One Unicorn could be just a figment of your imagination. Herd several together, and you get a Blessing of Unicorns upon your day.
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In light of Musk’s salute on Monday, Roman historians Sarah Bond and Stephanie Wong tackle “The Revisionist History of the Nazi Salute.” A taste:
Musk has a long history of referencing the Roman Empire. His brand of technocratic despotism and its social media iconography has roots in the work of 20th-century European fascists, who were themselves fixated on Ancient Rome. He has long been obsessed with the late Roman Republic dictator Sulla and in December even changed his X avatar to “Kekius Maximus” — a Romanized version of Pepe the Frog dressed in military garb similar to that of Maximus in the film Gladiator (2000). Like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the billionaire has frequently expressed admiration for the Roman Empire, posting AI pictures of himself cosplaying as a Roman soldier and cooking up theories about why ancient Rome fell (answer: severe decline in birth rate). He thinks about it every day.
But from the myth of SPQR to the “Roman salute,” the Roman Empire cited by those fascists — including Hitler — was, in fact, a modern fantasy born in part from art and cinema.
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Madeleine Davies considers “The Question of Childlessness.” If it’s not just about the economy, what is it? A taste from the intro:
The Lower Red Lion, a 17th-century pub in St Albans, Hertfordshire, is an unassuming establishment. According to its own website, it has no history of “noteworthy guests” – “the height of the yard arch would not accommodate a full coach”, it explains. In 2024, however, it gained a degree of notoriety when a new patron announced his arrival on social media. “Found my new local,” he wrote, pointing in the attached photo to the pub’s sign: “Dog friendly; child-free.” Having, perhaps unwittingly, ignited the embers of a long-running debate about the place of children in public spaces, he found himself in receipt of thousands of replies.
Historians with cooler heads might point to other phenomena to explain the pub debate, from shifting expectations of motherhood to the decline in freedom afforded to younger children (now unlikely to be allowed to roam unsupervised while their parents enjoy a pint). They might also point to a degree of continuity. One contributor to this particular debate concerned that parents “let kids run wild nowadays and don’t teach them to behave properly” can be assured that their concerns would have been met by sympathetic nods through the centuries. Among the parenting tactics bemoaned by one medieval critic (cited in Hugh Cunningham’s magnificent history The Invention of Childhood) was the tendency to “dandill hymn and dindill hymn and pamper hymm… and gyve hym the swetyst stop in the dish evyn when he lest deserve it”.
What has undeniably changed, however, is the number of children we are having in the first place. In October, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported the fertility rate in England and Wales had fallen to its lowest level on record, at 1.44 children per woman. It hasn’t reached replacement level (2.1 children on average) since 1972. Globally, the number of children per woman has more than halved since 1963, from 5.3 to 2.3. The belief that we have entered a “fertility crisis” is widespread.
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From “freedom” from kids to another kind of freedom—Miles Smith considers “America’s Free Press Tradition.” A taste:
The American republic’s executives and legislature largely understood that the press’s imperfections and speculations served a vital role in maintaining the energetic vigilance of a free democratic and democratic people’s natural rights. That the people and the press might sometimes be imprudent was not a reason to curtail press or speech freedoms or to subordinate them to state control. In 1795, President George Washington told Gouverneur Morris that in a government as free as the United States, “where the people are at liberty, and will express their sentiments oftentimes imprudently, and, for want of information, sometimes unjustly, allowances must be made occasional effervescences.” Washington, interestingly enough, did not use the occasion to complain about the press’s freedoms. A free press, he conceded, made occasional messes.
The messiness of the press prompted the first president not to make excuses for government intervention, or for government misinformation, but instead to make it clear that press and speech freedoms did not give the government license to ignore its own corruption.
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Jordan Ballor reviews Jesse Covington, Bryan McGraw, and Micah Watson’s new book, Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics. An interview with the authors is coming soon at Current!
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Switching gears to other matters, Boris Dralyuk reviews a new book about his hometown—Julian Evans, Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War. A taste from the intro:
In 1916, Isaac Babel, who did more than anyone to put his Ukrainian hometown on the literary map, began one of his first published pieces with an admission: “Odesa is a nasty place. Everybody knows that”. That, of course, was only half the story. Babel quickly added that “this significant and most charming of cities in the Russian Empire has a lot going for it.” Anyone who has set foot in Odesa at any point in its modern history can testify to the city’s alluring attributes – the chipped and pockmarked rococo façades of its buildings, the brisk business done in its port, on its commercial streets and in its open-air market, and, above all, the warmth, wry humour and jolly cynicism that hangs everywhere in the salty air, amid the scent of acacia trees.
It is difficult not to wax romantic, or to stay entirely serious, when writing about Odesa, the so-called pearl on the Black Sea. It was, after all, not only the Soviet “capital of humour”, but also the wellspring of the romantic strain in Soviet-era writing. Its proudest sons and daughters include the comic novelists Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov – creators of the conman to end all conmen, Ostap Bender; the humourist Mikhail Zhvanetsky, who for Soviet audiences served as Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen rolled into one; the sultry soprano Isa Kremer and jazzy bandleader Leonid Utyosov; and highly popular poets such as Eduard Bagritsky, Semyon Kirsanov and Vera Inber, whose exciting, colourful verses were often set to music. These were some of the makers of the myth of Odesa – the image of a city of jokers and gangsters, of sunshine and revelry on the edge of both the empire and its unjust laws.
All of them, with the exception of Petrov, were Jews, and all were, after a fashion, russophone – for the Russian spoken in Odesa is thoroughly inflected by Yiddish and generously peppered with Ukrainianisms.
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EconTalk’s Russ Roberts talks with poet and librettist Dana Gioia about opera—and why it moves us so deeply.
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A moving reflection from historian—and California resident—Verónica Gutiérrez about the devastation of the fires. A taste:
As I sit down in the local library to write this post, I can see the ocean extending beyond the tree tops and red tiled roofs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Following the curve of the coast, I can see beach towns, most notably a collection of tall white buildings that must be Santa Monica, where I lived when I moved to SoCal in 2004. But then the buildings stop. Sweeping my eyes to the left there is an eerie emptiness, for little remains of the 21-mile coastal stretch of Malibu. Further along the Pacific Coast Highway, even less remains of Pacific Palisades. Places I know well are no longer.
Forgive me if my post is disjointed, but I have been in such distress since the fires broke out. I’m grateful that aside from dangerous air quality when the fires first erupted – when flames were visible from the Peninsula – my family has not been in danger. Even so, with fires erupting all around us with zero containment, homes burning on live television because fire hydrants had no water, and Santa Ana winds producing hurricane-force winds causing what meteorologists dubbed “fire-canes,” I felt myself slipping into a panic. All I could do was cry. Receiving an erroneous evacuation warning did not help…
I was watching live news coverage the next afternoon, Wednesday, January 8, when a newscaster announced that the archdiocese had just confirmed that Corpus Christi church had burned. I called my husband, who has known the pastor for 42 years, and sobbed with him over the phone. This beautiful church where we attended Mass every year to celebrate my husband’s birthday before walking over to our dear friend’s home to spend the afternoon. They were both gone.