"Where do you see yourself in ten years?"

The trailer for "The Intern."

Modern Times

Everybody says they want to meet interesting people, but few are willing to stay at the $29 motels where you can find them.

- David Burge


[Photo by Nate Watson at Unsplash]

"The Strange Death of Europe"

Although the book has been out for a while, this interview of Douglas Murray by Dave Rubin may be of interest.

First Paragraph

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

- From The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin

Niall Ferguson

The Rubin Report interviews with historian Niall Ferguson:

Part One

Part Two.

Always worth my time.

Back By Popular Demand

Jordi Savall with Folias de Espana.

Biz Films

The trailers for:

• "Rogue Trader"
• "Tucker"
• "Chasing Madoff"
• "Up in the Air"

Book Review

Wally Bock reviews the book. 

[If it passes The Bock Test, it is a book to be considered.]

Music Break

Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) with "The Wind."

When Diversity Training Divides

City Journal: Chloé Valdary on how diversity training has shifted away from the racial healing of Martin Luther King. An excerpt:

Di Angelo holds that all whites are complicit in racism by virtue of their skin color. To argue otherwise is racist; to object to the label proves that the label fits. This racial double bind negates King’s belief in the capacity for human goodness. In “The Current Crisis in Race Relations,” King wrote that “the important thing about a man is not the color of his skin or the texture of his hair but the texture and quality of his soul.” For Di Angelo, no distinction exists between skin and soul. She and other purveyors of such thinking embrace a reductive and repellent vision of racial guilt.

[Photo by Shane Rounce at Unsplash]