Reviews and News:
The difficult life of Betty MacDonald, author of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books.
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François Mitterrand’s letters to his mistress: “The release last Thursday of that collection, Letters to Anne — along with a fanciful scrapbook Mr. Mitterrand kept for Ms. Pingeot from 1964 to 1970 — offer a rare glimpse into the life of a man generally seen as icy and Machiavellian, and who never left his wife even while he lived for years with Ms. Pingeot. The publication also reflects a changing France, where private lives were once held so sacred that the public learned of Mr. Mitterrand’s second family only when a French magazine broke the news two years before his death in 1996.”
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Winston Churchill in South Africa.
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In Auden’s late prose, he was “especially fascinated by artists and writers who were more or less monstrous or obsessive, who exemplified intellectual temptations that he himself had experienced and refused.”
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Modernism’s dunce: “In every medium, Cocteau maintained to the end the manners of a Belle Époque host: he never fails to entertain. During his life this rendered his high modernist credentials suspect — but none of that matters now. As Arnaud shows, the amiability, as well as the manic productivity, stem from a kind of despair: the world is a misunderstanding.”
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E. F. Benson’s Ghost Stories: “Benson’s monsters tend to be enormous slug-like creatures, grey and faintly luminous, acting as the terrible instruments of God’s wrath. As vehicles for giving readers the willies, they are most effective.”
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Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, Andy Smarick takes stock of charter schooling at 25:
“For 100 years, from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, nearly every American K-12 public school shared several defining features. Whether you found it in a rural town, a major city, or a sprawling suburb, you could say for certain a number of things about that school. It was run by a government body (the school district) that had been given exclusive control over public education in that area. Students were assigned to the school based on where they lived. A public governing board or official—typically elected—made the most important decisions about the school’s operations.
“Over the last quarter-century, these rules and other chapters of the public-education canon have been rewritten. Because of a simple but profound policy innovation, our understanding of how public schools can be operated, enrolled in, and overseen has been transformed. Even more remarkable is how these changes took place. They weren’t the result of bossy federal mandates or sweeping court decisions. Their progress wasn’t directed by distant administrators or fueled by a tangle of government agencies. They didn’t occur suddenly or all at once.
“Behind this incremental revolution—the charter school movement, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this fall—was a collection of principles that will be familiar to conservatives especially. Charter schools explicitly shifted power from the government to individuals and neighborhood organizations. They prioritized local needs and local decision-making. They trusted families and practitioners to have better information and more wisdom than technocrats. They made room for entrepreneurialism and innovation. They cultivated a diversity of school options to suit a pluralistic society. They focused governments on outcomes instead of inputs. They emerged from piecemeal reform of a longstanding institution, which proceeded slowly from modest community initiatives, not all at once in accordance with grand plans devised by experts.
“Though welfare reform is perhaps conservatism’s most visible domestic policy success of the last generation, charter schools may be more significant, and may have more ripple effects in the future. At a time when Donald Trump has tempted the Republican party and conservatism towards an embrace of statism, strong central leadership, and bellicose certainty, charter schooling represents a textbook case of the opposite: how individual empowerment, an enlivened civil society, and a modest skepticism about complex, centralized solutions can change lives for the better. Indeed, the story of charter schooling, a national movement that grew from an early-1990s Minnesotan pilot program, could serve as an inspiration for conservative policy leaders in the months and years ahead.”
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Image of the Day: Lenticular cloud
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Poem: Midge Goldberg, “The Molt”
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