Reviews and News:
Is American culture rotten? Anthony Esolen thinks it is, and he argues the only thing that can be done to restore it is to reject its “terms and conditions”: “We must learn anew to read and speak, to sing and work and dance and pray, and to build and cherish beautiful things. If Esolen’s envisaged culture strikes us as quaint, as something only even desirable before the Industrial Revolution or the invention of the television, so much the worse for us.”
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The Catholic priest Ronald Knox made a deep impression on eventual convert Evelyn Waugh and translated the Latin Bible into English. He is almost entirely forgotten today.
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Patrick Kurp reviews A. M. Juster’s comic verse.
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On Fitzgerald’s lost stories.
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Is there such a thing as nothing?
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The tangled history of Irish mythology.
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I review a book on the many meanings of the phoenix in this week’s magazine.
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How lemonade may have helped stopped the plague in Paris and other odd food facts from history.
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Essay of the Day:
Stop spending so much time online. Ross Douthat in The New York Times:
“Search your feelings, you know it to be true: You are enslaved to the internet. Definitely if you’re young, increasingly if you’re old, your day-to-day, minute-to-minute existence is dominated by a compulsion to check email and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram with a frequency that bears no relationship to any communicative need.
“Compulsions are rarely harmless. The internet is not the opioid crisis; it is not likely to kill you (unless you’re hit by a distracted driver) or leave you ravaged and destitute. But it requires you to focus intensely, furiously, and constantly on the ephemera that fills a tiny little screen, and experience the traditional graces of existence — your spouse and friends and children, the natural world, good food and great art — in a state of perpetual distraction.
“Used within reasonable limits, of course, these devices also offer us new graces. But we are not using them within reasonable limits. They are the masters; we are not. They are built to addict us, as the social psychologist Adam Alter’s new book Irresistible points out — and to madden us, distract us, arouse us and deceive us. We primp and perform for them as for a lover; we surrender our privacy to their demands; we wait on tenterhooks for every ‘like.’ The smartphone is in the saddle, and it rides mankind.
“Which is why we need a social and political movement — digital temperance, if you will — to take back some control.”
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Image of the Day: Sakrisøy
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Poem: Jessica Hudgins, “Spring”
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