Walk Around the Lift

There comes a point when you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. Any mechanic will tell you that it is invaluable to have other mechanics around to test your reasoning against, especially if they have a different intellectual disposition.

~

Even on the relatively primitive vintage bikes that were our specialty, some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. I quickly realized that there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank.

- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

Why the AfDs Wins in Germany

 Christopher Caldwell explains in First Things.

You may have seen his book on the problems in Europe.

On My List

 

Crank It Up

 

Small Project Week

 The Rhone household is onto something both small and big, starting with a spice drawer.

The Bad Old Days

 

A Dubious Quest for 'Reparatory Justice'

 If European abolitionists did not become saints overnight, African chiefs who insisted on business as usual were hardly Satanic. They were instead agents following a brutal social logic: So integral was enslavement to the internal workings and moral order of most African communities in that period that it is difficult to conceive of their functioning without it. Historically, a pre-colonial African kingdom that did not extract slaves from a vanquished vassal was as rare as one that did not regularly engage in slave raids. In the 1840s, Gezo, king of the West African state of Dahomey, told the importuning British, “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth.… The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.” In this, he echoed a sentiment that was not uncommon for the time.

Read all of Ebenezer Obadare's essay in Commentary magazine.

Work Work

 

From "Taken": The Importance of Skills

 

The Case Against College Degrees

MoneyWise: Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs argues for the trades.