the coffee bar for designated periods in order to help them understand their ‘white privilege.’ Readers might think such conduct would be illegal, but the frown you see will only be your own. Dignity is immune to discursive reasoning, and its assertion is a willful act that succeeds when words are tools to enforce meaning rather than to understand reality and nature.
“We have it on the incontrovertible authority of Justice Anthony Kennedy that ‘the Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.’ Kennedy has thundered that the term ‘liberty’ in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is now synonymous with autonomy, which is realized by choice and identity creation, the dignity of which must be recognized and affirmed at the point of law.
“If our politics is just the legal vehicle for enforcing the indefinite extension of pronouns and racial identities, we might wonder how politically durable such identities really are. Might a politics of identities produce something vastly different from the intentions of the progressive smart set?”
Photo: Fantasia
Poem: Richie Hofmann, “Pictures of Mozart”
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