Reviews and News:
The discovery of chance: “In the mid-19th-century photographs of Alexander Herzen, he looks appealing: a rumpled Russian nobleman with a straggly beard streaked with gray, his watch chain and waistcoat straining against a full stomach, a look of wistful and gentle melancholy in his eyes. Tolstoy thought Herzen (1812-70) was one of the finest prose writers of his time, and so did Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. He was also an editor, a political activist and a scathing and ironical polemicist, castigating equally the Russian despots in Petersburg and his fellow socialists in exile in London, Geneva and Paris. In the years between the European-wide revolutions of 1848 and the czar’s brutal suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1863, he was one of the most provocative revolutionary minds of his time. When he was buried at Père Lachaise in Paris in 1870, a mourner exclaimed: ‘To the Voltaire of the 19th century!’ That is not how he has been remembered.”
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Transgenderism and human dignity.
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Donald Trump and excluding the uncouth.
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Oren Cass reviews Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic: “Levin illustrates how this nostalgia infects and distorts American politics, leading both parties to create platforms aimed at resurrecting a bygone era. Policymakers on the left are forever ‘seeking to add more rooms onto the mansion of the Great Society’ because they fail to recognize the ‘unstable dichotomy’ of economic consolidation and cultural liberalization it embodied. Presiding over the Obamacare vote in the House of Representatives, Levin notes, Nancy Pelosi proudly wielded the same gavel used by Congressman John Dingell for the passage of Medicare 45 years earlier. The Right, meanwhile, feels ‘the urge to define today’s problems as simply a reversal of Reagan-era achievements . . . . They paint in broad strokes an economy that could grow with gusto if only some straightforward, misguided restraints were removed.’ But ‘the combination of global circumstances, regulatory restraints, cultural exclusions, and policy controls’ that supported a ‘half-remembered golden age’ at mid-century ‘is not one that we could (or would want to) re-create today.’ So Levin poses the question at the book’s heart: ‘How can we make the most of the opportunities afforded by the dynamism and the freedom set loose by America’s postwar diffusion while mitigating its costs and burdens, especially for the vulnerable among us?'”
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In praise of Hugh Honour and John Fleming’s A World History of Art.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Kernel, Nathan Smith explains how a Vassar professor of English helped convict the Unabomber:
“With Kaczynski arrested, his court-appointed attorneys sought to have all the evidence from the cabin thrown out, arguing that the search warrant was invalid. In addition to David Kaczynski’s description of his brother and other circumstantial evidence, the affidavit supporting the search warrant claimed to have found similarities between ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’ and Ted Kaczynski’s known writing. The defense team wanted to challenge that analysis, arguing that anyone with an axe to grind against modern society could have written it.
“In response, the federal prosecutor asked Don Foster, a professor of English literature at Vassar College, to examine the Unabomber Manifesto, compare it to Kaczynski’s known writing, and offer his opinion on the question of authorship.
“The authorities came to Foster in part because he’d already received popular attention for identifying political commentator Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors, an anonymous 1992 novel fictionalizing Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. Using an electronically searchable copy of the novel, he’d compared text from the novel with Klein’s Newsweek columns, looking for repeated words, parallel syntax use, and unique phrases. As it turned out, the author of Primary Colors favored words like ‘lugubrious,’ ‘puckish,’ and even the phrase ‘tarmac-hopping,’ all of which were used repeatedly and uniquely by Klein.
“But Foster’s methods weren’t without controversy. Critics pointed out that others had already suspected Klein. That’s why his Newsweek columns had been included among the limited number of suspect texts Foster used for comparison. For months afterward, Klein refused to admit he was the author; Foster, it seemed to critics, waffled a bit in the face of Klein’s denial, offering that maybe the columnist wasn’t the only author. Nevertheless, Klein eventually confessed.
“So Foster agreed to perform a similar comparison between the manifesto and Kaczynski’s known writing. One overlap he noticed was the phrase ‘sphere of freedom.’ A previous expert had told the FBI the phrase was too common to suppose evidence of authorship. But using LexisNexis, Foster showed that of the 229 results listed by the search engine, 193 instances were quotations. Of the remaining 36 results, nine were dated after the publication of the manifesto. That suggested ‘sphere of freedom’ wasn’t a common phrase at all—it tied.”
Read the rest. (HT: Will Antonin)
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Image of the Day: Hallstatt
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Poem: Virgil, Excerpt from Aeneid Book VI (Translated by Seamus Heaney)
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