“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” is, famously, the opening sentence of a 1941 essay by Orwell. But Blitz or no Blitz, to our ears the phrase sounds a little hysterical.
“Conservatives are waxing wroth over a New York City high school principal who sent anti-white racist materials to parents in which a scale of “whiteness was outlined ranging from Uncle Tom Whiteys labelled “White Abolitionists” to the downright evil “White Supremacists” by way of varying shades of collaboration or resistance to America’s entrenched racist regime.
The Trump Show Trial coincided with my finishing Stephen Kotkin’s “Stalin: The Paradoxes of Power.” The monumental book ends with two events: Stalin deciding that Marxist principles dictated finally collectivizing agriculture, which led to 7 million deaths in the Holodomor. And the Shakhty Trial of mine workers, which Uncle Joe – as American liberals lovingly called him – used to shock any objectors to collectivization into submission.
Very early in the history of movies, Sweden produced a couple of directors of the first rank, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, both of whom were brought to Hollywood, where each made a handful of features with major stars, most notably including Great Garbo, who came to America with Stiller, who had discovered her.
Reverence for the Holy Name is the positive alternative to the Commandment against taking it in vain.
A friend of a friend asked his friend, a medical student, how many bones there are in the human body. In reply he heard that there is no definite answer. “You mean to tell me,” he pressed on in astonishment, “that since the days of the Victorian vivisectionists nobody’s bothered to come up with the answer?”
In selecting books to read, many people are content to employ The Random Walk method of my childhood, when I was set loose, without guidance, in a library to prowl on my own. This method has the advantage of finding hidden treasures, but it’s a bit like digging for gold, without any knowledge of what gold is and where it can be found, in a vacant lot. You’re more likely to find old soup cans, dog excrement, and sodden rotting copies of the shopper insert in the daily newspaper.
Thomas Campion was a great song-writer of the 16th and 17th centuries. Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine, Let well-turned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights Sleep’s leaden spells remove. This time doth well dispense With lovers’ long discourse; Much speech hath some defense, Though beauty no remorse. All do not all things well; Some measures comely tread, Some knotted riddles tell, Some...
In 1945, a decorated artillery officer in the Red Army wrote a letter ridiculing “the mustachioed one,” Stalin. He was arrested by the secret police and given a long sentence in the Gulag. That was Solzhenitsyn. Last week Douglass Mackey was arrested for making jokes during the 2016 election. He went under the nom de comedy Ricky Vaughn, after the character played by Charlie Sheen in Major League,”the 1989 baseball spoof. Tyrannies don’t like comedy. Vaughn’s alleged crime was putting up on Twitter suggestions that Hillary Clinton supporters could vote for her by tweeting to a specific number. Only an...
I pledge to my supporters that I shall do what I can to restore the vision of political order that inspired the drafters of the Constitution.
