This is my choice.
Friday, October 31, 2025
Thursday, October 30, 2025
First Paragraph
I cannot always see Trieste in my mind's eye. Who can? It is not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination. It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar melody, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single native name that everyone knows. It is a middle-sized, essentially middle-aged Italian seaport, ethnically ambivalent, historically confused, only intermittently prosperous, tucked away at the top right-hand corner of the Adriatic Sea, and so lacking the customary characteristics of Italy that in 1999 some 70 percent of Italians, so a poll claimed to discover, did not know it was in Italy at all.
- From Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Recommended Essayists
You know the version of the conversation game where everyone lists their choice of extraordinary dinner companions. I propose a collection of essayists. You might not always agree with them – in fact, I’m certain you won’t because they’d disagree with one another – but you’ll be in for fine and often highly amusing writing.
I’ll set aside
some well-known powerhouses such as James Baldwin, G. K. Chesterton, Joan Didion,
George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, and Tom Wolfe.
Here goes:
Arguably:
Essays by Christopher
Hitchens
Cultural
Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James
Cultural
Cohesion: The Essential Essays
by Clive James
Essays in
Biography by Joseph
Epstein
In a Cardboard
Belt! Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage by Joseph Epstein
Latest
Readings by Clive James
Once More
Around the Block by
Joseph Epstein.
The Ideal of
Culture: Essays by Joseph
Epstein
Things Worth Fighting For: Collected Writings by Michael Kelly
Oxford Union
City Journal: Daniel J. Flynn has some ideas for the newly ousted president-elect of the Oxford Union.
He needs to read Flynn's new book on Frank Meyer.
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
The Pipeline
It is no surprise that Nicholas Bate has a lot of great stuff in the pipeline.
[Photo by Wolfgang Weiser at Unsplash]
Monday, October 27, 2025
Memories of Book (and Comic Book) Reports
Return now to the old days of Classics Illustrated Comics.
[With a modest proposal for college bookstores.]
Sunday, October 26, 2025
Saturday, October 25, 2025
"When the Frost Is on the Punkin"
This has become an Execupundit tradition:
Kent Risley with a marvelous recitation of the poem.
[Photo by Elissa Wyne at Unsplash]
Bouncing Back
And yet, buried under layers of luxury and self-doubt, America’s political and economic institutions still hum with energy. Most Americans still exhibit the bourgeois democratic values that have sustained the nation on its journey to greatness. If our current political leadership doesn’t seem quite up to the task of both articulating and executing popular desires, a new generation is waiting in the wings. These new leaders will have personal and political faults of their own, of course. Leaders always do. But they may also be better suited for the task ahead. Better equipped to defend what’s best in America.
Read all of Matthew Continetti's essay in Commentary magazine.
Don't Think This Doesn't Happen
They examined everything except the key issue and the key witness.
But they thought they were thorough because they had explored so many other things.
The Debate for Manhattan District Attorney
Alvin Bragg has been given the gift of two opponents who will split the vote.
Friday, October 24, 2025
New York City's Experience Problem
A structural reason why New Yorkers should consider experience when choosing a mayor.
[Photo by Triston Dunn at Unsplash]
First Paragraph
The boy was wild and perfect, standing on the central table and clapping his hands. He had the eyes of a saint, Frau Möller recalled afterwards, an earthly saint like Francis, or a great thinker like Galileo. She had noticed him when he came in, past her little alcove by the door. She was not there to oversee the youth club. The young were specifically enjoined by the Party to organise themselves. Spaces were to be set aside for self-education and cultural awareness, and music was a part of that. If these gatherings became rowdy and inappropriate - if they were not strictly what had been envisioned by the committee - that was no concern of hers. She was employed only to keep the coats and close up. She had no other role.
- From Karla's Choice: A John le Carré Novel by Nick Harkaway
Thursday, October 23, 2025
NYC Blues
Rob Henderson on the youthful supporters of Mamdani.
Remember the informal slogan of John Lindsay when he ran for mayor in 1965: "He is fresh while everyone else is tired."
Great slogan. He turned out to be a disaster.
A Little Civil War with Breakfast
I've been reading Civil War histories with my breakfast. It's been delightful. Makes the current times seem sane.
Did you know that when South Carolina seceded from the Union - the first state to do so - one of its leaders wanted the new country to be named the Confederate Slave-Holding States of America?
Catchy name. There's always at least one idiot in any large meeting.
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Totalitarian Anti-Zionism
Gil Troy in Commentary Magazine takes us back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the United Nations, and evolving anti-Zionism. An excerpt:
It was and is the Great Inversion—and Perversion. Despite being mass-murdered by Nazi racists, Jews became racists. Despite resisting Ottoman, and then British, colonialism controlling their indigenous homeland, Zionists then became settler-colonialists. Despite there being many dark-skinned Israelis and light-skinned Palestinians, Israelis became “white oppressors,” racializing this nationalist clash. And despite enduring history’s largest genocide, Jews were and are accused of “genocide.”
Academia
The problem with spending time with students, or on students, or writing book reviews or essays is that none of those activities do anything for you professionally. Academics are rewarded for one thing and one thing only: research. Scholarly publication. Nothing else counts; anything else is a step toward professional suicide. I knew this, of course, and it tormented me. But, to quote a phrase, I could do no other.
- William Deresiewicz, "Why I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering)" in The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society.
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
A Meandering Chef
I have completed the research for the report and have several stacks of paper as proof.
To those I have added the rough, very rough, drafts of approaches that go in different directions, each one altered by new perspectives that come to mind, but now, like a stew simmering in a large pot, they await the spices I carry, even though a great deal of the report's flavor will be achieved by subtraction, not addition.
And much will depend upon the connecting theme, which is yet to be chosen.
That selection will be made with care because the best themes have one thing in common: the ability to bite.
[Photo by Getty Images for Unsplash+]
First Paragraph
Everybody agreed that the Washington's Birthday ball was the most brilliant event of the winter. Unlike most social functions in this army camp by the Rapidan, it was not held in a tent. There was a special weatherproof ballroom - a big box of a building more than a hundred feet long, whose construction had kept scores of enlisted men busy. Some of these had been sent into the woods to fell trees. Others had taken over and operated an abandoned sawmill, to reduce the trees to boards. Still others, carpenters in some former incarnation, had taken these boards and built the building itself, and it was pleasantly odorous of new-cut pine, decorated with all of the headquarters and regimental flags which the II Army Corps possessed. The flags may have been worth seeing. It was a boast of this corps that although it had suffered nearly 19,000 battle casualties it had never yet lost a flag to the enemy.
- From A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
Monday, October 20, 2025
It Is Never Easy
Cultural Offering's Buckley has passed.
It is never easy. It's been several months in our household, and I still find myself looking for our dog.
I do believe that dogs go to heaven. It wouldn't be heaven without them.
First Paragraph
This book answers a simple question that is never asked. How did the Roman state survive for nearly 2,000 years?
- From The Romans: A 2,000-Year History by Edward J. Watts
A Holocaust Has Many Fingerprints
My Substack on the rationalizations is here.
Excerpt: We didn’t kill them. Our sole responsibility was to sell their furniture as well as the other property they left behind when they moved. And, of course, we made sure their homes had new owners.
[Photo by Colin C Murphy at Unsplash]
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Saturday, October 18, 2025
Once Upon a Time
Nicholas Bate at Hunter Gatherer 21C is becoming the go-to person for the genuine life.
[Photo by John Michael Thomson at Unsplash.]
Highly Recommended
"Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling - from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls."
Closer Is Better
One historical figure who becomes even more impressive with closer study.
What a remarkable man!
[Photo by Getty Images for Unsplash+]
First Paragraph
When our daughter Anna was born in July 1985, I was two years into a marriage that had made me happier than I had ever been and nine months into the unexpected success of Losing Ground. My two daughters from a previous marriage loved Catherine, their new stepmother, and were enthusiastic about having a new sister. I had no sense of anything lacking in my life, least of all religion. I was a happy agnostic.
- From Taking Religion Seriously by Charles Murray
Friday, October 17, 2025
Disgrace
Seth Mandel on antisemitism in the world of British soccer. An excerpt:
To review: a member of Parliament called for Maccabi fans to be banned from a soccer match because violent anti-Semites didn’t want them there. He then celebrated when his demand was honored by the local police. What kind of country does this sound like?
"The Great Feminization"
Check out the essay by Helen Andrews at Compact magazine.
An excerpt:
"Experts chimed in to declare that everything [Larry] Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria."
Very Interesting
"An Assortment of What Ifs" has been getting a surprising amount of attention.
Perhaps it taps into the spirit of the times.
Help Wanted: Real Consideration for Real People
New York magazine:
Sarah Thankam Mathews on why the job search has become a humiliation ritual.
A telling quote: "It feels like I'm just trying to make my robots talk to their robots."
We need to reduce the use of tech in both the job application and screening process.
[Photo by Markus Winkler for Unsplash]
Thursday, October 16, 2025
First Paragraph
"He's been taking pictures three years, look at the work," Maurice said. "Here, this guy. Look at the pose, the expression. Who's he remind you of?"
- From LaBrava by Elmore Leonard
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
The Weird Nature of Decisions
There are decisions that are quickly made and others that are mulled over with advisors.
All well and good.
But the strange part is that the significance of the decision often has little influence on which technique is used.
I've seen major decisions that are quickly and casually made while great time is devoted to minor, easily reversible, decisions.
And a category that deserves special study contains issues that bubble along and never come close to being decided.
First Paragraph
We were at prep, when the Head came in, followed by a new boy not in uniform and a school-servant carrying a big desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every boy rose to his feet as though surprised in his labours.
- From Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
The Peace Agreement
I have concluded that Donald Trump has two almost supernatural powers.
The first is being grossly underestimated.
The second is the casual way in which he drives many of his critics absolutely insane.
First Paragraph
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
- From Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Monday, October 13, 2025
Sounds Familiar
If the Democratic convention was meeting in an irrational atmosphere, the reason is clear. During the last few years events themselves had been irrational; politics in America could no longer be wholly sane. Here and there, like flickers of angry light before a thunderstorm, there had been bursts of violence, and although political debate continued, the nearness of violence - the reality of it, the mounting threat that it would monstrously grow and drown out all voices - made the debaters shout more loudly and appeal more directly to emotions that made reasonable debate impossible. Men put special meaning on words and phrases, so that what sounded good to one sounded evil to another, and certain slogans took on their own significance and became portentous, streaming in the heated air like banners against the sunset; and even the voices that called for moderation became immoderate. American politicians in 1860 could do almost anything on earth except sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of their situation.
- From: The Coming Fury [Volume One of The Centennial History of the Civil War] by Bruce Catton
First Paragraph
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these Highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got up high, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.
- From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Sunday, October 12, 2025
Saturday, October 11, 2025
First Paragraph
Mr. Yancey could usually be found at the Charleston Hotel, where the anti-Douglas forces were gathering, and a Northerner who went around to have a look at him reported that he was unexpectedly quiet and mild-mannered: as bland and as smooth as Fernando Wood, the silky Democratic boss from New York City, but radiating a general air of sincerity that Wood never had. No one, seeing Yancey in a room full of politicians, would pick him out as the one most likely to pull the cotton states into a revolution. He was compact and muscular, "with a square-built head and face, and an eye full of expression," a famous orator who scorned the usual tricks of oratory and spoke in an easy conversational style; he was said to have in his system a full three-hour speech against the Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, to be unloaded at the proper time, and the Northern observer reflected uneasily that although Douglas probably had most of the votes at this convention, the opposition might be a little ahead in brains.
- From The Coming Fury [Volume One of The Centennial History of the Civil War] by Bruce Catton
Execupundit Note: I am a fan of Shelby Foote's work on the Civil War, but before him was Bruce Catton and Catton was excellent.
Friday, October 10, 2025
Oikophobia Update
If radical scholars were really concerned about racist lapses from our great modern guiding principle of gens una sumus, they wouldn't look to a distant past where that principle could never have prevailed. They could instead easily find examples of whole societies where that "racist" ideology is still alive and well - in the Middle East, for example. But instead of looking for racism where it is blatant and abundant, they seek it in the one place where it's getting hard to find - in their own society. That discrepancy tells us what really motivates these scholars: not the correction of racism, but a radical determination to condemn the society that they themselves are part of.
- From A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism by John M. Ellis
The Barbarians Are Inside the Gates
The Independent: Canterbury Cathedral has a graffiti art display on its walls.
Everyone associated with that nitwittery should be sacked.
An excerpt from the story:
“The everyday theological questions expressed in the art installation and the cathedral’s historic tradition of graffiti have not stopped some from expressing very strong reactions,” a spokesperson said in a press release on the work.
Thursday, October 09, 2025
Wednesday, October 08, 2025
First, You Get Inside Their Heads
It's a bureaucratic maze.
The items are hidden in plain sight, but they have misleading labels.
The secret is to know the terms that are used to cloak.
It's as if Frog is Ox and Owl, well, that's Dinosaur.
Here's one. There's another and another.
And suddenly, we have stacks of very interesting reading.
[Photo by Ariel at Unsplash]
Tuesday, October 07, 2025
On Target
Two years after the genocidal rampage that happened on October 7, 2023, it's important to be reminded of the nature of the atrocity, even as Hamas's useful idiots continue their warped campaign to recast victims as perpetrators, perpetrators as victims.
- Niall Ferguson
- Niall Ferguson
A Warning
The Free Press: Douglas Murray on the war that Israel won and the West is losing.
[Photo by Taylor Brandon at Unsplash]
A 1997 Warning About Our Schools
This book is about the great changes that have taken place - and are still proceeding - in humanistic education and learning throughout the English-speaking world, though they are most advanced in America. This is a matter of great social importance. From elementary school through university, literature and history are two of the most significant aspects of the education of young people. The effect of a profound change in the way the subjects are taught and in what teachers are trying to achieve in teaching them is therefore far from trivial - especially when part of the purpose of the change is to transform students' attitudes toward the society in which they live.
- From Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities by John M. Ellis
Monday, October 06, 2025
In 2060: The Robot Revelation That Awaits Us
Our relationship with robots may go in a different direction than either HAL or The Terminator.
Can you imagine this scenario?
[Photo by Brett Jordan at Unsplash]
First Paragraph
This is the true story of the most singular prison break ever recorded - a clandestine wartime operation that involved no tunneling, no weapons, and no violence of any kind. Conceived during World War I, it relied on a scheme so outrageous it should never have worked: two British officers escaped from an isolated Turkish prison camp by means of a Ouija board.
- From The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History by Margalit Fox
Sunday, October 05, 2025
Saturday, October 04, 2025
Perspective
Somebody once observed to the eminent philosopher Wittgenstein how stupid medieval Europeans living before the time of Copernicus must have been that they could have looked at the sky and thought that the sun was circling the earth.... Wittgenstein is said to have replied: "I agree. But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been circling the earth."
- James Burke
First Paragraph
In 1974, the International Chess Federation adopted as its motto gens una sumus, the Latin phrase which means that we human beings are all of one family. It's easy to see how this idea applies to chess players. The board makes everyone equal before its clearly defined rules. The players may speak different languages, but on the chessboard they all use the same idiom. Nationality, sex, skin color, temperament - all make no difference to what happens in the course of the game. Though gens una sumus has never been formally adopted by the United Nations, it's by now the unofficial ethos of that body, and the European Union committed to something very similar when in 1985 it adopted the "Ode to Joy," Beethoven's setting of Friedrich Schiller's early poem "An die Freude," as its anthem. Schiller's text includes the telling words: "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" - all men become brothers.
- From A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism by John M. Ellis
Friday, October 03, 2025
The Subversion of Britain
The Free Press: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on "The Manchester Attack and the Subversion of Britain."
An excerpt: Yes, Britain stands at a fork in the road. But the choice is not, as Starmer claimed, between "decency" and "division." It is between delusion and decision. It is between barbarism and civilization.
The Real Power
Nicholas Bate is reminding us that amid all of the tech and artificial intelligence thunder, we have a human advantage:
Get real. Be human. Get close.
First Paragraph
Two British Communists spoke over the telephone in 1949 about a former comrade turned enemy.
- From The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel J. Flynn
Thursday, October 02, 2025
WFB, Jr.
Cultural Offering is writing some letters, and, given the stamps, it is wise to assume that a fountain pen will be involved.
Highly Recommended
A Layman's Blog points to a great book by Jay Winik.
A fascinating overview of major events and personalities.
I gave away copies and will now get another.
When the book bills arrive, I'll say, "It's those damned bloggers in Newark, Ohio."
Get to Know John M. Ellis
The above is his latest book.
His book on The Breakdown of Higher Education is excellent.
Unintended Consequences
I've developed an array of management workshops over the years.
Most of them were - and are - successful but there was one class in particular that bombed. It only took a couple of sessions for me to spot an inherent problem.
The class dealt with the subtle skills that aren't in the usual job description, but which are taken for granted.
Skills such as anticipating needs, taking initiative, learning about your boss's management style, and using diplomacy with your co-workers.
All solid stuff, I believe, and they were bolstered by some tips which even an excellent employee could use.
The problem, I soon concluded, was due to a development before my control.
While my goal was to help already good employees become even better, what I discovered was that the people being sent to the class possessed highly negative attitudes which put them two steps away from termination.
None of them signed up for the program. All of them were forced to attend by bosses who hoped the session would improve their dismal dispositions.
In short, they didn't want to be there, and I didn't want them there.
All of which is a reminder to consider the unintended consequences. In retrospect, I should have anticipated the problem.
My assumption was that the class members would want to learn. As it turned out, the only thing that most of them wanted to learn was how to get back at the lousy, no-good, boss who'd stuck them in the worthless class.
But I know at least one person who learned a great deal.
Awaiting
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that when - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we grasp it, we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
- John Archibald Wheeler, physicist
[Photo by William Zhang at Unsplash]
