Category: Access

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

26 May, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Invitation to a Beheading

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Readers may recall how, in a post at the beginning of March, I unveiled before them a portrait of absolute evil in the shape of a voluble blonde.  My model for the portrait was Russian, which is hardly surprising, as ours is the land of the Great Purge and, years before that, of atrocities against humankind that make present-day savagery in Syria and Iraq seem like postprandial deliberations in the House of Lords.  Beheading is execution; stuffing mouths with shards of broken glass, as the Bolsheviks liked doing in the Crimea in 1919, is gratuitous cruelty; and between the two...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

18 May, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: What is to be Done

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  We are in full bloom of summer here, with the vendor on the corner of our street and the Vucciria market detonating bunches of flowers on the sidewalk like fireworks over the Thames.  The first peaches are out, too.  The spring’s pent up heat explodes so violently in Sicily, as if to bust the dams of summertime in an act of solar sabotage, that it creates an anomaly, whereby the first fruit and vegetables of every season taste best – unlike the more northern parts of Italy, to say nothing of the rest of Europe, where their flavor comes...

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Autodidact / Feature / On the House

15 May, 2016

Aristotle’s Politics, Book II, i-iii

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In the second book of the Politics, Aristotle takes up, classifies, and analyzes the variety of political systems, both real and theoretical.  His initial point of departure is sharing or having in common (koinonein):  Do the citizens of a commonwealth have all things, some things, or no things in common?

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

11 May, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Valencia

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Funny thing, déjà vu.  However trifling the original experience that triggers it years later, no sooner is it relived in the present than it acquires mystical significance. I had a brush with it over the weekend, when some Russian friends flew us over to Spain to stay with them for a few days at their house by the sea. This was a couple of hours’ drive from Valencia, on the Iberian Peninsula’s eastern coast.  Driving from the airport through small seaside towns and villages, suddenly I noticed with horror that half the shop signs were in Russian.  Family restaurants, hair...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

6 May, 2016

Does Your Daughter Feel a Draft?

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  “There ain’t no draft no more.” – Sgt. Hukla in “Stripes” Say, isn’t the U.S. House of Representatives supposed to be controlled by Republican “conservatives,” almost all of whom oppose the non-conservative Donald Trump? Weren’t they elected to a majority in the 2010 Tea Party campaign to repeal Obamacare? Well, the conservatives just voted to impose the draft on girls. H.R. 4478 actually is called the Draft America’s Daughters Act of 2016. Reportedly it was put up as a jest by “Rep. Duncan Hunter, a former Marine who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, [but] does not...

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

4 May, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: But ah, my Foes, and oh, my Friends

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Vladimir Bukovsky, whom I became friends with while living in Cambridge in the late 80’s, was born in 1942.  In 1963, while a student in Moscow, he was arrested and charged with possession of forbidden literature. As it was thought more convenient to pronounce a lad of 20 insane than to bother with a trial, he was committed to a special psychiatric hospital.  He was released in February 1965 and arrested again in December of that year for organizing a street demonstration.  This time he was committed to a psychiatric hospital of the ordinary type. Released in July 1966, in...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

2 May, 2016

Racism–and the Rose by Any Other Name OTH

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This a revision of three old pieces on the same subject: Thucydides observed, in his famous depiction of the civil war on Corfu, that political partisans change the meanings of words.   Dictionaries have become instruments of ideological oppression.  The movement began long before the end of the millennium. “We very clearly had made a mistake,” said the marketing director of Merriam-Webster, explaining her company’s decision to pull an on-line thesaurus that included “faggot” and “fruit” as synonymns for “homosexual.” While many homophiles freely use expressions like “faggot” and “fruity,” and “butch,” they reserve the right to dictate polite usage...

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Autodidact / Fleming / On the House / Poetry

30 Apr, 2016

Mr. Autodidact’s Poem(s) of the Week

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First is a sonnet by Tennyson, not one of his best, perhaps, but indicating his distaste for professional critics and men of letters: Poets and Their Bibliographies Old poets foster’d under friendlier skies, Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in the readers’ eyes; And you, old popular Horace, you the wise Adviser of the nine-years-ponder’d lay, And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay, Catullus, whose dead songster never dies; If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere That once had roll’d you round and round...

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All Paid Subscribers / Seiler

29 Apr, 2016

Neocons Losing Friends Over Trump

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I didn’t know Neocons had friends. I thought they only had interests. But both Peter Wehner in the NY Times and Tom Nichols at The Federalist whine they have “lost friends” over opposing Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. Well, some friends of mine in 2006 “lost” their son in the Iraq War, which these two chickenhawks supported, Wehner even as the head of Bush’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. I went to the funeral. And another former neighbor of mine got a 100% disability in Iraq. It’d say each is a bigger “loss” than somebody de-Friending you on Facebook. One of the...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

28 Apr, 2016

Glossed in Translation

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Every one of us knows something about lying – not that I’d ever dream of casting aspersions on the probity of my readers–and it isn’t always from books that the bitter knowledge comes.  And the one thing about lying that any normal person who’s ever been caught with his hand in the cookie jar understands is that the lie has to be convincing, otherwise it would be best to simply say nothing and look injured, leaving it to others to make the necessary excuses. A convincing lie, in fact, needs to surpass the truth in verisimilitude, because a salient feature...