Steve Layman is hanging around with Judge Learned Hand.
A great combo.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
First Paragraph
In November 2004, I took a job with a courier company in Iraq and moved to a patch of gravel next to the airport in Mosul. Two small, temporary buildings served as office and living quarters. I shared them with two homesick Nepalese Gurkhas and a retired British soldier. Our planes flew in from Bahrain, and the four of us worked with a team of five Iraqis to unload and deliver their cargo. U.S. soldiers received care packages from family and equipment from far-off bases. Iraqis came to collect diesel engines, X-ray machines for the local hospital, and crate upon crate of untaxed Jordanian cigarettes for resale. At night, the Gurkhas ran up massive bills calling Nepal on our satellite phone, and the Brit watched movies, drank whiskey, and cleaned his boots and his gun.
- From The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State by Graeme Wood
The University Scam
We now make it relatively easy for students to meet the immediate cash outlay of attending college with readily available loans, but this has the effect of diminishing the consumer's natural tendency to scrutinize the real value of what he is paying for. The result is that students are starting their working lives shouldering large debts that will take them many years to repay, while in many cases what they are getting for it is little more than a piece of paper - a diploma certainly but without the skill and knowledge that such a diploma used to certify.
- John M Ellis, The Breakdown of Higher Education (2021)
[Photo by Ben Iwara for Unsplash+]
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
First Paragraph
The word "revolution" has an interesting etymology. When asked by Soviet sociologists what it meant to them, Russian peasants responded "samovol'shchina," or, roughly, "doing what you want." In modern advertising, "revolutionary" has come to mean "radically new," and hence, by implication, "improved." When used in everyday speech, it is another way of saying "drastically different." From such usage one would hardly suspect that the word had its origins in astronomy and astrology.
- From A Concise History of The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes
Deeply Appreciated
Many thanks to Kurt Harden and all others who've written their very kind reviews of Pilate's Magician.
Those matter more than I can say.
The Tide is Turning
My Substack is up: The Divisiveness of Diversity Mismanagement.
[Photo by Fine Photographics at Unsplash]
Monday, August 17, 2026
The Math Gap
San Francisco Standard: A Berkeley mathematics class has students who are "five to eight years behind in mathematics."
An excerpt: "Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school."
[Photo by Eric Prouzet at Unsplash]
Kaputt
I recently finished Curzio Malaparte's novel, Kaputt.
It's fascinating, chilling, and beautifully written and yet the problem with Malaparte is you never quite know how much of the story is true.
And your biggest worry is that all of it is true.
Sunday, August 16, 2026
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Saturday Morning
Coffee first, of course.
Errands. Chores. Phone calls. Gas station. Bookstore.
I should run by the post office.
And, of course, there is reading and writing.
My Substack column should be up today.
I also need to crank up the marketing of Pilate's Magician.
[Those of you who have written kind reviews are especially blessed.]
And later, as the evening approaches, I need to mow the backyard and trim some bushes.
Wherever you are, have a marvelous weekend. Take it slowly.
Friday, August 14, 2026
An Acura Boost or Bore?
Instapundit: Will Acura find a new groove?
[An old friend of mine now drives nothing but Acuras. He used to drive Mustangs. Go figure.]
A Rather Fascinating Person
And then, a last snapshot. It's eleven years later - the invasion of Iraq, which I backed, is a disaster; the financial system that my friends helped build has crashed; my wife and I are divorced; the New Republic is sold after I feared going bust - and here I am in my white suit walking across Harvard Yard, surrounded by students: "Harvard, Harvard shame on you, honoring a racist fool." The racist fool is, apparently, me. It's a sodden coda, one I don't quite grasp, or believe.
- Martin Peretz
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Ballad
And this is the ballad of my life: that I mumble strange syllables before the people of silence.
- Avrom Sutzkever
Fascinating
I will also show, with the help of facts and figures that my research team and I have collected, block by block and farm by farm in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, that most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of the savings among the poor is, in fact, immense - forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.
- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
First Paragraph
My hometown was, in the 1960s, a passable embodiment of the American Dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for all the kids in town, whatever their background. A half century later, however, life in Port Clinton, Ohio, is a split-screen American nightmare, a community in which kids from the wrong side of the tracks that bisect the town can barely imagine the future that awaits the kids from the right side of the tracks. And the story of Port Clinton turns out to be sadly typical of America. How this transformation happened, why it matters, and how we might begin to alter the cursed course of our society is the subject of this book.
- From Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam, published in 2015.
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Two Key Questions on Technology
- What will you do with it?
- What will it do with you?
[Photo by Microsoft CoPilot at Unsplash]
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
From "Amusing Ourselves to Death"
In television teaching, perplexity is a superhighway to low ratings. A perplexed learner is a learner who will turn to another station. This means there must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount.
- Neil Postman
Monday, August 10, 2026
Bring Them Back!
Natalya Murakhver on how the best children's history books were allowed to go out of print.
When I was a child, I read the Random House history series. All of the books were excellent.
Mr. Peretz and His Constellation
From The New Criterion in 2023:
Myron Magnet on The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left, Right and Center by Martin Peretz.
I can recall when Peretz's editing of The New Republic produced a must-read magazine.
First Paragraph
There was a photograph of Frank in an ad that ran in the Detroit Free Press and showed all the friendly salesmen at Red Bowers Chevrolet. Under his photo it said Frank J. Ryan. He had on a nice smile, a styled moustache, and a summer-weight suit made out of that material that's shiny and looks like it has snags in it.
- From Swag by Elmore Leonard
Sunday, August 09, 2026
Saturday, August 08, 2026
Evergreen
"I 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."
- William F. Buckley, Jr.
Friday, August 07, 2026
An Odious and Unwise Endorsement
The American Association of University Professors endorsed a political candidate for the first time in its 110-year history.
Its views, long suspected, are now out in the open.
A Crisis in the Humanities
Quillette: Peter Boghossian writes about the rigid orthodoxy on political issues.
Not to worry. They will defend your right to agree with them.
On Writing
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
- Kurt Vonnegut
[Read the sample from my novel, Pilate's Magician. The book went through numerous drafts.]
Living with Heat
The hottest day in Phoenix was memorable: 122 degrees in 1990.
Somehow all of the "But it's a dry heat" jokes didn't work then. I opened my front door, and it was like opening the door of an oven.
Stunningly hot.
But living in Phoenix is usually akin, I suppose, to living in Alaska: you adjust to the weather. Most places are air-conditioned and there are times when you are only moving about in an air-conditioned car.
[And the winters are marvelous.]
It is expected that our water bills will climb due to the multistate battles over Colorado River water. Much of that is unfair because Arizona has been far more active with water conservation than California.
There is also the sensitive issue of agriculture. Farming can easily take more water than a sub-division, but the state and the nation will pay a price if the farms disappear.
In the meantime, we're optimistic. The predicted high temperature for today is 104 degrees. Some rain is expected next week.
Thursday, August 06, 2026
The Paradox of The Information State
And herein lies a central paradox of the information state. The great ills that it seeks to remedy, such as disinformation, are themselves products of the very thing, namely the surveillance- and attention-based Internet, on which the state relies. That is why, throughout all the outcry about the evils done by Facebook or Twitter, the politicians who are loudest in condemning those platforms do not take the obvious step of seeking to make them less powerful. Their aim is not to reform or rebuild the repressive infrastructure of the Internet, only to make it serve their own interests.
- From The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob Siegel
Wednesday, August 05, 2026
The Arday Scandal
The Free Beacon on the scandal involving the youngest black professor in Cambridge history.
Random Thoughts
A qualified compliment is an alarm bell. ~ Any business lunch that involves Chinese food or BBQ is likely to be well-attended. ~ In general, you should avoid the novels of Graham Greene if you're depressed. ~ Breaking exercise into small segments makes it more difficult to avoid. ~ Whether to replace a trip to a conference with a trip to the mountains or the beach should not be a difficult decision. ~ Before proceeding with a major decision, explore the assumptions. ~ A new word is needed to describe the modern news media's unique blend of incompetence and bias. ~ I wonder if colleges will even have majors in 2030. ~ Let's bring back postcards as a charming way of updating one another. ~ It is easy to work alongside heroes and not realize it, but the same cannot be said of fools. ~ One of the many gifts that Israel has inadvertently given to supporters of Western Civilization is that of shared enemies. ~ Networking events may give you some meaningful connections but volunteer work for the good of the community will definitely do so. ~ How can we preserve the values produced by farm families if farms continue to be replaced by real estate developments? ~ Much of research involves determining which material can be ignored. ~ If you want to be shunned by someone either loan them money or do them a favor. ~ One of the biggest mistakes of people who speak the same language is assuming that they share the same meanings.
Tuesday, August 04, 2026
Not That This Would Be Subject to Abuse
Brownstone Institute: The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention considered establishing a national system of quarantine camps.
[HT: Joel Engel]
Read This!
Myron Magnet explores how Rudy Giuliani made New York City great again.
[Photo by Getty Images at Unsplash+]
Monday, August 03, 2026
Fauci and China
Writing in City Journal, Nicholas Wade (no relation) examines where the blame rests for the pandemic.
An excerpt:
Fauci did not defend the natural origin position at Senator Paul’s hearing. In his long silences—he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, despite his 2025 pardon from President Biden—even his supporters could hear a failure to deny some incontrovertible facts. He supported an extensive program of gain of function research without seeking the public advice and consent of independent scientific experts. He let his grantees fund dangerous viral manipulations at the Wuhan Institute in unsupervised and unsafe laboratory conditions. When the SARS-CoV2 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, as it almost certainly did, he engineered a seemingly independent report that blamed the pandemic on nature instead of on the research that he had calamitously funded.
First Paragraph
We set off in an open cart drawn by four whip-scarred little oxen and piled high with equipment and provisions. No medieval knight could have been more closely armoured than were Tilly and I, against the rays of the sun. A mushroom-brimmed hat, built of two thicknesses of heavy felt and lined with red flannel, protected her creamy complexion, a long-sleeved white blouse clasped her by the neck, and a heavy skirt of khaki drill fell to her booted ankles.
- From The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood by Elspeth Huxley
Sunday, August 02, 2026
Saturday, August 01, 2026
Books for Children
Sippican Cottage: I Read All These Books and Boy Are My Lips Tired.
[I'm flashing back to when many children's books had the works of great illustrators such as Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth.]
A Greater Enlightenment
Joel Kotkin: "Scientists Who Believe in God Are Challenging the Expert Atheist Establishment."
An excerpt:
The rise of religiously oriented scientists represents a challenge to the "established" ultra-secular scientific establishment whose credibility was undermined by their adding political dogma to their research. This includes such absurdities as insisting there are more than two biological sexes.
Friday, July 31, 2026
First Paragraph
It was May 14. In a few days my class back in Jamestown, North Dakota would be graduating from high school, and I was in Singapore.
- From Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour
Lake Sebago
I have come to look forward to Stephen Landry's annual vacation at Lake Sebago.
The man worked at a university so he's used to dealing with loons.
As Europe Crumbles
I recall posting warnings about Europe's uncontrolled and slipshod borders policies years ago when books by Douglas Murray, Christopher Caldwell, Mark Steyn, and Bruce Bawer were sounding the alarm.
Some readers claimed it was an overreaction and that the numbers were nothing to be worried about.
Their views were either shared at top governmental levels or the decision makers actually wanted to produce chaos.
I confess that the latter explanation is not as crazy as it may seem. These are not stupid people.
But they are duplicitous.
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Substack: Eclectic Collections of Demonstrators
Beware of assuming good will. Not everyone wants the best.
[Photo by Karollyne Videira Hubert at Unsplash]
First Paragraph
When Elena Lang went missing, Sebastian Wolff couldn't work out what all the fuss was about.
- From Evil in High Places by Rory Clements
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Living a Better Life
Nicholas Bate reveals his favorite book in the Companion series.
It is mine as well.
First Paragraph
On 2 August 216 BC the Carthaginian General Hannibal won one of the most complete battlefield victories in history. Outnumbered nearly two to one, his heterogenous army of Africans, Spaniards and Celts not merely defeated, but virtually destroyed the Roman army opposing them. By the end of the day, nearly 50,000 Roman and Allied soldiers lay dead or were dying in an area of a few square kilometres, whilst between ten and twenty thousand more were prisoners. Less than 20% of one of the largest armies ever fielded by the Roman State survived to reform over the next few weeks. Cannae became the yardstick by which the Romans measured later catastrophes, but only one or two defeats in their history were ever judged to have been as bad. The scale of the losses at Cannae was unrivalled until the industrialized slaughter of the First World War.
- From Cannae: Hannibal's Greatest Victory by Adrian Goldsworthy