A Rare Show Where the Monster Shows Up Early

 

The Magazine Shuffle

 

Magazines rise and fall and many seem to linger in a state of limbo. 

Some, such as The Atlantic, can be excellent and ridiculous in the same issue.

When I was a young student of Government (the University of Arizona refused, in those enlightened days, to call it Political Science), I read The Nation, The New Republic, Time, National Review, Newsweek, The American Spectator, and U.S. News & World Report in order to get an array of viewpoints and soon added Commentary magazine to the mix after seeing a recommendation by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Esquire magazine was eagerly awaited back in the pre-woke days when it had writers such as Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe.

Nowadays, when newspapers are more inclined to confirm biases than to report the news, it helps to scour an even wider range of opinions, and some journals are rather eclectic. 

Some current members of my stack include: The Arizona Republic (my local paper), City Journal, Commentary, Compact, Fortune, Quillette, The Free Press, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Criterion, The Spectator, The Tablet, UnHerd, The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Examiner.

The quest continues.

[Photo by Philippe BONTEMPS at Unsplash]

More Scribbling

[Not my desk but you get the idea. Photo by eleonora at Unsplash]

I have some Substack essays to complete and a second novel that was set aside while Pilate's Magician was completed.

My assumption was that little book could be quickly done. [Guffaws in the hallway. Snorts in the den. Gunshots in the street.]

Now my office is recovering from the avalanche of paperwork surrounding the novel and yet the second book may also - will also - produce its own mountain ranges.

The task includes explaining a system where defense attorneys argue that their clients are guilty and physicians don't blink at the conscious, smoothly designed, murder of their "patients."

It sounds like something out of Orwell or Huxley but much more traditional. 

All about power. And that always makes it trickier.

Bear with me.

[And if you haven't read Pilate's Magician, whatsamatta you?]

On My List

 

The novel was great.

Memorial Day

 

From the Ken Burns's documentary, "The Civil War."

Find Something Beautiful Today

 

[Photo by James Newcombe at Unsplash]

Crank It Up

 

It's Crazy That It Ever Went Away

 Education Week: Cursive is making a comeback.

Rescuing New York City

New York City has a talent pool and structural problem.

And the solution can be found by studying what happened in an Arizona desert city in 1942.

[Photo by Triston Dunn at Unsplash]

First Paragraph

 This is the story of a group of extraordinary individuals, a constellation of talent in eighteenth-century London that was known simply as the Club. Though not a large group, its members made brilliant contributions to our culture that are still celebrated today. But there was another, perhaps even more important, requirement for Club membership: you had to be good company - ready to talk, laugh, drink, eat, and argue until late into the night at the weekly meetings at the Turk's Head Tavern. Unlike some later clubs, it had no premises of its own, but met in an ordinary London pub.

- From The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch