Reviews and News:
Michelangelo’s miscalculation: “His magnificent design for Pope Julius II’s tomb turned out to be the worst case of project overrun in art history.”
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Why youth wasn’t enough in Egypt: “After January 2011, Tahrir Square became a byword for hope, defiance and the unpredictability of history. The Egyptian people’s unexpected revolt baffled political scientists and other experts. Equally puzzling was the alacrity with which so many of the same Egyptians welcomed a new strongman a few short years later.”
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BuzzFeed sued over Trump dossier.
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Paris burglar explains the easy theft of five masterpieces from the city’s Museum of Modern Art: “‘It’s one of my easiest and biggest heists,’ Mr. Tomic told reporters on Friday outside the courtroom where he and two men accused as accomplices were on trial for the thefts…Mr. Tomic said at trial that he concentrated his efforts on one of the museum’s bay windows. During several scouting visits, he discreetly sprayed the window’s mounts with acid so they could be easily dismantled later. Then, around 3 a.m. on May 20, 2010, he disassembled the window, removed the glass, cut the padlock and the chain of the metal grid behind it and entered the museum. The alarm systems remained silent.” Mr. Tomic was arrested after he bragged about the heist to friends.
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The environmentalist who unintentionally killed millions: “Since the mid 1970s, when DDT was eliminated from global eradication efforts, tens of millions of people have died from malaria unnecessarily: most have been children less than five years old. While it was reasonable to have banned DDT for agricultural use, it was unreasonable to have eliminated it from public health use. Environmentalists have argued that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which was cancer. However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place.”
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An insider-trading tale that reads like a thriller: Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street “is a richly reported, entertaining tale about the cat-and-mouse game between the government and [Steve A.] Cohen — much of which played out in the news media — for the greater part of the last decade, if not longer.”
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Essay of the Day:
The University Bookman has put together an excellent symposium on immigration. Here’s a snippet from Gerald J. Russello’s editorial introduction:
“Unfortunately, debate over immigration is often innocent of any knowledge of history, culture, or demographics, and proceeds almost solely on the basis of the immediate political points to be made. To remedy this lack of serious thought, The University Bookman has invited a number of distinguished conservative scholars to consider how conservatives should think about immigration.
“Although the contributors differ in emphasis and, likely, policy prescriptions, some common themes emerge. The first is that America has a unique heritage: we are a nation committed to the truth that all men are created equal in political life, as David Azerrad explores in his reflections on the Declaration of Independence. But our equality is not the abstract Lockeanism that is prized by both the progressive left and the global capitalist right, in which we are seen merely as independent egos and consumers. Rather, we live in actual communities in the real world. These communities differ from one another and the people in them have the responsibility to maintain the goodness of these communities for ourselves and our posterity as our Constitution provides. But as Brad Birzer shows in his reflections, the personal experience of Americans, virtually all of whom descend from immigrants, cannot be discounted and must be integrated into the wider debate of how we treat newcomers. Indeed, Birzer makes the provocative point that nationalist restrictions on immigration is in fact a progressive innovation, and one inconsistent with American experience.
“This leads to a second commonality, one that was once obvious but seems to have been almost forgotten: not everyone has the right to immigrate to the United States, and it is an appropriate exercise of sovereignty to think carefully about which immigrants to allow in; this is what Daniel McCarthy refers to as the ‘proxy war’ over immigration, which reflects deeper divisions. This means that our immigration policy must be oriented around the good it does for America and Americans, as Yuval Levin suggests, and also a renewed emphasis on assimilation. Richard Reinsch refers us to the helpful work of Harvard immigration economist George Borjas, which has analyzed both the positive and negative effects of large-scale immigration on American workers.”
Read the essays here.
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Photo: Owls
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Poem: David Yezzi, “Capgras”
