Turning and turning in the widening gyre
They [the Serbs] found a remarkable solution: They felt sorry for themselves. They marinated in self-pity; self-cherishing, they fairly caramelized themselves in sentimentality. They solved their formidable moral problem by declaring themselves the injured party. An artful if disgraceful display of jujitsu; this is a tactic one encounters in wife beaters and child abusers, who ingeniously manage to convince themselves, if not the authorities, that they were driven to it by the terrible behavior of their victims.
- From Evil: An Investigation by Lance Morrow
My first studio movie was The Way We Were. Like everyone else I was dazzled by Bob and Barbara. They were both terrific to me and I learned a lot from them both. Bob used to hide in my trailer so they’d stop pulling at him every five minutes. We would sit and talk about the difference between theatre and movie acting, and his advice went a long way in my life. Years later he came to a New York stage performance, and I remember he wrote a personal note to every one in the cast. He knew the impact he had on people, especially his fellow artists, and he used it graciously at every opportunity. . He was an incredibly giving and lovely man. I’m grateful for the short time and chats we had together. Thank you, Bob, and may you rest in peace.
- James Woods
Christopher Caldwell examines one of the major issues of today in The Claremont Review of Books.
He wrote Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West in 2009.
The Europeans like to take their time on potentially fatal threats.
The September 15, 2025 issue of The Wall Street Journal reports that the publisher of Rolling Stone is suing Google, alleging that the AI overviews use reporting from various sources without appropriate compensation.
It is reasonable to expect a variety of litigation on related issues.
This could be a major area of vulnerability for A.I. in the United States.
The Chinese, shall we say, are more flexible in such matters.
I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that, in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last 2,000 years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.
- Kenneth Clark, Civilization
[Photo by Constantinos Kollias at Unsplash]
Read all of Heather Mac Donald's essay in City Journal.
The Free Press on the larger significance of the murder of Charlie Kirk.
We fear his assassination represents a watershed moment for free expression in this country. We worry that his murder will have a profound chilling effect—that people will shy away from open discussion, that they will avoid honest debate, and that they will turn away from sticking their neck out for fear that engaging with their fellow citizens might mean an engraved bullet will be meant for them.
We must not let that happen.
Douglas Murray writing in the New York Post. An excerpt:
You might say that anybody could have done that.
But anybody didn’t, and anybody doesn’t.
And in any case, Charlie Kirk was not just anybody.
He didn’t just give people a platform and debate his ideas and theirs.
He listened.
We seem to be in the Loon Self-Identification Stage of a national tragedy.
This is a relatively new development, but it should be an invaluable resource to HR departments and voters in the future.
The Man Who Never Sleeps, the incomparable Nicholas Bate, is now at a new blog site.
We always knew he was a Hunter Gatherer.
My Substack has some excellent resources and you don't even need to know the difference between Octavian and Augustus.
[Photo by Jorgen Hendriksen at Unsplash]
The first assassination I personally remember was that of President John F. Kennedy. It was so jarring that many of us felt we'd seen the end of assassinations for a while.
After all, such violence was not supposed to happen in a civilized and advanced society.
But then came the assassinations of Malcolm X, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Those were followed by numerous assassination attempts: one on Alabama Governor George Wallace; two on President Gerald Ford and one on President Ronald Reagan.
And, of course, two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump.
And now, the political assassination of Turning Point leader Charlie Kirk.
The monsters are out there, and they always want to take away our choice,
Mike Burke, writing in Commentary magazine, has a very interesting article on Japan's rising strength.
[Photo by Arron Choi at Unsplash]
"The Party Secretary catches Kovacs," said Szocs changing tack. "'Comrade Kovacs, why weren't you at the last Party meeting?'" "The last Party meeting?" replies Kovacs. "If I'd known it was the last Party meeting, I'd have brought the whole family.'"
- From Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer
Best wishes on a full and speedy recovery to Patrick Rhone, intrepid Volvo driver.
[We had a Volvo station wagon for many years. It was built like a tank.]
"And that's before you even notice that he's holding a knife."
Kat Rosenfield, writing in The Free Press, examines the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte, North Carolina light rail car.
City Journal: Kay S. Hymowitz on the midlife divorce problem.
[Photo by Kier in Sight Archives at Unsplash]
One of the strangest things about an American university education is that it bundles a whole lot of things together. If you want to take a course in high-level mathematics or listen to the lectures of an accomplished historian of Ming China, you must also buy membership in one of the country's most lavish gyms; purchase all-you-can-eat meals at breakfast, lunch, and dinner; rent a room in a student dorm even if your parents happen to live a few miles down the road; pay an army of administrators whose jobs range from organizing parties to hiring puppies for you to pet during finals; subsidize student clubs that are devoted to such varied activities as playing Dungeons & Dragons or blind-tasting exclusive wines; and help to pay the lavish salaries of football and waterpolo coaches.
Read all of Yascha Mounk's essay on Substack.
The first day in the countryside they had walked out of the forest slap into a Russian camp. Pataki immediately feigned intense pain, on the lines of acute appendicitis, and got the others to plead for a doctor and medicine. This appeal had the desired effect, the soldiers had told them to go to hell and shooed them away.
~
Mathematics had this to recommend it, if nothing else: it made everything else, ants, English, push-ups, ironing, washing-up, beguiling and wonderful. Whole new galaxies of interests had popped open now that the maths exam was drawing close; anything unconnected with maths was irresistible.
~
"It goes without saying you're going to win this match," said Hepp, "so I'm not going to say it. These meat-processors have undoubtedly got webbed toes and if they're in basketball gear, it's because they brought their mothers to help them change. I don't want to be accused of being unreasonable, I don't want to be the target of petulant rumblings but gentlemen, I have to insist on a twenty-point victory."
- From Under the Frog, a novel by Tibor Fischer
Cabinet reshuffle in Great Britain. If the King calls for an election, it would be a major service to the nation and a boost for the royalty.
[Photo by Elias Kipfer at Unsplash]
If you have visited West Baltimore lately, you understand. If you haven't, you can't understand. But I'll try to explain what it's like and then offer an argument for how it got that way.
- From Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future by Chris Papst
My Substack essay on gratitude is up.
Please read and spread the word.
[Photo by Nathan Lemon at Unsplash]
From Harry Mount's review in The New Criterion:
"It sounds like the mosaic technique shouldn’t work. But Brown is so acute in his observation—and so funny—that other people’s pictures of the Queen coalesce to form as accurate a picture as is possible of this most elusive of characters."
"In my fable of Brave New World, the dictators had added science to the list and thus were able to enforce their authority by manipulating the bodies of embryos, the reflexes of infants and the minds of children and adults. And, instead of merely talking about miracles and hinting symbolically at mysteries, they were able, by means of drugs, to give their subjects the direct experience of mysteries and miracles - to transform mere faith into ecstatic knowledge. The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind manipulation. In the past free-thinkers and revolutionaries were often the products of the most piously orthodox education. This is not surprising. The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will really work - with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
[Photo by Roman Popov at Unsplash]
City Journal: Steven Malanga finds that lawsuits are zapping city budgets.
My reaction: Wait until the questionable use of software for personnel selection starts producing large awards.
If you thought that colleges and universities were going to abandon racial preferences, think again.
Writing in Commentary magazine, Naomi Schaefer Riley reveals what the College Board has been up to.
I left home more than forty years ago. I was eighteen. When I went back, after six years - and slowly: a two-week journey by steamer - everything was strange and not strange: the suddenness of night, the very big leaves of some trees, the shrunken streets, the corrugated-iron roofs. You could walk down a street and hear the American advertising jingles coming out of the Rediffusion sets in all the little open houses. Six years before I had known the jingles the Rediffusion sets played; but these jingles were all new to me and were like somebody else's folksong now.
- From A Way in the World by V.S. Naipaul
I first met a former member of the Waffen SS, the Nazis' elite fighting force, while researching a television documentary in Austria in 1990. It was an extraordinary experience.
- From The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees
Writing Routines has the workspaces of nine famous writers.
The Art of Manliness has the libraries, studies, and writing rooms of 15 famous men.
Literary Hub: Where 20 famous books were written.
These are on my re-read list. I re-read some of them every year.
At the foot of the hill, Tsingtau's Government House stood alone on a slight mound, its gabled upper-floor windows and elegant corner tower looking out across the rest of the town. Substantial German houses with red-tiled roofs peppered the slope leading down to the Pacific beach and pier; beyond them the even grander buildings of the commercial district fronted the bay and its harbors. Away to the right, the native township of Taipautau offered little in the way of variety - the houses were smaller, perhaps a bit closer together, but more European than classically Chinese. In less than two decades, the Germans had come, organized, and recast this tiny piece of Asia in their own image. Give them half a chance, Jack McColl mused, and they would do the same for the rest of the world.
-From Jack of Spies by David Downing
I stopped the car, got out and took off my sunglasses. Everything was exactly as Zgut had said it would be. The inn was two stories high, a yellowish-green color, with a mournful-looking sign hanging over the front porch that read, "THE DEAD MOUNTAINEER'S INN." Deep spongy snowdrifts on either side of the porch bristled with different-colored skies - I counted seven of them, one with a boot still on it. Knobby dull icicles thick as your arm dangled off the roof. A pale face peered out of the rightmost window on the first floor, and now the front door opened and a bald, stocky man wearing a red fur vest over a dazzling nylon shirt appeared on the porch. He approached with slow, heavy steps and then stopped in front of me. He had a coarse, ruddy face and the neck of a heavy-weight champion. He did not look at me. His melancholy gaze was focused somewhere to the side, expressing a sad dignity. No doubt this was Alek Snevar himself, owner of the inn, the valley surrounding it, and Bottleneck Pass.
- From The Dead Mountaineer's Inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
I'm working on a Substack article exploring the foresight of Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, Dostoyevsky, Dick, de Tocqueville, and others.
When I was young, I thought Orwell had the best crystal ball, but now I think Huxley and Bradbury were closer to the mark.
And yet there may be another who is even closer.
Do high school students still read Brave New World?
[Photo by Markus Spiske at Unsplash]
Last night we had a huge dust storm followed by a heavy thunderstorm.
More may arrive today.
Very welcome.
Journal of Democracy:
"The Road to Digital Unfreedom: President Xi's Surveillance State" by Xiao Qiang.
Cochise Hall, the dorm I lived in at the University of Arizona during the Sixties, was built in 1921, had large rooms, sleeping porches, no air conditioning, no carpeting, no phones in the rooms, communal bathrooms, and radiators for heat. Televisions were prohibited in the rooms, but there was one in the lobby.
The cost was $130 per semester.
[Photo by Chris Yoder]
A Layman's Blog has the photo.
Instant memories and let me tell you that was an especially warm experience in Phoenix, Arizona.
Jonathan Turley looks at the judicial philosophy of an increasingly unpersuasive Justice Jackson.
In 2019, Penguin Random House planned to publish the debut novel of young adult (YA) author Amelie Wen Zhao. A few months before the publication date, there was an uproar on Twitter. People who had never read Blood Heir proclaimed that it was racist because it was set in a fantastical world where oppression was not based on skin color. According to Zhao's critics, it was "cultural appropriation" and "antiblack" to depict slavery that was not African American slavery. The uproar was so loud that Zhao canceled the publication of Blood Heir. In a statement posted to Twitter, she apologized for the "pain" and "harm" her unpublished novel had caused the "readers" who never read it.
- From That Book is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing by Adam Szetela
[Photo by Anthony Roberts at Unsplash]
The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked like he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax.
- Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
Mariah Faith Continelli at The New Unhinged provides an outstanding analysis of how Cracker Barrel screwed up:
It was shortly after 2:00 AM that the idea arrived. I jotted it down in the journal I keep nearby and the went back to sleep.
Fortunately, unlike so many middle-of-the- night thoughts, it still looked good in the morning.
By midmorning, it looked even better.
And that was after coffee.
And now it has produced two other perspectives that are of value.
I'm flipping the ideas around and drinking more coffee.
There's nothing surprising about any of the above, but for the fact that this involves a subject I have been studying for months.
I was typing away last night when a thunderstorm rolled into Phoenix and I shut down my computer.
Beautiful.
My Substack essay on advertising will be a trip down Memory Lane for many of you.
[Photo by Nikoloz Gachechiladze at Unsplash]
Nicholas Bate, a.k.a. The Oxford Beatle, zeroes in on what you need to know about The Group.
[Photo by Fedor at Unsplash]
Commentary magazine: Joseph Epstein examines the modern problem of massive biographies.
Yes, sometimes less is more.
Lord Charnwood's biography of Abraham Lincoln, which is still considered to be the best of the Lincoln biographies, is a very reasonable 337 pages.
And here's the executive leadership of the Young Women's Christian Association. Its name is the same.
A question recently came up as to whether or not I'm an "upbeat" management consultant.
My answer was, and is: "No, I am a realistic consultant. Some situations are neither happy nor easy. That doesn't mean they can't be addressed. It means they should be addressed."
[Update: And then I smiled.]
On Substack, I explore what was lost when the secretarial pools disappeared.
[Photo by wu yi at Unsplash]
Being a towering castle of sloth, I am amazed at how often I forget this.
[Photo by Natalia Blauth at Unsplash+]
It is hard to overstate the extent to which the credibility of the news media has fallen in recent years.
Rather than a program called Meet the Press, it would be far more interesting to have one called Confront the Press in which an array of citizens got to question reporters.
[Photo by Waldemar at Unsplash]
It was good fun commanding a division in the Iraq desert. It is good fun commanding a division anywhere. It is one of the four best commands in the Service - a platoon, a battalion, a division, and an army. A platoon, because it is your first command, because you are young, and because, if you are any good, you know the men in it far better than their mothers do and love them as much. A battalion, because it is a unit with a life of its own; whether it is good or bad depends on you alone; you have at last a real command. A division, because it is the smallest formation that is a complete orchestra of war and the largest in which every man can know you. An army, because the creation of its spirit and its leadership in battle give you the greatest unity of emotional and intellectual experience that can befall a man.
- From Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1943-1945 by Field Marshal Viscount Slim
[Note: William "Bill" Slim is commonly regarded as one of the greatest commanders in World War II.]
Commentary magazine: Christine Rosen on the reaction to the Sydney Sweeney ads.
[Photo by Will Esayenko at Unsplash]
"I haven't learned from the baseball industry. I learned from Saturday Night Live. I learned from the Grateful Dead. I learned from Cirque de Soleil. I learned from WWE. I learned from Taylor Swift. I Learned from Mr. Beast. I learned from Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I learned from Apple."
- Jesse Cole, owner of The Savannah Bananas
