Conor Friedersdorf picks apart Moira Weigel’s review of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind. The headline of the review is “How Elite US Liberals Have Turned Rightwards.” Friedersdorf: “That display copy says: Never mind the merits of the book’s thesis—what’s important here, fellow leftists, is where the authors fall on a left-right ideological spectrum and what psychological factors may be motivating them. What’s a truth proposition when there’s an ongoing culture war to fight? What unfolds over the body of the review isn’t quite a character assassination of the authors so much as a series of premeditated assaults.”
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has passed away. Bill Gates remembers Allen in The Atlantic. Maximilíano Durón writes about Allen’s extensive art collection and how a trip to the Tate in London thirty years ago kick-started his interest in collecting.
The great William Hazlitt: “To read Hazlitt is often to feel the chasm of years instantly collapse, bringing him beside us. He can sound, for all his period references, compellingly up to date. The word ‘modern’ is attached to Hazlitt so frequently that it can sometimes feel like part of his name. Historian Paul Johnson hailed him as ‘a truly great writer, perhaps the first truly modern writer in England,’ a conclusion that gets a thumbs-up from critic Joseph Epstein. ‘Among Hazlitt’s contemporaries,’ Epstein notes, ‘Coleridge was certainly more wide-ranging, Wordsworth in his particular line deeper, [Charles] Lamb more winning. But Hazlitt . . . feels more like our contemporary, which is another way of saying that he seems more modern.’”
Here are a couple of items on Russell Kirk that might interest you. As part of their “Russell Kirk Week,” FORMA has posted an excerpt of Annette Kirk’s 1995 talk on life with her late husband: “Russell’s emphasis on things of the heart and the hearth became more evident after we married and began to have daughters. So mindful was he of pleasing children that when building an addition onto his ancestral home, he instructed the carpenters to place the windows closer to the floor so little ones could look out more easily. He also made sure there was a room in a tower that could be used as a clubhouse and a winding staircase to a cupola set atop the house allowing them to view village fireworks on the Fourth of July. To entertain them he created a garden walk and called it the Troll’s Path.” And at Law and Liberty, James Matthew Wilson reviews Kirk’s letters.
Michael Weingrad reviews what he calls the first anthology of Israeli science fiction and fantasy stories: “Whether or not you like the pun in its two-word main title—try saying it quickly—Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature is an impressive English-language collection of stories originally written in either Hebrew or English. It includes tales of invasions both alien and angelic, dystopias in which childrearing is outlawed in favor of technologically produced adulthood, a marriage between Death and a Jerusalem maiden, and other inventive imaginings. To grasp the special virtues of this effort, it helps to contrast it with the last major anthology of a similar kind, People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, published in 2010.
A Reader Recommends: Connie Kirk recommends the novels of Robin Jenkins. Here’s what she says: “I was in Oban, Scotland, looking for a Scottish author, and I found an author of a lifetime. Andrew Marr calls him ‘The best-kept secret in modern British literature…if you are interested in books that are humane and wise, not slick and cynical; then treat yourself this year to some Robin Jenkins.’ I can recommend The Cone-Gathers, Fergus Lamont, Leila, Poverty Castle, The Changeling, The Thistle and the Grail. I have read four of these more than once, and there are many more books that I have not read. (Yea!)” Thanks, Connie!
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Justin Zaremby writes in praise of Hanna Holborn Gray, who withstood a “lifetime of threats to academic freedom—from the Third Reich to loyalty oaths in the 1950s to the student protests of the 1960s” to defend the “principle of liberty within the academy”:
“Nearly twelve years ago, while completing my dissertation, I was seated next to Hanna Holborn Gray at a conference dinner. The Renaissance historian, who served as the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, told me about the changes she had witnessed in higher education during a long career, and described many of the émigré scholars whose works occupied my time and whom she had known—Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Henry Kissinger, to name a few. Gray’s sonorous voice and matter-of-fact approach to education mesmerized this eager graduate student. I resolved to learn more about her, and a few weeks later sought her permission to write her biography. She politely declined my request.
“In retrospect, it was Gray’s no-nonsense approach to higher education that I found most enthralling. Contemporary leaders at major research universities often seem to apologize for the work of their schools. Speeches from such presidents regularly focus on the responsibility of research universities to train leaders, socially conscious citizens, and entrepreneurs, or to provide the critical-thinking skills that employers value. Colleges regularly repackage graduation requirements in an effort to make a college education seem sexy and relevant. Rather than acknowledge research and teaching as intrinsically important—for the individual and society—university leaders risk coming across as snake-oil salesmen, boldly selling a product in which they have little confidence. It is no wonder students increasingly view themselves as consumers—confident that their demands with respect to every aspect of campus life (from curriculum to investment strategies) will be granted. Gray offered the unapologetic defense of higher education that I had longed to hear.
“‘As daughter and granddaughter, sister and niece, and finally spouse of an academic,’ she begins, ‘I have lived in the university world all my life.’ It is that world which Gray records in An Academic Life, a book that largely eschews confession in favor of a more dispassionate and annalistic chronicle of American higher education in the post-war period and the various institutions where she studied, taught, and governed. This opening line also reflects the ironic tone that flows through the book. Gray is generally applauded for being the first woman to serve in numerous executive roles in higher education, but, to her chagrin, this often became the primary focus of the media attention she received over the years, which ‘took the theme of the “first woman” to do this or that;’ she laments that ‘reporters never seemed to take any interest in my views on education or other relevant topics.’”
Photos: Seven square miles
Poem: Katy Rawdon, “The Winter Garden”
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