The Doctor Is In: Oracular Wisdom
A podcast in which we begin to answer Dot’s question about the Delphic Oracle. The background of the image is a theater at the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona.
Category: Feature
Donald Rumsfeld, R.I.P.
Some conservatives are already ridiculing an Atlantic Monthly hit job on the late Donald Rumsfeld. Apparently, they don’t realize that a magazine staff writer is an expert on war and management. (This guy brags about how astonished DOD aides were, when he outlined his critique of the Iraq War.)
Journalists are like doctors: They know everything, especially in fields they have no experience in.
The Blondes of Wisconsin–Bukoski’s Best
In recent decades Anthony Bukoski has emerged as one of the best writers of short fiction, not just in America but in the English language. He has turned the ugly streets of his native Superior, Wisconsin, into a literary landscape as mythical as Faulkner’s Mississippi and Tolkiens Middle Earth and populated it with unforgettable characters whose failures and follies are redeemed by their self-respect and their capacity for love. Of his earlier collections, I wrote previously: Anthony Bukoski is one of the finest fiction writers in America. Stolidly remaining in the grim ruins of Superior, Wisconsin, he has...
World’s Worst Generals
“People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is: ‘Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.’”
– Col. John R. Boyd (U.S. Air Force, ret.)
From Abraham to Napoleon: Revival
The empire of the Babylonians was not fated to last, and Cyrus the Persian, after entering the city in triumph in 539, promulgated an edict authorizing the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. It has been conjectured that the Persians were rewarding Babylonian Jews for their covert assistance in the defeat of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, but, there is no need to posit such a special relationship. Cyrus’s general policy was to reverse the forced resettlement of inflicted on subject nations by Babylonian and Assyrian rulers, whose strategy of divide et impera would be emulated by later tyrants.
Wednesday’s Child: Canterbury Tales 2.0
Perhaps one needs to be a writer, or at any rate a storyteller by temperament, a habitual raconteur, to feel it, but for a man of such disposition there is no greater frustration than trying to relate an anecdote to the driver of a car while in the passenger seat
From Abraham to Napoleon, Part II
Few details of the story of Exodus have been securely confirmed by archeologists. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that nomadic Hebrews made their way out of Egypt back to southern Canaan, where some of their people appear to have been living already.
Ilhan Omar–Unwelcome Guest
Ilhan Omar’s campaign slogan was “Send Her Back”–to Congress, of course. There is no doubt that the Congress of the United States deserves a member as loose in her financial dealings as in her intimate life, but it is not to Washington but to Mogadishu that she should be sent.
Wednesday’s Child: Ongoing Enquiries
The news from my alma mater… Ah, but the gentle reader may not know that as a young man I spent many years in litigation with Yale University, which sought to shut down the literary magazine I edited for publishing poems that rhymed and, more generally, for airing views unsuitable to a modern place of learning.
