Monday, June 30, 2025
What Writers Know
Check out "The Not-So-Odd Habits of Writers."
It contains seven ground rules of my own.
[Photo by Thomas Griggs at Unsplash]
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Saturday, June 28, 2025
From The Man Who Never Sleeps
Another great story from the hottest pen in Oxford.
Check out Nicholas Bate and his latest novel, Pierre Lambert, Detective.
[Photo by Ben Seymour at Unsplash]
Friday, June 27, 2025
To Be Clear
"The Great Clarification." An excerpt:
There was a time when an assumption that everyone was operating from the same dictionary was common. Adults assumed that schools, universities, and even companies were roughly the same as the ones they’d known throughout their lives. They thought that the political parties were on separate sides of a mainstream and that they weren’t in separate galaxies.
Travel Essentials: Planning, Compliments, and Courtesy
Back in the pre-9/11 days when I had projects in different cities several days a week and a harried business traveler could board a plane at the last minute, I got to the point of planning trips so carefully that I could tell by the very "feel" of my luggage whether or not I'd left something out.
In addition to the essentials, I always packed a tape recorder and business tapes, business magazines, an appointment book, the obligatory Elmore Leonard or Robert B. Parker novel for morale, and a couple of granola bars or a bag of M&Ms in case I got stranded somewhere.
Another item addressed was my morale. I decided early on to fend off boredom by becoming a careful observer. Although Sherlock Holmes level was never achieved, it was educational to look at people and not just through them, to notice routines and disruptions, and to get a sense of the morale of the workers in the airport, the car rental agencies, and the hotels.
It was apparent that making an extra effort to give compliments and courtesy to others was a way of easing through the hassles. In most cases, those gestures were appreciated, sometimes deeply so.
Recent Internet videos of bizarre behavior in modern airports reflect a low level of conduct I never encountered in those years of travel.
Either the videos reflect the Internet's tendency to collect multiple bad examples or things have truly gotten weird out there.
If it's the latter, private planes have never looked so good.
[Photo by Suganth at Unsplash]
Thursday, June 26, 2025
NYC Election
The cool thing is real socialism has never been tried before and we can all be excited for the chance to finally see it in action.
- Mary Katherine Ham, with tongue firmly in cheek
Mamdani and the Would-Be Revolutionaries
Reihan Salam in The Free Press: "Making Sense of Mamdani." An excerpt:
"If you want to find someone in a revolutionary mood, look to the recent college grad with hundreds of dollars in student loans and no solid job prospects, the 35-year-old creative professional who is spending a third of her low six-figure income on rent, or the 40-year-old Ivy-educated adjunct professor living with roommates who never, ever, do the dishes."
Moral Credentialing and Moral Licensing
Moral credentialing is a phenomenon where people become more likely to act in inegalitarian ways, and (critically) become convinced that their actions are nonbiased, after affirming their commitment to egalitarianism or engaging in behaviors they interpret as egalitarian.
~
At times, however, conspicuously aligning ourselves with social justice causes can not only blind us to the immorality of our actions, it can even lead us to feel entitled to do things we recognize as immoral, and to view these behaviors as acceptable for us to engage in, at that moment, under those circumstances. This is called "moral licensing."
- Musa Al-Gharbi in We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
"The Mortal Storm"
Kenneth L. Marcus on anti-Semitism and the Brandeis Center's lawsuit against Harvard University.
As New Yorkers Ponder a Permanent Escape to the Beach
Althouse is commenting on the Bezos wedding in Venice, thus freeing the rest of us to ponder what the possible election of a whack-job mayor in New York City will do to the real estate market in Florida.
[Photo by Juan Burgos at Unsplash]
Shakespeare, Dickens, and Company
This may be one of the most important essays I've written.
Please spread the word.
[Photo by Taha at Unsplash]
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
"Iran Brought This on Itself"
On January 28, 2024, Iran killed three American soldiers on a base in Jordan, injuring more than 40. On October 19, 2023, an Iranian militia in Yemen engaged the USS Carney destroyer in what the Wall Street Journal described as “the most intense combat a U.S. Navy warship had seen in the better part of a century, shooting down more than a dozen drones and four fast-flying cruise missiles.”
That “10-hour engagement” came, of course, just 12 days after Iran’s militia in Gaza invaded Israel, murdering 1,200—of which 41 were Americans.
Read all of Seth Mandel's essay in Commentary magazine.
The Meandering Writer
I get one broad idea and then it goes through shape-shifting stages as I restructure it via multiple drafts, tossing once "brilliant" ideas and replacing them with, so I hope, better ones, recalling observations from related areas that may just be barely related.
I'm preparing a Substack essay that began in a very different territory than the one it's likely to end up in.
That's fine and necessary.
At least for me.
Bold History
Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) wrote a book that inadvertently raises the question of whether English prose style can be, or even should be, an end in itself. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire encapsulates - in a very large capsule - his idea that history is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
Monday, June 23, 2025
Hasn't Seen "Jaws"
Ann Althouse confesses that she has never seen "Jaws."
A major cultural oversight.
I read the book and saw the film and think the film was better than the book.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Saturday, June 21, 2025
An Important Perspective
From May 2023: Mark Helprin and the Survival of the American Nation.
[Photo by Kimson Doan at Unsplash]
Friday, June 20, 2025
From Organic Community to Synthetic Connection
Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan on "how our online lives shape our lives in community."
[Photo by Carol Highsmith's America at Unsplash]
Deep Sinking at Harvard
It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said he would "rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University." Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised by how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today.
- Douglas Murray, "The Derangement of Harvard" in the July 2025 issue of The Spectator
True
A Large Regular is one of my daily blog visits, often more than once, because it is possible to find an array of perspectives and you don't miss the gaps.
Sometimes Novels Provide the Clearest Picture
A few novels with a clear picture of how the world really works.
[Photo by Steven Wright at Unsplash]
Thursday, June 19, 2025
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Beyond Ridiculous
It may take AT&T, Carmax, Deloitte, Google, and Nike announcing that they will remove all funding from the WNBA until it achieves better officiating at its games.
Some Don'ts
Don't say yes when you know you should say no.
Don't use caring as an excuse to deceive.
Don't think that you can complete 100 pounds of work in a 70-pound day.
Don't regard charisma as a long-term substitute for competence.
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Poetry Slam
Robert Frost: "Acquainted with the Night."
William Butler Yeats: "The Two Trees."
Rudyard Kipling: "Dane-geld."
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "A Psalm of Life."
Monday, June 16, 2025
I Will Be Easing into This Morning
This week brings writing as well as a couple of workshops that I'll be conducting out of town.
They are short classes, not the monster variety which I'll be teaching later this month.
I also have a desk that needs a leaf blower, but that's another story.
Bear with me.
[Father's Day brought several books my way. Each looks great. More on those later.]
First Paragraph
Edwin St. John St. Andrew, eighteen years old, hauling the weight of his double-sainted name across the Atlantic by steamship, eyes narrowed against the wind on the upper deck: he holds the railing with gloved hands, impatient for a glimpse of the unknown, trying to discern something - anything! - beyond sea and sky, but all he sees are shades of endless gray. He's on his way to a different world. He's more or less at the halfway point between England and Canada. I have been sent into exile, he tells himself, and he knows he's being melodramatic, but nonetheless there's a ring of truth to it.
- From Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Happy Father's Day
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
- Mark Twain
John Lahr, writing in Esquire in June 2016, remembers "Fishing with My Father." An excerpt:
"Men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after," Henry Thoreau supposedly said. Sometime in the middle of my first morning, with the putt-putt of the motor echoing off the rocky shoreline, I understood what he meant.
Saturday, June 14, 2025
The American Action Orientation
Julian Marias, the disciple of Ortega y Gasset, who spent much time here in the 1950s and 1960s, observed that although Americans get more mail than any other people in the world, they receive far fewer personal letters. An American friend of mine, Howard Higman, a professor of sociology, makes the point well. A letter from an American is like an itinerary, he says, a letter from an Englishman is like a diary.
- From "My America!" an essay in Bite the Hand That Feeds You by Henry Fairlie
Israeli Products
You can buy Israeli products on this site.
I am tempted to try the Israeli Special Forces coffee, but the honey also looks promising.
[HT: Jonathan Wade]
Friday, June 13, 2025
Just Arrived!
The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America by Steven F. Wilson
Current Reading Stack
- Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr
- Another Sort of Learning by James V. Schall
- Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI by Karen Hao
- The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Power, and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska
- Pierre Lambert, Detective by Nicholas Bate
- The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future by Mustafa Suleyman
- Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier
- The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant
- Lazarus Man by Richard Price
- The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli by Richard Aldous
- Unleashed by Boris Johnson
- On Settler Colonialism by Adam Kirsch
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- We Have Never Been Woke by Musa Al-Gharbi
- Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson
- Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law by Neil Gorsuch
[Photo by Laura Ohlman at Unsplash]
When Perspectives Change
"Surfin' Safari - 1962
"Surfin' U.S.A. - 1963
"Jaws" - 1974 (novel) and 1975 (film)
[Photo by Knut Robinson at Unsplash]
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Time to Recognize an Iranian Regime in Exile
Instapundit has breaking stories on Israel's pre-emptive strike on the Iranian nuclear program.
The Price of Anti-Social Media
My latest Substack column covers more than a call for a return to dueling.
[Photo by Aaron Burden at Unsplash]
Screwtape and the Enemy Schools
Take sometime today and read Erik Twist's contribution to First Things.
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Going to Those Who Know
When the Allied air forces planners were examining ways to keep the Germans from moving supplies to the Normandy area, they initially focused on destroying French roads and railways, but the problem was that even with a direct hit, those could be quickly repaired.
[The British air commander, Arthur Tedder] asked some British railway engineers, "What attack would hurt them most? Their answer: repair facilities. "If you destroy those, the network will soon be paralyzed."
[Source: The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower by Michel Paradis]
One of the Most Interesting Museums in the World
I've got a meeting this morning at the Musical Instrument Museum.
Looking forward to the meeting and the location.
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Final Draft
Going over the final draft of a novel I've been writing. Searching for errors. Considering any possible weak spots.
Call it a "How to make it better" obsession.
Or a quest.
Multiple drafts provide answers and often they are of the "Get rid of this" variety.
The first book I wrote was way back in 1976. Typewriter days.
Yesterday, I remembered editorial comments on that lengthy process and an idea arrived.
A nice idea, modest and nothing dramatic, but a very good fit.
Especially for a final draft.
Monday, June 09, 2025
What is a Work College?
A work college is where all of the students are required to work throughout their educational experience.
Unique to work colleges is the requirement that all resident students participate in a comprehensive-work-learning service program for all four years of enrollment. Therefore, all resident students have jobs. Most students work at on campus jobs, while some students hold off-campus positions. Students are given responsibility, relied upon, and gain valuable work experience, while reducing the cost of education.
First Paragraph
William Gladstone was at home in Flintshire, North Wales, when the news came early that morning. Benjamin Disraeli was dead. It was hardly unexpected, but Gladstone immediately recognised the implications for himself and the country. 'It is a telling, touching event,' he confided to his diary. 'There is no more extraordinary man surviving him in England, perhaps none in Europe. I must not say much, in the presence as it were of his Urn.'
- From The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli by Richard Aldous
Sunday, June 08, 2025
Saturday, June 07, 2025
Ouch
Carter has never been what one would call svelte. Asked if a jacket could be cut to make him look slimmer, his man at Anderson & Sheppard offered the Jeeves-ian riposte "We're only tailors, sir."
- From the June 2025 Commentary magazine review by Rick Martin of When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
Who Says that Wills and Estates Law Isn't Interesting?
The New York Post on the mysterious will of the Zappos founder showing up five years after his death.
Friday, June 06, 2025
Thursday, June 05, 2025
Out This Morning
But don't miss my Substack essay on "The Possibility of Weasels."
[Photo by Dawid Zawila at Unsplash]
Wednesday, June 04, 2025
AI and National Defense
"Artificial intelligence is no longer merely a commercial or academic pursuit. It is now a matter of national survival, and a decisive factor in the geopolitical competition of this century."
- Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
On My List
"In clearing so large a place for himself, he left a vacuum no one since has been able to fill. This is the absence so many feel today - adversaries and apostates as well as advocates and admirers. A founder of our world, he speaks to us from a different one, beyond our reach but hovering near, if only we can discover in ourselves the imagination and generosity, the kindness and warmth, that Bill Buckley demonstrated time and again in his long and singular life."
- Sam Tanenhaus
Tuesday, June 03, 2025
The Coming European Wars
The Free Press: "How the Muslim Brotherhood Is Capturing Europe" by Simone Rodan-Benzaquen.
A classified report from the French Ministry of Interior reveals the plan.
Let's Have Beautiful and Practical
From a letter that John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail on May 12, 1780:
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.Ah, if only the world were so nice!
The fact is, as the people of Ukraine and Israel can tell us, the world is not that nice. There are barbarians out there who would like nothing more than to take over a nation of artists.
I have no doubt that John Adams knew that. He was a very intelligent leader of a successful and bloody revolution.
The secret then and now, of course, is not to avoid dreams, but to know when you are dreaming.
Monday, June 02, 2025
For Clarification
We are at a point where we do not need daily news as much as daily dictionaries.
As noted in "The Great Clarification."
[Photo by Jake Blucker at Unsplash]
A Glass of Wine
"If we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.... If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it!"
- Richard Feynman
Sunday, June 01, 2025
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)