Reviews and News:
How did the West become so rich? According to Deirdre McCloskey, it can be attributed to one thing above others: Freedom. “What enriched the modern world wasn’t capital stolen from workers or capital virtuously saved, nor was it institutions for routinely accumulating it. Capital and the rule of law were necessary, of course, but so was a labor force and liquid water and the arrow of time…The coupling of ideas in the heads of the common people yielded an explosion of betterments…Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious.”
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What makes bad writers bad? “Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself. While bad writers may read a great many diverse works of fiction, they are unable or unwilling to perceive the things these works do which their own writing fails to do. So the most dangerous kind of writers for bad writers to read are what I call excuse writers – writers of the sort who seem to grant permission to others to borrow or imitate their failings. I’ll give you some examples: Jack Kerouac, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou.”
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An uncondescending history of magic.
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The lessons of Sparta.
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In Case You Missed It:
Dante’s marriage: “Dante’s wife Gemma was not the shrew of legend, and may even have been the recipient of one of his most moving Canzone, according to Marco Santagata’s indispensable biography of the poet.”
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Saint Augustine among the barbarians: “In a series of letters to Boniface, the confused Roman commander, the Saint in no uncertain terms argued that secular authorities had the duty to protect the social order and the populations entrusted to them.”
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The beauty of American topographical maps: “At the close of the Second World War, the United States government embarked on an enormous artistic enterprise. It is estimated to have cost nearly $3 billion and, at its height, employed more than 2,000 people. I am talking about the topographic mapping program of the United States Geological Survey. It was an opus of Whitmanesque proportion, a heroic rendering of the American landscape; every last whorl and hachure and dotted line of actual topography — not to mention the name of every last desert wash, old mine or glorified goat track — was exhaustively cataloged. This 54,000-tile mosaic was not, of course, done in the cause of aesthetics, but it nevertheless represents as gorgeous and complete a depiction of the country as any ever made.”
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How Lewis and Tolkien fell out.
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Classic Essay: Paul Elmer More, “The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne”
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Interview: Ben Domenech talks with Matthew Mehan about what Shakespeare can teach leaders.
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