Category: Access
Wednesday’s Child: The $5000 Question
All my philosemitic friends love this joke, so I’m going to tell it without fear of infamy. The fact is, this is only my second joke in 156 posts, and I have a good sense that by now the gentle reader may well be more tired of my own humor than of other people’s.
October Surprises Coming
In American political parlance, an October Surprise is something launched to affect an election just before voters go to the polls, this year on November 6. There also are run-ups to the October Surprises, such as Vyshinsky’s – I mean Mueller’s – witch hunts against President Trump’s associates, which have had nothing to do with Mueller’s portfolio to look into non-existent Russian rigging of the 2016 election.
Wednesday’s Child: The Errant Way
While invoking Conrad or Nabokov would be a bit of overkill, the fact is that passing for a native in a language other than one’s mother tongue – in my own case, moreover, a native whose literary persona is distinctly curmudgeonly – invites comment. In particular, it is often said that learning a foreign language any time after puberty, as was Stalin’s case with Russian, condemns the learner to a lifetime of subtle humiliations. Stefano, a friend from London who has been almost absurdly kind to me over the years, has now got it into his head that he wants...
The New God of AltRight
Why would a kid attracted to AltRight fall for Jim Morrison, Freud, and Nietzsche? Why wouldn’t he? Morrison is simply a latter-day Peter Pan on acid, the perfect model for displaced white kids who don’t know who or what they are
Wednesday’s Child: A Touch of Autobiography
I was raised in a world of sedentary feats, in a cultural microcosm which deliberately undervalued experience. More than that, it treated experience as a kind of monstrous blemish upon the face of thought, a defect that was deemed the more ungainly for being the more noteworthy, unexpected, or rare
The Wall at the World’s End
Donald Trump has still not been able to build his wall to keep America safe from Central American kitchen workers who got to the bathroom and don’t wash their hands before returning to work. But if neighboring aliens are still pouring in to the USSA, news has come of a formidable deterrent to the other kind of alien–things from outer space. The New Horizons spacecraft, cruising somewhere in the neighborhood of Pluto, has detected what could be a hydrogen wall. Score a big one for Donald! We all know how fond the Democrats are of aliens, but not everyone is...
Poems of the Week
Spanish is the lovin’ tongue,
Soft as music, light as spray.
‘Twas a girl I learnt it from,
Livin’ down Sonora way.
Herodotus Book I, concluded
Herodotus devoted much of the first book to the Persians, their conquest of Lydia, and their subjugation of the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor and the offshore islands. He spends a great deal of time on the Ionian Revolt, provoked by Persian expansion, because it is both the predecessor and a major cause of the first Persian War with the mainland Greek cities. The early Greeks, who were not unified either in dialect or ethnicity, were divided into distinct ethnic and dialect groups: The Ionians, who were predominant in Asia Minor, the Aegean islands, the great island...
