A quiet Sunday, and are you looking for reading? Look no more:
Thorstein Veblen a century ago diagnosed what is ailing the university now—too much presence of businessmen trying to run things. These authors don’t like that. I tend to agree, though I think they maybe don’t realize that a person with a name like “Richard F. Teichgraeber III” is as likely to appear in one...
I am so deeply American, in the insecure but blustery way that some Americans are taught to be American, that it has taken me all my adult life to develop a more mature picture of what it means to be American. (This isn't at all the fault of my parents, who were deeply committed to my sister and I becoming aware of the amplitude of the world, and the possibilities for goodness and value to be discovered everywhere; it is my adolescence.) And of course I'm still developing into a sufficiently adequate resemblance to "maturity." Like my country, I...
One of the things I’ve been doing on sabbatical is reading more widely and deeply in books that I would consider classics, but which are not necessarily of immediate professional interest in my field at the moment.
I always try to do this, but sabbaticals and summer often provide the most expensive opportunities to explore such works. Even so, I do not try to go up them down, but sip them slowly reading a bit every day, slowly chipping away at...
A good analysis of how Americans’ views on policing and race today are different than they have ever been before. As Galston says, “it’s not 1968 anymore.”...
Here's a nice passage from Edmund Burke, on the idea of society as a contract across generations, though he doesn't do enough I think to distinguish society from the state. I found the passage from the e-TOC of a weird journal I get, Population and Development Review, it's about demographics, I recognize that's not everybody's cup of tea but...
Reading Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, and I come across this:
It must be confessed that though the plague was chiefly among the poor, yet were the poor the most venturous and fearless of it, and went about their employment with a sort of brutal courage; I must call it so, for it was founded neither on religion or prudence; scarce did they use any caution, but run into any business which they could get employment in, though it was the most hazardous. Such was that of tending the sick, watching houses shut up, carrying infected persons...
Often you hear people on the right arguing for the existence of a cultural crisis, a crisis of the family, a crisis of moral anomie and nihilism, and arguing that this crisis exists because of cultural liberalism.
In this piece, from last year, Thomas Edsall gathers together some actual data that shows, reasonably convincingly, that no such "crisis" exists, and insofar as there are data...
Part of our problem with this virus is that it works on a time scale different than any that we've been used to. Actions we take today only show up as having an effect on the virus about three weeks from now. But we live in a zero-time society, where instantaneous events are the norm. This is probably especially so in politics, so political leaders are hyper-chipmunk like in their velocities. And they expect the other realities in their world to work on the same time scale. Nothing coming at them slowly looks like a danger. So our sensibilities are designed for threats very different...