Busy times, but I'm here with the crucial information for you.  Or at least the interesting information.

Carol Graham offering an overview of the literature on “deaths of despair” among...

Because it's Wednesday, and you need new ideas!

A really thought-provoking piece on concentration, distinguishing it from attention:

We ask too much of attention and not enough of...

This is interesting--I didn't read this when it came out this past May, but it seems worth considering.  Am I guilty of this "left Straussianism"?  I wonder if sometimes I am. What do you think?   ...

This is a good piece by Ryan Crocker, a long-time State Department hand and expert on the Middle East.  He's a serious guy, who represented the United States for both Republican and Democratic...

This is a disappointing list.  Or the idea behind it is disappointing, anyway I don’t know why we need a list of the meanest views of the year. Perhaps that is one sort of list, composed of the sort...

I came across this piece a few weeks ago and it seems right to me.  Short story: since 1990, global homicide rates have declined by 20%--that's a huge decline.  You may not know it, but over the...

Flowers!  Well, no, not flowers.  But links!  Lurvly.  If less fragrant.

As I have grown up, I have come to appreciate Frank Sinatra's singing, as (in my uninformed opinion, anyway) the...

Small little post:

I like the Google N-gram viewer, which I use from time to time, more as provocation.  It allows me to check on any word, or phrase, and see how frequently it appears in...

Another in an occasional series...  

Gossman's book is a lovely study of the cultural and intellectual milieu of the Swiss city of Basel in the second half of the nineteenth century, when its...

I have a long-standing interest in T.S.Eliot, at times bordering on obsession.  He's someone whose thinking I find enormously powerful. At times the racism and anti-semitism of his work (which is, I...