Reviews and News:
The ugliness and diversity of Soviet architecture: “Some of the places Hatherley visits include public libraries throughout the Soviet bloc; art-house cinemas and milk bars in 1960s Poland, where surrealism almost became a standard decorative form; television towers in Moscow and Vilnius, which became monuments of modern mass media; the brutalist apartment complexes of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, where society more closely resembled North Korea than Russia; and the metro stations of Moscow, which Hatherley believes are the one specimen of Soviet architecture and public infrastructure superior to anything built in the West.”
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A first look at America’s new supergun: “‘Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to build a projectile like this because the cellphone industry, the smartphone industry, hadn’t perfected the components,’ said William Roper, the director of the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office. ‘It is a really smart bullet.'”
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Yuval Levin on how boomer nostalgia harms America.
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Nazi minds: “Are evildoers monstrous psychopaths, or is the capacity for wickedness inherent in every human being? The question never ceases to fascinate, and despite the myriad horrors of our time, the Nazis continue to provide its touchstone. In the latest attempt at an answer, the psychiatrist Joel E. Dimsdale revisits contemporary psychological evaluations of the defendants at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. In Anatomy of Malice, he provides a meandering, thoughtful, yet ultimately inconclusive overview, for the layman, of the minds of Nazi leaders, the differing views of the doctors who examined them, and psychology’s possible contribution to explicating the causes of evil.:
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In Case You Missed It:
The great emoji flood will “never stop!” “Michael Everson, a linguist living in Ireland, is responsible for helping the literary history of the human species survive in the digital age. He is also responsible for helping you give somebody the finger through your iPhone.”
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T. S. Eliot’s conservative modernism.
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Ethan Epstein takes a look at how Rush Limbaugh’s Sandra Fluke comments in 2012 hurt – and is still hurting – talk radio: “The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 that talk radio ad revenue was falling and that ‘advertising on talk stations now costs about half what it does on music stations, given comparable audience metrics.’ The Journal attributed this directly to the Media Matters campaign after the Fluke incident, with one radio executive saying that it ‘was enough to change the paradigm for all of talk radio.'”
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“It needs more public-spirited pigs”: T. S. Eliot’s rejection of Orwell’s Animal Farm published online.
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Classic Essay: James Q. Wilson, “The Bureaucracy Problem.” More about Wilson’s life and work at Contemporary Thinkers.
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Interview: John J. Miller talks with Yuval Levin about his new book, The Fractured Republic.
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