Idiot: “A foolish or stupid person.” Here is John Wagner at The Washington Post: Ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) offered a blunt assessment of her former profession Monday night: “What we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re […]
Archives for June 2023
It is possible to teach and write at the same time?
Here is novelist Christina Lynch at LitHub: When I was hired for a tenure-track English professor position, a colleague said to me, “You’ll never write another word.” I was slightly offended, since I had at that point been writing professionally […]
Why Write: A Brief Defense
Who doesn’t need a well-furnished room for reflection?
Commonplace Book #267
Communities and neighborhoods are sites of political disagreement and contest just like every place else: “the grassroots” and “the people” are only more abstract and diffuse forms of the same imagery. They aren’t pure, and they don’t act with one […]
What’s a Uygher?
Here is Lawrence Ukenye at Politico: Republican presidential candidate Francis Suarez was caught unaware Tuesday morning by a radio interviewer’s question about alleged human rights abuses in China. When the Miami mayor was asked if his campaign would mention the […]
Historian: The 2nd Amendment was to make sure the U.S. would not have to deal with a Prigozhin-type invasion
Here is historian Noah Shusterman at The Washington Post: On Saturday, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, ordered his soldiers to withdraw from Ukraine and to instead set their sights on targets within Russia itself. First they took over Rostov, […]
Was Trump really impeached twice?
Yes. He was. But Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik don’t think so. No, really. They have introduced resolutions to “expunge” Trump’s impeachments from the historical record “as if such Articles of Impeachment had never passed the House of Representatives.” […]
Is capitalism secular?
Eugene McCarraher, the author of The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, does not think so. He discusses his 2019 book with Peter Mommsen at the Plough podcast: Listen here. A taste of the transcript: Capitalism, […]
Belarus, Ukraine, Russia: an eclectic reading list
The events of this past weekend had a number of Cold War and Russian history and politics experts excitedly feeling relevant. What exactly happened and what does it mean? I appreciated this analysis from Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. In […]
REVIEW: One Island in Time
What if history really does center on the least, the last, and the lost?
Commonplace Book #266
I would like to claim that the coming of modern secularity in my sense has been coterminous with the rise of a society in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely […]
Mike Pence: “Conservatives can either be for politically motivated government intervention in the private sector, or we can be against it.”
As the populist candidates for president attack woke corporations, Pence is trying to shore-up his lane as the Ronald Reagan candidate. Today he turned to the libertarian Reason magazine to defend free markets. Here is a taste of his piece […]
Liberty University spokesperson invokes Stalin, Mao, and Hitler on “education”: “We have to get back to that for conservative values”
I am not sure Ryan Helfenbein, the director of Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center, really meant what he said in an interview on the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network this weekend, but it sure sounded like he was calling […]
NBC News poll puts Trump nearly 30 points ahead of DeSantis in GOP nomination race
The poll was taken between June 16 and June 20, 2023: The NBC News poll also gives Biden a four point lead over Trump in the 2024 general election. It has DeSantis in a dead heat with Biden in 2024. […]
Joe Biden is amassing an electable resumĂ© “without making a big show of it”
Here is a taste of Michael Tomasky’s New Republic piece “Democrats, Wake the Hell Up!”: Nobody seems to have noticed this, but over the course of the spring, the country’s four leading freight rail carriers agreed to grant the vast majority of […]
Cabrini University will close next year
The Catholic university in the Philadelphia suburbs is closing its doors. Cabrini University, which was founded in 1957 by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is named after Mother Francis Cabrini, the first U.S. citizen (naturalized) to […]
Evangelical roundup for June 26, 2023
What is happening in Evangelical land? We spent the weekend covering the Christian Right “Road to Majority” conference. Read our posts here. This weekend The Way of Improvement Leads Home podcast dropped Episode 113. Historian Larry Eskridge joins us to […]
American animals
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people doing early anthropology were very interested in climate and environmental conditions, but in very different ways from today. Early anthropologists connected geography to the nature of the people living there. Now, this […]
The Mirage of the 1950s
An anxious, heartbreaking decade looks better at the movies
Sunday night odds and ends
A few things online that caught my attention this week: Anne Applebaum on the Russian people’s response to the Wagner Group’s attempted insurrection. The Nation saves Bookforum. Old magazines and change over time. Saving baseball. Jon Zoebenica reviews Alexander Stille’s […]