Reviews and News:
Make religious freedom great again: “In her concession speech…Hillary Clinton referred to the ‘freedom of worship’—piety limited to a synagogue, church, or mosque. But what the American founders protected was the right of all to live out their faith every day of the week in public and in private, provided they peacefully respect the rights of others. The reduction of religious liberty to mere freedom of worship is a hallmark of the Obama years.”
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Bradley Birzer reconsiders Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale: “When it first came out in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale was both praised and condemned for being anti-male as well as pro-abortion. Those who loved it and hated it viewed it as an updated, feminist 1984. Whether it was a poor reflection or a logical extension of Orwell’s classic, no one much cared. It was what it was. Little has changed today. Nearly every public school in the United States offers it as a modern classic, sometimes replacing and sometimes supplementing Brave New World and Lord of the Flies. Now it’s so pervasive that it’s taught in an almost perfunctory way…In reality, the story is as complicated as anything Huxley or Orwell wrote. Indeed, in many ways, The Handmaid’s Tale is the best dystopian novel written thus far, even better than its predecessors, in part because it builds so effectively on what came before it. As a grand work of art, it is deep. The story moves rapidly, but the symbolism and nuances take innumerable readings to discover. Without question, it is far too deep to be categorized in the simplistic terms of left or right.”
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A closer look at an alternate version of the Exodus story: “An alternate version of the Exodus story circulated in antiquity—one so bizarre it might as well have occurred in an alternate universe. In this version, the pharaoh decided to cleanse Egypt of lepers and other ‘unclean’ people, confining these unfortunates first in quarries, then in an abandoned city called Avaris. The lepers chose as their leader a priest named Osarseph, who proceeded to reject Egyptian culture just as that country had rejected him. Osarseph ordered his followers to stop worshiping the gods of Egypt, and also to feel free to dine on the sacred animals of the country. Not satisfied with that, he also arranged to have the country invaded by making alliance with the ‘Shepherds’—a group of people formerly expelled from Egypt, now living in Jerusalem. The lepers/shepherds tag team ravaged Egypt for 13 years before the pharaoh’s forces finally overcame them and they retreated to Syria. But before they left, Osarseph changed his name to ‘Moses.’…The Osarseph story was recorded by Josephus, writing in the 1st century a.d. As a Jew, Josephus was incensed by the tale, which he ascribed to an Egyptian author named Manetho. Josephus hotly denied any association with the leprous Egyptians of the story, declaring that Moses had, in fact, ‘lived many generations earlier,’ and denouncing Manetho as ‘a ridiculous liar.'”
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The violent push for transgender conformity: “Transgender ideology advances under the banner of progress and enlightened thinking. Yet its fundamental claim—that a human being can change his or her sex—’is starkly, nakedly false,’ according to Dr. Paul McHugh, who served for twenty-six years as psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins pioneered sex-change surgery, but abandoned it in the 1970s after research revealed that it did not improve the mental health of patients.”
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Jews and medicine: “Your bubbe was not the first to notice the restorative powers of chicken soup, aka ‘Jewish penicillin.’ The Egyptian Jewish philosopher physician Maimonides prescribed the broth in the twelfth century as a curative for respiratory illnesses—a recommendation that was backed up in 2000 by research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center showing that chicken soup can indeed slow inflammation associated with colds and flu.”
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Single sentence novel wins £10,000 literary prize.
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Essay of the Day:
What’s wrong with Vox? Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, explains in devastating detail:
“Do you know what your problem is? Your problem is not that you are uninformed. That is what you might have thought your problem was. Your problem is also not that you lack information. This is a common misconception. In fact, people nowadays have lots of information. Too much, even. No, your problem is the opposite. Your problem is that you cannot interpret the information you have. You lack the guiding hand of expertise. You need a vox dei, a little Voice of God whispering in your ear, helping you along, telling you what it all means. You need someone to let you know what’s what, to find the truth for you and analyze it and put it in orderly stacks of notecards with little suggested opinions on them.
“For the past two years, Ezra Klein’s philosophy in running Vox.com has been precisely this: people do not need facts, they need explanations. The ordinary person is ill-equipped to interpret the facts, to figure out what they mean. Klein rejects what he calls the ‘More Information Hypothesis,’ the idea that a better-informed citizenry could have more productive political debates. In fact, because we see facts through partisan lenses, facts alone are useless. People are irresponsible with knowledge; facts just make them ‘better equipped to argue for their own side.’
“Thus for Klein, the job of experts is not to give the public raw information, so that it can come to its own conclusions. The job of experts is to process the information themselves, and tell the public what it ought to have concluded. They are not here to help you figure out what you believe. You are a hopelessly irrational consumer. They are here, rather, to tell you what to think.
“Vox therefore does not hesitate to make strong judgments. Its headlines frequently declare that ‘No, X is not what you think it is…’ or tell you ‘Here’s the real reason why…’ It promises to give everything you need to know on a subject, eliminating the need for further curiosity on the reader’s part. If you don’t know what the 18 best television shows are, Vox will tell you. (Quantification is its specialty; Vox builds trust by knowing the numbers, by having the data.) The Vox ‘explainers’ say it plainly :about this, there can be no doubt.
“Yet strangely, Vox staff would likely bristle at being called mere manufacturers of “opinion” or ‘commentary.’ This is because when a Vox-er declares a scandal to be ‘bulls**t,’ he intends it as fact rather than opinion. There is no attempt to distinguish between the journalistic and the editorial. It all blurs together as ‘analysis.’ Vox is therefore an exercise in the simultaneous having and eating of cake; it wishes to both make strong value-laden assertions and be trusted as neutral and dispassionate. This means that Vox inherently practices a crude and cruel form of rhetorical dishonesty: it treats matters of profound complexity as if they are able to be settled through mere expertise. If anyone disagrees with what the wonks have concluded, they must be dumb, delusional, or both.
“As conservatives quickly pointed out after Vox‘s debut, this ends up meaning that liberal political values are implicitly assumed to be factually correct. It has also meant that over the course of 2015-2016, Vox became a powerful propaganda outlet for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It would run features like ‘The 11 moments that define Hillary Clinton‘ (Of course there are exactly 11). These would include important milestones like ‘How the 2008 loss turned Hillary into a hipster’ but would completely leave out Goldman Sachs and Clinton’s devastation of Libya.
“Clinton appeals so perfectly to the Vox sensibility that its writers become puzzled when trying to figure out how anyone could oppose her. So Ezra Klein will ruminate on the mystery of why Hillary Clinton is distrusted by the public but liked by those in her inner circle, concluding that it is because Clinton is a careful listener who prefers paying attention to the views of others rather than explaining her own. (Klein doesn’t mention the equally plausible thesis that Clinton is distrusted because she tells lies about things and treats the public with cynicism and contempt.) Or Dylan Matthews will wonder why Hillary Clinton is not being given credit for her incredibly ambitious socially progressive policy platform. (Failing to consider that almost nobody thinks Hillary Clinton will ever actually make any attempt to put that platform into action.)”
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Image of the Day: San Marino
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Poem: Isabel Galleymore, “The Ash”
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