Reviews and News:
The “miraculous” story of Latin literature: “There were many other advanced civilizations contemporary to and in contact with the Greeks—Egyptians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Jews, Persians—yet only the Romans used Greek literary models to create what would become the Western world’s first vernacular literature.”|
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A history of chairs.
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Monet’s mad enchantment: “Beginning in 1914, and continuing almost until his death in 1926, Claude Monet was preoccupied with a massive, multipart installation project known as the Grande Decoration. Inspired by his garden at Giverny outside Paris, these paintings were devoted to the play of light and color Monet discovered in his lush private water park, where he had lovingly cultivated water lilies, wisteria, rhododendrons and weeping willows for decades. But unlike the Nymphéas (or water lilies) paintings he had been producing since the 1890s, the Grande Decoration evolved as a cycle, meant for permanent installation in a gallery devoted to the series, and was presented as a gift to the nation in a contract Monet signed in 1922.”
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Europe’s single currency has been “an economic and political disaster.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains “how the dollar operates smoothly across America’s 50 economically diverse states, noting ‘important adjustment mechanisms’ such as large interstate tax and benefit transfers, and the common language, which helps workers find employment in different states. The euro, on the other hand, ‘was created in a way that sowed the seeds of its own destruction’.”
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Save Edinburgh: “Some of Edinburgh’s planners and civic architects…seem bent on a process that would turn Athens into downtown Tirana during the Hoxha years. The eastern end of Princes Street and the top of Leith Walk, which ought to serve as antechambers before the glories of Calton Hill, have instead been disfigured by a brutalism that makes Cumbernauld look like Lisbon. The long-overdue demise of the unlovely St James Centre presented the ideal opportunity to begin a process of repair. Instead, the city’s planners and architects sought to embed further their dismal credo and now a bizarre luxury hotel complex will soon begin to take shape.”
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Joseph Epstein on “the new normal”: “When learning of an act of exceptional bravery or impressive altruism or pleasing decency, ‘the new normal’ is not the first phrase that comes to mind. What the phrase ‘the new normal’ actually means is ‘the new awful.'”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, George Nash explains why the fusionism that characterized American conservatism since the 1960s may be at an end:
“By the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term in 1989, the American Right had grown to encompass five distinct impulses: libertarianism, traditionalism, anticommunism, neoconservatism, and the Religious Right. And just as Buckley had done for conservatives a generation before, so Reagan in the 1980s did the same: he performed an emblematic and ecumenical function—a fusionist function, giving each faction a seat at the table and a sense of having arrived.
“Yet even as conservatives gradually escaped the wilderness for the promised land inside the Beltway, the world they wished to conquer was changing in ways that threatened their newfound power. Ask yourself this question: aside from conservatism, what have been the most important intellectual and social movements in America in the past forty years? As a historian I will give you my answer: feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism. Since the 1970s America has been moving Right and Left at the same time.
“Next, ask yourself this: what has been the most historically significant date in our lifetime? September 11, 2001? Perhaps. But surely the other such date was November 9, 1989, the night that the Berlin Wall came down.
“Since 1989, since the downfall of Communism in Europe and the end of what Ronald Reagan called the ‘evil empire,’ one of the hallmarks of conservative history has been the reappearance of factional strains in the grand alliance. One source of rancor has been the ongoing dispute between the neoconservatives and their noninterventionist critics over post-Cold War foreign policy. Another fault line divides many libertarians and social conservatives over such issues as the legalization of drugs and same-sex marriage.
“Aside from these built-in philosophical tensions, with some of which the conservative coalition has been living for a long time, two fundamental facts of political life explain the recrudescence of these intramural debates in recent years. The first is what we may call the perils of prosperity. In the 1950s and early 1960s the number of publicly active, self-identified conservative intellectuals in the United States was minuscule: perhaps a few dozen at most. Today how can we even begin to count? Since 1980 prosperity has come to conservatism, and with it a multitude of niche markets and specialization on a thousand fronts. But with prosperity have also come sibling rivalry, tribalism, and a weakening of ‘movement consciousness,’ as various elements in the coalition pursue their separate agendas. The ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ (as Hillary Clinton has called it) has grown too large for any single institution or magazine, like National Review in its early days, to serve as the movement’s gatekeeper and general staff. No longer does American conservatism have a commanding, ecumenical figure like Buckley or Reagan.
“Underlying these centrifugal impulses is a phenomenon that did not exist twenty-five years ago: what Charles Krauthammer recently called the ‘hyperdemocracy’ of social media. In the ever-expanding universe of cyberspace, no one can be an effective gatekeeper because there are no gates.
“The second fundamental fact of political life that explains the renewal of friction on the Right was the stunning end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Inevitably, the question then arose: could a movement so identified with anticommunism survive the disappearance of the Communist adversary in the Kremlin? Without a common foe upon whom to concentrate their minds, it has become easier for former allies on the Right to succumb to the bane of all coalitions: the sectarian temptation. It is an indulgence made infinitely easier by the internet.”
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Image of the Day: Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery
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Poem: Mark Jarman, “The Way You Went”
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