Just because I have a ton of them.

Brookings on Europe’s large-scale shift, over the past few years, on China—from fundamentally engaging to more complicatedly confronting.  But it being Europe, it’s never whole-hearted.

What is the pandemic doing to belief in American Exceptionalism?  Who knows, really? I want to say.  But maybe it’s doing something interesting.  This piece proposes that it might be.  

A wonderful piece by Jon Malesic, a friend who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite essay writers.  It is full of insight and wisdom--and yes, those categories are distinct: insight is born of grace and intelligence, and wisdom, often, is born of grief, as it is, I think, here:

Academic and professional cultures get people like me to locate our identity within them, in part by separating us from people and place.… 

In the cosmopolitan ideal, you belong to the world, equally at ease in Berlin or Bangkok, knowledgeable of local customs, ready to join a conversation anywhere, with anyone. It’s an ideal of connoisseurship. It’s knowing to pronounce the Czech capital Pra-ha, not Progg, when you’re chatting about Bohemian pilsners.

But it also means being equally ill-at-ease anywhere, including among citizens of your home country. The desire to belong is incongruous with the individualistic culture of America’s elite. To live out the cosmopolitan ideal means you know someone everywhere but have close ties nowhere, because you’ve moved so many times for work. It means you never realize the dream of the Cheers theme song. There’s no place you can go where everybody knows your name.

You can’t really understand what people mean by “the 90s” unless you appreciated The Onion.  I remember coming across it in Chicago, in about 1994 or so.  It was kind of the hermeneutic key to that time, and for a decade or so later.  Here’s a story of how they managed to confront their largest challenge in those years, the national trauma of 9/11.  Among other things I learned: They had their “New York Launch party” (apparently a thing) on the night of September 10th, and who played? Of course: They Might Be Giants.   

This is a pretty interesting picture of how the City Journal and the Manhattan Institute have failed the test of the Age of Trump: 

Trump’s lack of fitness for the presidency was entirely predictable. What was unforeseen was the moral collapse in the face of the gathering storm by conservative activists and intellectuals. The Trump seduction happened at so many distinguished conservative thought centers and magazines that it led some Never Trumpers like Max Boot to conclude retrospectively that there was something amiss in the DNA of American conservatism that made the movement susceptible to a repellent figure like Trump. Others conservative opponents of Trump have argued that Trump’s conquest of their movement is a historical aberration and continue to hope for the revival of decent conservatism.

I will leave it to future historians to fully explain Trump’s success in high jacking American conservatism. What follows is, instead, the story of what I witnessed at one reputable conservative institution, a think tank where donor money weighed heavily and writers were prohibited from writing about certain subjects—which culminated in my former colleagues’ intellectual surrender to Trumpism.

This is pretty true about almost all other conservative magazines and thinkers that I know.  More disappointing than surprising, I guess.

Meanwhile, on the left, there are interesting squabbles about freedom of speech.  As ever, Jeffrey Isaac (author of, among other books, Democracy in Dark Times) has smart things to say:

one very effective way for the signatories to the Harper’s “Letter” to avert or even disprove the criticism they have received would be for them to immediately follow up, now, with a second letter that reiterates the commitment to robust debate, but that centers on the danger that Trumpism poses to democracy, calling for an immediate suspension of the new guidelines, and articulating a broader defense of intellectual and political pluralism and the rights of political contestation that explicitly points the way toward the defeat of Trumpism in November.

Useful data on the Confederate monuments across the US. Pro tip: they were all erected long after the Civil War, in a bid to re-secure white supremacy.   

“Change is coming to Iran, but there is no one guiding it.” A sobering analysis of what is happening in Iran right now.

Wear masks inside stores and restaurants; wear them wherever you may be in a large crowd or confined space, really.  Just be careful, people.