Reviews and News:
Roger Scruton’s confessions: “Art critics, like Oscar Wilde’s definition of the cynic, know the price of everything and the value of nothing, Roger Scruton says in an essay about kitsch that begins his latest book, Confessions of a Heretic. Today critics praise modern art filled with so much that ‘tells you how nice you are: it offers easy feelings on the cheap.'”
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The case against artifact reparations: “Returning objects, and angrily demanding their return, serves today’s great powers in much the same fashion that seizing those same objects served them centuries ago. ‘Consider,’ Jenkins writes, ‘what energy and ideas are diverted away from imagining a better future when those who would have fought for it are now so distracted by finding the cause of present problems predominantly in the past.'”
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James Lee Burke’s bayou noir.
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The forgotten Agnes Repplier: “Who remembers Agnes Repplier? From her first essay in 1881 to her death in 1938 this half-Southern Catholic woman produced some of the most admired prose in America. Ellery Sedgwick, her editor at the Atlantic Monthly, called her ‘a sort of contemporary ancestor, a summation of the best that has gone before.’ Yet her books are entirely out of print. In his collection of Repplier’s essays, American Austen: The Forgotten Writings of Agnes Repplier, historian John Lukacs resurrects a lost American talent.”
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Russell Berman reviews Mitch McConnell’s new memoir: “If Ryan wants people to see him as earnest, McConnell is fine if they merely see him as shrewd. He’s no idealist, and he has little use for purists.”
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The fall of the house of Wilde: Sir William Wilde’s sons “Willie and Oscar died as outcasts; Jane died a pauper. Willie, a London Daily Telegraph journalist, drank as though immune from the wall-eyed hangover of tomorrow. By the time he married a wealthy American widow, Mrs. Frank Leslie, in 1891, liquor had got him well and truly licked. (The marriage was dissolved after a private eye reported evidence of adultery.) Willie’s wild drinking was fuelled by jealousy for his younger brother’s literary acclaim and, perhaps, by experiences of abandonment and loneliness following his father’s death back in Dublin in 1876. Like most alcoholics, Willie Wilde was a mess of self-pity, mendaciousness and gleeful irresponsibility. His shambolic, unwashed appearance prompted Oscar to make his famous quip: ‘He sponges on everyone but himself.’ Having resorted to stealing and selling Oscar’s clothes for more booze, Willie died in London in 1899 at the age of 46. His daughter Dorothy Wilde, no less wretched, perished of a heroin overdose in France.”
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Yannick Nézet-Séguin named music director of the Met: “For the first time in four decades, the Metropolitan Opera has a new music director. The company announced on Thursday that it was passing the baton long held by James Levine to Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, known for vital, visceral music making. The generational shift to Mr. Nézet-Séguin, 41, from Mr. Levine, 72, who stepped down last month after years of uncertainty and cancellations because of health problems, comes at a challenging time for the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts institution — and for opera.” (HT: Barton Swaim)
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The cosmopolitan king: “King Edward VII loved smoking, a habit his mother detested. As Prince of Wales, he abandoned White’s, the famous gentlemen’s club, where tobacco use was restricted, and in 1868 became a founding member of the Marlborough, where it was permitted, even encouraged everywhere save the dining room. He pressed the habit upon his friends and his children and even tolerated it in his wife, Queen Alexandra, who enjoyed cigarettes while playing solitaire in the evenings. Richard Davenport-Hines, the author of many justly celebrated biographies and the editor of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s absorbing Wartime Journals, brings sympathy and good humor to his brief life of this raffish and not entirely pleasant sovereign.”
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Essay of the Day:
This weekend the Swiss voted down a referendum to give all citizens a universal basic income of $2500 per adult. (77% opposed the measure.) In The Wall Street Journal, Charles Murray argues that the American government should replace welfare with an “annual grant” of $13,000:
“In my version, every American citizen age 21 and older would get a $13,000 annual grant deposited electronically into a bank account in monthly installments. Three thousand dollars must be used for health insurance (a complicated provision I won’t try to explain here), leaving every adult with $10,000 in disposable annual income for the rest of their lives.
“People can make up to $30,000 in earned income without losing a penny of the grant. After $30,000, a graduated surtax reimburses part of the grant, which would drop to $6,500 (but no lower) when an individual reaches $60,000 of earned income. Why should people making good incomes retain any part of the UBI? Because they will be losing Social Security and Medicare, and they need to be compensated.
“The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper.”
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Image of the Day: D-Day
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Poem: Kathryn Starbuck, “I Fell Asleep among the Horses”
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