Category: Access

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

23 Jun, 2016

Wednesday’s Child (on Thursday): Independence Day

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The more one thinks about it, the clearer it becomes that freedom in our day and age is all about saving face.  And that some people in the world, perhaps an overwhelming majority of them, just don’t give a toss about having their face saved. Freedom is an entry in a roster of intangibles, on the same page as honor, dignity, sovereignty, faith, love, respect.   Drop any one of these metaphysical substances from the roster, and you will find that the remaining ones have become more inchoate as a result.   Excise another, and you will see that, rather...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

22 Jun, 2016

No One Ever Expects the Spanish Inquisition

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When I looked at Red Philipps’ recent piece on the NeverTrump movement, I realized how ignorant I am of the conservative zanies who populate the blogosphere.  He referred several times to one Eric Erickson.  If I had ever heard of this character, the name—so reminiscent of Swedish comic Ole Olson—had been rejected by my conscious mind as one more piece of lint it did not need.  I can already tell you who played Chester and Doc on the Gunsmoke radio  program and once read a bad book on Gandhi by another fraud of the same name.   Enough, as they...

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Feature / Heiner / On the House

21 Jun, 2016

Maintenant, ça suffit

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I’ve been out of Paris for a week now, and apart from a brief stop there on my way to London to watch the Brexit vote unfold, I will be out of my adopted home for another week still.  I continue to be bemused that such a generally kind and often generous populace is acting out in the most vicious and selfish of ways – and the current strikes are perhaps a visible sign of a silent sickness that has plagued France for some time. Now, I want to make it clear – I understand and respect that strikes are a way...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming / On the House

19 Jun, 2016

Autodidact: Readings for June

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By popular demand (at least three requests uttered in a diffident tone of voice), I am reintroducing some discussions of lighter works–in addition to the ongoing Aristotle–and a poem of the week. For the next few weeks, I propose to discuss three works by R.L. Stevenson:  The Wrong Box, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Dynamiter. I have been mostly absent from this site for over two weeks.  For more than a week, while I was in South Carolina attending the Abbeville Institute’s Summer School, my MacBook Air refused to turn on, and when, every few...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

15 Jun, 2016

At the Zoo

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Man taunts history much the way he abuses nature, like a young delinquent at the zoo who is completely certain that the wild animal he’s teasing is secure in its cage.  Like nature, history is patient, shrugging off his foolish provocations, and only once in a while does it emit a deafening roar and rattle the bars of the cage.  Even more rarely, it breaks out, and then woe betide the arrogant trespasser.  Then Nero fiddles as Dresden burns, Castro smiles and strokes his beard as Lisbon is leveled by the earthquake, and Genghis Khan’s motorized divisions march on the...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

9 Jun, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: More from Oxford

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  I was sitting in a New College quad, chatting with two habitués of HiLo, the Jamaican speakeasy that, in response to my post last week, a reader has playfully – and, on reflection, not wholly inaccurately – likened to this site.  The boys were both blond, affable, eloquent, and almost preternaturally polite, though obviously I was only too aware of their capacity for nocturnal Jekyll-and-Hyde mutation into what in England is called Hooray Henrys, drunken young men in black tie who vomit into public fountains and never tire of mocking their more scholarly peers. I asked the boys to...

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Feature / Fleming / On the House

6 Jun, 2016

Travel Diary of a Peripheral Male 1999, Part Two of Three

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MILAN It is small wonder if European conservatives hate the United States.  My room at the Hotel Granduca di York is cramped, too small to fit in a practical writing desk but big enough to hold an American window on the world–a TV set.  Next door is the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which holds a priceless collection of manuscripts, rare books, and paintings, but here in my room I have everything an American could need: CNN, 24 hours a day, as well as a variety of channels–Italian, French, German–all replaying episodes of Hunter, Friends, or Mad About You (that’s Dingue de Toi...

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Feature / Fleming / On the House

3 Jun, 2016

1999 Travel Diary of a Peripheral Male, Part One of Three

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An On The House Reprint from 1999 Midtlantic It has been a long day for this straight white European male.  O’Hare Airport is a sort of decompression chamber between Middle America and the rest of the world: rude United clerks who act as if they own the airline, the gauntlet of guards at the x-ray machines none of whom is able to speak English, and everywhere the stench of the Disneyworld cuisine: pizza, hotdogs, and every few feet a McDonald’s, whose unique blend of grease, sugar, and msg is the olfactory signature tune of the New World Order. If they...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

3 Jun, 2016

The Disneyland Primary

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  California is a crazy state, a kind of Venezuela attached to the Mainland USA and with the world’s top high-tech companies running things instead of Hugo Chavez’s heirs. Like Venezuela, California has massive shortages of local things, in particular housing, which costs more than $650,000 for buying a shotgun shack along the coast, with rents for one-bedroom garrets at more than $1,850 a month. Even if you can afford a house, or bought one before about 2000 when prices almost were reasonable, chances are your children won’t be able to afford to live here until they inherit your manse,...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

1 Jun, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Letter From Oxford

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  Life under a Kafkaesque socialist bureaucracy may have its good points, but clarity of mind is not among them.  Opposite the main entrance to New College, where in spite of having no visible moth damage to my sweater and coat I’d been mistaken for an academic and given a few nights’ shelter, is a Japanese restaurant. I was perusing the menu in the window to while away the time before my son arrived, and this read as follows: “(P) indicates suitable for pescatorians (fish eating vegetarians); (V) indicates suitable for vegetarians (no meat, no fish); please note that many...